Time Flies

This is what the children's home tree nursery looks like now.  There is still a lot of work to be done in harrowing and removing the soil, but you can see the kids hard at work in the distance.

First of all, welcome to my newly updated blog.  I finally found what I think will be an easy and reliable way to upload photos while here in Africa.  While I was at it, I thought I would give my blog a bit of a face lift, so I hope you enjoy it.  If time keeps moving at the same pace it has for the last few weeks, I will be back after what will feel like just a handful more blinks of my tired but energized eyes.  I suppose it is a good thing that time is moving so quickly, if the old adage holds true, but it sure does increase what was an already respectable sense of urgency I had upon arrival in the great continent of Africa.  We are making great strides on the projects, though we are still waiting for the truck to arrive and begin drilling, which I have been promised up and down will be today.  Since last entry, we have plowed both the children’s home and training center tree nurseries, and demolished and reshaped about half of the beds in the kitchen garden at the children’s home.  During two days off from school for half-term break, the children worked very hard each morning to get half of the children’s home tree nursery harrowed.  I had never heard this term before, showing the lack of farm-related manual labor in my days, but I asked around after pretending to know it’s meaning the first few times I heard it.  I found out it is a process used to break up the clumps of dirt that remain after plowing.  Our original plan was to remove all the dirt after plowing, but when I realized that the plowed soil amounted to hundreds of tons, we decided harrowing, removing all remnants of grass, adding dried manure, and then slowly using it to fill the tubes as we progressed was the best option, as it will save us a lot of time and money.  It seems like each day, many times though my own ignorance and stupid questions, we are finding ways to streamline our operation and save loads of money.  I am also always amazed how much these children enjoy this manual labor, and are thrilled to spend their time away from the classroom doing it.  It is a far cry from how I spent my days off from school growing up - sleeping in, spending more time complaining about the 10 minutes of chores I had been assigned than actually doing them, and then playing basketball and other sports all day with my friends, but I suppose the world I grew up in isn’t quite what they are dealing with here.  

Me with my three new buddies, Kiptoo, Kibet, and Chepchumba after narrowly escaping a monitor lizard, which was fleeing their attacking dog directly at us.  

Our plans for this week include a few things from last week, as I am learning on a daily basis that things here just take longer.  I am not exactly sure what the main culprit is for this, but I choose to point to a lack of access to reliable transportation and other resources, and just an overall slower-paced, more relaxed lifestyle.  As I explained to someone before I left, if there is trouble with a delivery of some materials or something small but necessary is forgotten on our end, we can’t just hop in our reliable vehicle, drive on reliable paved streets, park in a shuttle-necessitating parking lot at one of our many theme-park-sized local home improvement superstores, get expert advice as we are shown immediately to what we are looking for and more, breeze through the checkout line and jump back on the shuttle to our vehicle, and speed home, all in under an hour (maybe add 10 minutes if we decide to take advantage of the soda and hot dog deal on the way out).  We must strategically bunch together our trips to town for materials and supplies, so if something is needed to proceed with a project, it is usually at least a couple days before we will obtain it and proceed with that particular piece.  Add to that the uji and chai breaks each morning and afternoon, siestas after lunch, and the inevitable and constant social breaks, and you have yourself a project moving ahead surely, but most noticeably slowly.  At first my inclination was to try to really push everyone and give quick deadlines for task completion, but I quickly realized that was not productive, even counterproductive.  So I have now been shown that the best way is to give task lists to each manager and let them divvy out responsibilities to their team.  While I still am calling meetings and roaming around to check on progress and get involved when needed, I have much more appropriate expectations, and am seeing each person involved enjoying and taking ownership of their tasks.  That basically means waking up each morning and deciding over conversations at breakfast what I will be involved in that day.  This may seem like a really disorganized and unproductive way of approaching a project of this complexity, and I felt the same way at the beginning, but I am learning through this experience that it is not, and really the only way it can be done within the context of this place and culture.  An additional benefit of this slower pace is that it allows me to really pay attention to all the intricate details of such a project.  Ultimately these are their projects, and I am seeing how letting go of my own expectations of how they should work and progress is really allowing them to use their own creativity and ambition to not only own their respective projects, but to improve them.  I told them from the beginning that I am not the expert here in any of the specifics; they are the experts and I am just here to learn from them and keep everyone organized and moving forward together.  Though I thought that I had accepted this position for myself, I am now truly experiencing this statement of mine, which, though humbling, is extremely liberating and inspiring.

Two of the men from the Anti-Alcohol program putting the final touches on the brand new, 50-foot-long seed bed we have constructed.  This will be the temporary home of up to 40,000 seedlings per month.

So what will we do this week?  I can’t tell you exactly, but I can tell you what the plan is.  We will bring in a lot of dried manure and mix it with the plowed soil, build the giant seed germination bed and plant thousands of seeds, dig out one section of the training center’s tree nursery and transfer 20,000 existing seedlings to their new temporary home, plan out and plant shade trees in the training center, and iron out the plans for the training center and children’s home fruit tree orchards.  I am sure at least one of these things will not be completed and many other small items will be, but I have learned to accept that and make constant adjustments.  I have been told by a friend and very successful project manager that this is the nature of his business, and his success relies entirely on his ability to perform in this capacity.  I also plan to lock myself in my room (not really) and complete the elusive business plan that I started weeks ago and have opened scarcely since.  It feels to me like this business plan is a research paper in college that has been assigned at the beginning of the semester, to be turned in as the final project in the last week of class.  While I know that it is important that I begin work on it early, I would much rather spend my time and energy on the smaller, fun assignments than any time at all on this big, undefined project.  Part of it is that I was never even trained on how to put together a business plan, so I have put together my own outline based on research online, brief conversations with a few people that are not afraid of this type of document, and my own, obviously questionable common sense.  

Spending the evening with Kiprotich, my 2-week-old brother.

Outside of all the time I spend doing things directly associated to the borehole project, I have been attending my now-private Kiswahili lessons daily and just spending time with the people here, sharing conversations over chai and uji, and playing countless games with the kids.  Learning Kiswahili has been very challenging, but I think I am starting to make some good progress.  The teachers agree with their own encouragement, in between laughing hysterically at my attempts to pronounce words and put sentences together.  If nothing else, I am at least providing some apparently sidesplitting entertainment for whoever happens to be in the teacher’s room during my lessons.  I also attended the opening of a cultural center in the Kerio Valley this weekend, which was very interesting.  A group in Baringo, a place I have been to a couple times before, has used some business training from a workshop here to develop a cultural center that has many different kinds of traditional homes of tribes in their area.  The group asked for ELI to be the guests of honor at the opening event, and they requested me to accompany them.  This could have something to do with the fact that I have requested that they allow me to join them whenever they “go somewhere interesting or do something fun.”  The trip was long and incredibly hot, but very educational and a good opportunity to connect with a beautiful new community (to me) that has so much potential but some major developmental issues, most noticeably the completely dry lake bed that used to supply the entire area with water and food.  It was quite an experience to walk directly through the middle of the scarily dry, 1-Kilometer wide lake bed.  When we got to the other side, we met a small group of young children who had walked for well over an hour with their cows in search of drinking water for both their cattle and themselves.  They were lovely and friendly little ones that were very eager to show us where the small remaining crocodile and elephant population could be found.  Along the way, one of their dogs attacked a monitor lizard, causing the 3-foot-long prehistoric creature to flee directly in the direction of our group.  I was oblivious to the danger and overly interested to get a close look at the action, until I turned around and saw Kiprop, the nearest Kenyan to me, fleeing for his life.  At this point I immediately flashed back to the Crocodile Hunter episode I had seen where he pestered a monitor lizard to the point of it chasing him up a tree and biting through his steel-toed boot.  Needless to say I joined in the collective fight or flight response, choosing flight without delay.  After the lizard escaped and jumped to the other side of the small river, we all reconvened and the others began to make fun of me for running away and not even opening my camera to take a photo, saying I had chosen to instead use it as a weapon.  I still hear these jokes on a daily basis.  All I can say is that it really is tough being a Mzungu and not knowing how to behave in the bush.  

The kids hard at work in the shamba on their morning off from school, demolishing and standardizing the beds  so each family will have exactly 15 in which to plant and provide food for the children year-round.

After we survived that encounter and had endured the relentlessly hot sun for nearly three hours in this impromptu walking safari, we returned back to the village center, exhausted and dehydrated.  We were fed brown ugali and roasted goat meat before the ceremony finally commenced about six hours after it was scheduled.  Everyone spoke during the 3-hour event, and my speech to them mostly congratulated them on establishing this center, while also encouraging them to come together as a community to find solutions to their water shortage and continue to build the center into the type of place that would attract visitors from near and far for the cultural experience and wildlife viewing.  Since I now have my hair braided in corn rows again, I had to explain to the giggling crowd that I was in fact a man and that I was growing my hair out to donate it to children who had lost their hair during treatment for certain diseases.  Once they believed my statement of gender and understood the purpose of this very bizarre hair project, they accepted me and applauded my efforts.  This phenomenon always cracks me up to no end, but never more so than everyone here.  I was even told last week by a young lady in town that I was beautiful while shopping in the supermarket.  I got embarrassed, instinctively said, “thank you,” and scurried away down the next isle, causing Kiprop, who was walking next to me, to laugh and repeat this interaction, if you can call it that, through the checkout line and the entire drive home.  Again, it is tough being a Mzungu.

Let me wrap this up before you become too bored or I give too many embarrassing stories.  I will do my best to post each week from here on out, though my ability to do that depends what extent of involvement the projects require of me.  Each week certainly offers enough content to write about, so hopefully it will also afford me the opportunity to share it with all of you.  I hope you are all doing well, appreciate your continued prayers and support, and would love to hear from you.  Be good to yourselves and those around you.