Pictures and Video

I've finally sorted and arranged all the pictures and video's up on Flickr, you can check them out here:

My Flickr Picture Sets

Sadly one of the best video's isn't really working with Flickr video, so I've uploaded it here:

Kigali Memorial Centre

Excuse any poor punctuation or spelling, this is all getting typed on a French keyboard which has a different layout and a bunch of keys for letters like èçéù. Of course that means that I've moved on from Kampala staying with friends (many thanks to Kody and Gab) to Rwanda. The primary reason I came was the Kigali Memorial Center. It was dedicated in 2004, ten years after the genocide in Rwanda which left over a million people dead. The center describes the chain of events that led up to intense violence in the spring of 1994, and documents the stories of the survivors. The museum travels chronologically through events, starting back with the German and Belgian colonial periods, the building tensions during independence, and finally the breakdown of the peace agreements and ensuing violence in 1994. It was an unfathomable experience; the videos of survivors recounting how they watched their family members be killed, many times by friends, was heartbreaking. The center houses displays where family members can hang pictures of the loved ones lost in the terror. Seeing the thousands of individual faces lost to the violence is overwhelmingly difficult. The Rwandans took an thoughtful step (especially for someone coming from a center that hosted reconciliation workshops) of in implementing a community court, with the goal of reconciliation and justice, called a Gacaca court. You can read more about it here, or at the memorial center site.

The center also documents other genocides in history, and tries (as best as anyone can) to explain the common experience that the victims and survivors shared, and the motivation behind each incident. Finally, as you walk outside you can walk around the grounds of the center, where mass graves house over 250,000 victims of the genocide. It was such an intense and powerful experience, and I would recommend anyone who visits East Africa to go see it.

Masai Mara

After we left Nukuru in central kenya, we headed over the edges of the rift valley on torn up Kenyan road to the Masai Mara. The Masai Mara is the northern section of the Serengeti on the Kenyan side, and it is absolutely packed with the big game animals that we so often associate with Africa. We saw lions, elephants, and giraffes; along with the thousands of wilder beasts that make an annual migration in August. It was truly amazing, but I'll let some of the pictures speak for me:

It's amazing how close the wildlife, especially the large predictors let you get to them. The lion pictures come from the last morning we were there. As we were driving out we spotted the male lions head poking up out of the grass. We we drove over it ended up being a whole family, with the cubs running around playing the whole time we were there. I have tons more, and some great videos that I'll put up on Flickr when I get back to the states.

Safari!

Well the workcamp is over, and I've taken a little time to travel afterwards. Right after the end of the camp on Saturday, we (Mary, and her daughters Lilly and Daniel) headed out for a city called Narkuru; about half way between Kakamega (where the workcamp was) and Nairobi the capital. First we headed out to the Menengai Crater, a beautiful crater overlooking the city. The real sites were the next morning though, when we went into the Nukuru National Park, a small but beautiful park outside of the city. The park is absolutely expoding with animals, including some that are very endangered like the Black Rhino. Next we are off the Serengeti to see a bunch more! I'll try and get some more updates later on in the trip.

IDP Camps

During the post-election violence that hit Kenya during the period from December to February, it's estimated that at least 350,000 people were displaced in one way or another from their homes. Fortunately many were able to return quickly, and piece together their lives. Unfortunately many people came home to find that they had no home; it had been looted and burned. One of the largest groups affected by this targeted violence in western Kenya (where we are working) were the Kikuyus, the tribe favored by the president's party. In Kakamega, a ten minute drive from the peace center, people are still sheltered at the local Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp. At the beginning of the year, six thousand called this camp home. Many have made the journey home; but seven months later there are still 286 people living in the camp, with no clear time table or indication from the government of when it will be safe for them to return to their homes. On Friday we had the chance to visit the camp, and talk to those still living there (and to bring some supplies to the refugees that we had bought). It was really hard; they've been living three months without firewood or any means of cooking, and the government hasn't been supplying the camp with the necessary food. These are people from all walks of life, engineers, doctors, and farmers alike. They were in amazing spirits considering their circumstances, but you can see and hear the pain it's forced into their lives as they talk to you. Hopefully the Kenyan government can make true steps to resettling these people into their lives.
The above picture is of us handing over some of the supplies we brought to the management of the camp.

Here's a picture of the general layout of the camp. Each tent has two separate rooms, and now that the numbers in the camp has fallen it seems that one tent is usually only shared by a single family.

A fun picture

Just a quick post, I wanted to put up one of the pictures with a lot of the group in it. This one was when we were walking down to the forest, and we started to pickup all the children who escorted us to the forest. One week of work camp left, then off to a couple of spots in East Africa.

Kenyan Weather

When most of us think Africa (myself included before this trip) we think hot and arid, something along the lines of a safari poster. Kenya also lies on the equator, again something we American associate with dense rain forest and intense heat. The thing about western Kenya is that its high elevation drastically effects the climate. Here in Kakamega, we're about four thousand feet up, which also the case in Nairobi. Days here are usually in the 80's and sunny, building up heat until about 2. By the afternoon the rain clouds start to form, and they usually break right when were finishing work around 4:30. Lately at night it's been really cold, sometimes dropping to the low 50's. This is very cold to most of the Kenyans, and you see a bunch of winter coats come out at night. July and August here are part of the lesser rainy season; everything is green, though the Kenyans start to really worry about maleria when we get this much rain.

Below is picture of a Matatu, the main way of getting around East Africa. Each is supposed to fit 14, but they routinely run with a lot more; our record so far has been 24 people and a couple of chickens. If they see the police, they just bribe them to let them through the check-point. I acutally got to see my first Kenyan bribe the other day: the conductor of a Matatu payed the police 100 shillings to get an overfull bus through.