A Year in Four Paragraphs

Well folks it’s been a pretty crazy year. The fact that it’s been a year is pretty crazy. To make up for my horrible blogging record here’s a summary of what you would have read starting in January when I stopped communicating:

I’ve had a stressful, busy, and incredibly exciting year. In 12 short months I’ve been in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, Djibouti, Egypt, Israel, the United States, Turkey, and now Libya (more on that later). I’ve monitored an election; witnessed a social network and political movement form organically; trained lawyers, politicians, and youth activists; met with the speaker of the Somali Parliament and spoke with the new Somali Prime Minister. I raced camels; swam in the ocean; played with elephants; was licked by a giraffe; volunteered with disabled children and on other Rotary projects; played guitar at a few bars; attended 4 weddings in 2 different countries; mourned the loss of a great man and former candidate; snorkeled; shot clay pigeons; moved 4 times; completed all my coursework; wrote approximately 350 pages worth of papers; and met some wonderful people. Not so much sleeping.

I’ve learned an immense amount and had a wonderful if not always easy time. I’ve learned to love what’s to love about Kenya and miss what I miss about my home and wonderful country of the United Sates of America. And now to begin a new year of adventure and growth…

I arrived three days ago in Benghazi, Libya to start my next phase of fun and will do my best to improve my blogging for a bit. Yell at me if I don’t. Thanks for all your support, messages, friendship (be it from afar or up close), and good times this past year. Look forward to more of the same and better…

Rotary District 9200 Conference

Hello blog followers. Though I am getting ready to upload a number of delayed posts I figured it would be best to go in reverse order here and begin with the most timely. I am sitting here at the Speke Resort in Munyonyo, attending the 86th District 9200 conference in Uganda. There are 1700 East African Rotarians, Roteractors, Interactors, and guests in attendance. It’s quite the organizing feat. I arrived yesterday, and met up with another Ambassadorial scholar from Nairobi, who I interestingly had yet to meet. We took the day to get to know one another and find our way to our much less resorty hotel.

Though last night they had an unbelievably nice cocktail reception by the pool, today is the first day of the conference and has proven quite interesting. The morning was filled with introductions and formalities and then led into an address by the President of Rotary International. He spoke of the need to modernize Rotary to reach out to younger generations…noting that district 9200 is already one of the best in attracting young members.

The real fireworks started with the second session right before lunch. There are a number of high profile, incredibly intelligent, sometimes controversial professors from east Africa. Perhaps the most contentious is Ugandan Professor Mahmood Mamdan formerly of Columbia University, now more full time at Makarere in Kampala. The other, less contentious but equally hailed is Professor PLO Lumumba of Kenya. When Lumumba speaks you are instantly thrown back to the cadence and sound of civil rights leaders in the 1960s. He speaks forcefully but inspiringly. He spent his time discussing the ills of Africa and lack of leadership. But he used the opportunity to praise Rotary for creating a community of citizens that looks at impossible tasks and rather than turn away responds that one must try because there is no other option.

Mamdan was a bit more grounding, choosing bravely to speak on a topic of extreme relevance. For the past 3 weeks Ugandans have been engaged in a protest called “Walk to Work” or Walk2Work on twitter. In response to rising fuel and food prices, a few Ugandan opposition leaders called on citizens to avoid taking their normal transport and instead walk to work. Not too many showed for the first protest because the opposition is poorly organized and fairly unpopular. The police however responded harshly, arresting the lead opposition leaders, shooting tear gas into crowds of walking citizens, and arresting many on charges of walking without a permit.

The response shifted the spotlight to the protests and on the second walk to work day 2 days later hundreds of people showed up to walk with opposition leader Besigye. When the police intervened this time, protesters pushed passed only then to be confronted by military police shooting rubber bullets and more tear gas into the crowd. We are now on our 4th walk to work day and true to form the opposition has yet again been arrested on non-descript charges. Today unfortunately, the protest has seemed to turn more violent. A 4 year old child has been reportedly shot and killed and protestors in the west of the country have responded violently towards police with unconfirmed reports of a few dead.

You could be completely unaware of all of this, sitting in the quiet Munyonyo resort, but Mamdan gave a brilliant speech contextualizing it in the broader struggle in North Africa, the historic struggle of South Africans in the 1960s in Soweto, and what it means for democracy in the country. We are now breaking for lunch, but so far the conference is proving fun and inspiring. Well done Rotary!

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Last weekend I was finally able to connect with one of Nairobi’s many Rotary clubs for a service project. The club of Nairobi east has been partnering with Wangari Maathai’s organization, “The Greenbelt Movement,” to help plant trees and lessen the extremely destructive deforestation that is plaguing much of Kenya. While it may sound like a touchy-feely event, land issues and deforestation in Kenya affects water access, sanitation, farming productivity, and all sorts of related territorial conflicts.

In Nairobi proper, there are two reserves in the middle of the city. One, Nairobi National Park, is a game park complete with much of the wildlife you would expect to see on Safari. The other, the Ngong Forest, borders Kenya’s largest slum, Kibera, and faces serious deforestation issues. Since it hits the back of one of the poorest areas in central Kenya, the edge of the forest is continually hacked down for valuable timber or simply wood for cooking. The area can be so unsafe that one is prohibited from entering without an armed forest guard. It should be noted that these guards are often part of the problem, as they make so little they are easy to pay off to ‘turn the other way.’ Regardless, they are your company as you dig.

The morning of the event about 10 Rotarians and I met at a local shopping center where we carpooled to the Kibera site the club had planted last year. The Kibera site is really quite something. To approach it we drove down a main road and just past the car bazar, before a row of furniture makers at Dagoreti corner, we turned down a bumpy dirt road into the forest. Ten minutes later we reached the entrance to the Africa office for the World Organization of the Scout Movement, yes that’s the same organization as the boy/girl scouts. (Who knew, but the Scottish founder of the world-wide Scout organization is buried in Kenya and as such there is a major Scout Center in the Ngong forest). We drove into the center where were met by our armed guards and led on a short hike through the forest. One of the Rotarians got an earful of mocking for wearing brown leather dress shoes. With it having just rained the rest of the group donned rubber wellies or hiking boots and were thankful for it while traipsing through thick red mud.

A few minutes into the walk, the tree line broke and all I could see in the distance was row upon row of corrugated roofing combining into a smoking, living slum. The juxtaposition is jarring and only becomes more so as you walk out onto a close-to bare hill. The forest just stops and the empty land descends into the massive slum. The image surely makes the point about the conflict between human resource needs and environmental stability.

After we had learned a bit about the Kibera site we headed off to a different area of the forest to plant some trees. There may have been more speeches and ceremonial planting than working, but in the course of 20 minutes we had planted 300 trees. Afterward everyone headed for Nyama Choma (Kenyan BBQ) before heading home for the day. I’m looking forward to some more remote site visits in the new year!