Lizards and turtles and bugs, oh my!

Hi everyone!

My last post ended up being more deeply introspective than I had anticipated (and a bit of a downer!), so I wanted this post to revert back towards providing glimpses into what has been happening in the Village lately. However, I first want to express my gratitude to those of you who took the time to reach out following my last update. The words of encouragement, personal anecdotes about coping with the challenges of new environments, and expressions of love and support that I received meant more than I can say!

A couple of weeks after my last update, the rainy season arrived at last. It got off to a bit of a rocky start, with 2 days of intense rain followed by over a week of clear skies. This presented a major problem for all of the clusters, each of which has a large patch of cultivated land used to plant staple crops like maize, beans, and pigeon peas (Fun Fact: known as toor dal in India, it’s a perennial legume grown all over Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America). As soon as the first rains of the season fall, the children and susus (grandmothers) from each cluster go into full gear planting that year’s crops. The ground is tilled, the holes for the seeds are dug, and the seeds are planted. However, in these first few days it is crucial for there to be enough rain to cause the seeds to germinate. This year, after a 48-hour frenzy of torrential rain and scrambling to plant the crops, the rains stopped. Over the next several days without rain, it became clear that nearly all of the seeds planted weren’t going to grow; even worse, they would all have to be replanted when (or if) the rains returned. That’s exactly what ended up happening, and all of the clusters had to redo their planting efforts when the rains came back the following week. Fortunately, this time the rains stuck around continuously for about 10 days, before becoming more sporadic for the following weeks. I think we’re just about done with the rainy season, but we had a bit of rain this past weekend and the crop fields are all filled with seedlings. Then again, it started raining out of nowhere halfway through writing this update, so what do I know.

The rain was warmly welcomed, but with the rain came a not-so-pleasant arrival: the bugs. Oh sweet Jesus, the bugs. More than I’ve ever seen in my life. At dusk, about 48 hours after a good rain, some come streaming up out of holes in the ground like some sort of perverse geyser, others come from branches making the whole tree sound like it’s an electrical plant, and still more form plumes of winged termites that stretch up a good 10 feet before they dissipate across the Village. My personal favorites have been the spider/tarantula the size of my palm, and the centipede that was, no exaggeration, 10 inches long and about an inch in diameter. The real fun comes at night, when the bugs seek out the only source of light they can find: the Guest House. We have one light bulb directly over the dining table, and another directly over the table where the food is served. And when the most abundant bugs are small, brown, bean-sized beetles, and your dinner is maize and beans, this poses a problem. This led to an even greater dilemma: Is it better to keep the lights on, attract the bugs, but still be able to see when your beans aren’t all beans? Or is it better to keep the lights off, which attracts significantly fewer bugs, but have to trust your night-vision to make sure none of your beans are moving? It’s a high-stakes game.

These bugs are just some of the fun flora and fauna that lives in the Village. In my room for instance, I counted not one, not two, but 48 spiders living around the perimeter of the ceiling. I didn’t bother counting the ones in the bathroom. But then again, I don’t have many mosquitos, so that’s about par for the course. In the dry season there was a family of vervet monkeys that frequented the big fig tree by the river, and I frequently see big families of mongoose (mongooses? mongeese??) while out on my runs. There are lizards absolutely everywhere, from tiny geckos to big blue-and orange lizards called rainbow agamas. There’s also a mouse that lives in a pile of arts and crafts supplies in my office who I hear daily, have seen twice, and has eaten a volunteer’s birthday cake left in my office overnight once. Some of the less-frequently sighted critters are dik-diks (little deer about 15in tall at their shoulders), baboons (seen once robbing a papaya tree of its fruit), leopard tortoises, and even a lone hedgehog I saw wandering around the other night. Some of the farmers say that hyenas will move into the area during the rainy season, but I haven’t seen any signs of them. The bird life is pretty rich here, with cool species like red-cheeked cordon-bleus (picture Smurf-blue canary-sized birds with ruby red cheeks), all sorts of weavers, bee-eaters, the occasional raptor, and even a few hornbills. Certainly nothing like other parts of Kenya in terms of wildlife, but there’s enough wandering around to keep you hopeful that you might glimpse something cool!

Over the past month, while I’ve been working with our contractor to manage the maintenance and repairs of the rainwater harvesting program, a lot of my time has been spent working on projects for donors and for other outside people and organizations who are involved with the Village. Over the past few months, I have helped facilitate correspondence between Form 1 and Form 2 students at Lawson High School and their sponsors in the UK, and this month was a frenzy to complete the task before the students all left for the holidays. I was also assisting in a project being led by the Make a Mark Foundation, which has been a supporter of Nyumbani since even before Nyumbani Village was officially established. Every year, Make a Mark produces a small booklet filled with photos and quotations that are based around a certain topic. This year, Make a Mark wants the booklet to feature children from Nyumbani Village, and focus on the word “Hope”. As such, I spent a couple of weeks going around and taking photos of children and grandparents around the Village and, with the help of a translator, gathering their personal definitions of hope. It was interesting to note the clear difference between the grandparents’ definitions, nearly all of which directly focused on their faith and God, and the children’s definitions, which were all much more abstract. Some of my favorites: “Hope is an inner feeling of the heart that something better may happen to you”, and “Hope is your target”.

This past month we have had 5 volunteers from a Kenyan program sponsored by the Ministry of Education. These 5 volunteers are high-achieving recent college graduates who decided to take a full year to volunteer in a community very different from their own. Because of the strength of tribal lines around Kenya, especially in rural areas, the program aims to send its volunteers to a county in which their home tribe is not present. Our volunteers have spent 3 months volunteering in primary schools in nearby Machakos County which, like Kitui, is almost entirely Kamba. They have spent the last month volunteering in different departments around the Village, but have also helped me with conducting a survey that is gathering data on the effectiveness and the use of the new high-efficiency clay stoves that were designed by the Italian engineers and built by the Spanish volunteers who were here when I first arrived. With the volunteers’ help, we now have data from 50 houses that the engineers will be able to use to see what needs to be changed about the stoves or the education of how to use the stoves in the Village.

On November 28^th, the Village celebrated the 10^th anniversary of the first families to arrive in the village in 2006. This day was celebrated with a mass, performances from groups of children in the Village, and speeches from our Executive Director, Sister Mary Owens, the Vice-Chair of the Kenyan board. My favorite part of the ceremony was one of the final segments, when Sister Mary called up the 5 children in the Village who were part of those first families to move in 10 years ago. They did not speak at the event, but it made me think about how much they had seen this project grow since it was just a handful of buildings in the middle of nowhere. The youngest of these 5 children couldn’t have been much older than 10, meaning that nearly every memory of his life would have come from life here in the Village. I’ve certainly found myself looking at life here in a new light. I am only here for a year, and some of the children come when they are older so they only spend a few years in the Village. Some of the youngest of Nyumbani’s children, however, could spend upwards of 18-20 years here. Given the recent emphasis that is being placed on finding ways for Nyumbani to become donor independent (which, following the events of November 8^th in the U.S., and considering that our main source of funding is USAID, is looking a little more urgent), it’s ever more important to think of the fact that there are children that are hoping to call this place home for decades to come.

The end of the year is fast approaching, and that means that the Village is ready to go into its holiday break mode. The primary school students have been out of school for about month already; Lawson High School Form 2s and Form 4s finished their exams last week, and the Polytechnic students are finishing their final practical exams today. On Friday of this week, about 75% of the students will be picked up by their relatives, extended families, or legal guardians and will spend the remainder of the holiday season away from the Village, returning just after New Years.

Staying in the Village day-in and day-out can end up making time feel like a bit of a blur, so I’ve come to realize the importance of finding opportunities to get out of the Village a couple of times each month and explore new parts of the country. Nairobi is still the easiest place to get to, but it never fails to satisfy the need for a slice of pizza or a hot shower. This past weekend, I went up to Nanyuki to visit some friends who were hosting a holiday party for the PiAf fellows and other groups of their friends in Nanyuki and Nairobi. Nanyuki is situated right at the base of Mount Kenya, so in the evening we were rewarded with an (almost) unobscured view of the peak. I’m hoping to have time to climb the mountain while I’m here, but my wishful to-do list is growing fast! Nanyuki is also home to a lot of conservation work due to its proximity to the Laikipia highlands, a diverse and abundant wildlife hotspot, so my fingers are crossed that I’ll someday have the chance to spend some more time in the region!

In the coming weeks, I will be spending a good deal of time outside of the Village travelling over the holidays, and I couldn’t be more excited! This weekend is a 3-day weekend in Kenya to celebrate Jamhuri Day, which is Kenya’s independence day. I’ll be heading up to climb Mount Longonot and revisit Lake Naivasha and Hell’s Gate National Park with Javier and Celia, two volunteers at Nyumbani, along with several PiAf Fellows. The following weekend I’ll be heading off to Tanzania for 2 weeks, travelling with my friend Brennan from my study abroad semester in Tanzania in 2014. We’ll start at his bush camp outside of Ruaha National Park where he is working with an organization that mitigates human/elephant conflict. We’ll then head off to Mafia Island (named, apparently, after an ancient Arabic word and not, as you might imagine, by the large Italian population who have settled on the island) where we hope to snorkel with whale sharks(!!!!!), before heading up to Zanzibar for New Years. I can’t wait to share stories and photos once I get back!

Happy Holidays to all, and Happy New Year!

Love,

Shan

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi! 100% as cute as it sounds