Trav's Travels: A new home

September 3^rd. Happy Birthday Mom!

Considering how expensive Mpala is to stay and that I’m now paying my own rent since I’m not working on my master’s project now (so Todd isn’t paying), I moved off of the research centre. It was a very tough decision to do it b/c I have really loved the social aspect of the Mpala, I’ve grown very close to the few people remaining, and it’s just easy to live up there, but in the end this will save me over $1000 per month. I moved to a place called Milimatatu, which is about a 15 minute commute from the centre. It’s where the wild dog team is based, so I am sharing a house with Stef and Helen as well as a guy named Andrew who is part of the team, but is only here for 2 weeks.

The house and property is actually really cool. It’s totally how you’d imagine colonial British Kenya to be like. And it feels like it as well. The main house has three bedrooms, a large dining area, a living room with couches and a fireplace, and a kitchen. This is where Stef and Helen are living. Andrew and I each have our own rooms in a guesthouse that is just a few meters walk through a garden from the main house. It’s kind of nice to be living at a real house after being in a banda for 4 months. The place has 24 hour hot showers (b/c they actually insulate their solar heated water) and has 24 electricity from solar panels as well. The grounds are very nice with grass and a beautiful flower garden. They have a garden where we get fresh vegetables and different types of greens for salads. The land owner also brings fresh cow milk for us (which we boil to try and avoid brucellosis). The river runs through the lower part of the property, and you can hear it softly from my room at night. Unlike at Mpala, we cook for ourselves, but Stef and Helen so far have been great cooks, so that’s nice. I’d offer to do the dishes since my cooking skills aren’t great, but the house maid washes them. So instead I help chop some vegetables and then start the fire.

It’s a bit weird to have basically house servants. At first I wasn’t really sure how I felt about it. It just sort of feels weird and not right. But Stef (who grew up in Tanzania) told me that if the houses didn’t hire maids to do laundry, clean, wash dishes, etc, then these people just wouldn’t have jobs nor make money. Plus they usually get a place to stay at these houses. Which I guess is true. She told me that the few people who refuse to have house help are actually viewed by the Kenyans as cheap and the people wonder why they won’t help the locals out by hiring people.
The area has lots of wildlife around and the commute back and forth is basically a game drive. Just today I saw 3 herds of elephants, buffalo, giraffes, zebra, jackals, white-tailed mongoose, and more. And b/c it’s not too far away, I’m still going to try to make sure I can be social and hang out as much as I can with the other long-term Mpala folk: Julia, Sally, Matt, and George.

The drought has finally ended and it’s been pouring for several days. The day I moved out of my banda, it poured super hard and the thatched roof leaked, soaking my old bed (and causing the whole place to smell like mouse pee and poop b/c it all washed down onto my banda from the roof), so it was good I was moving. Also the area is incredibly green now with all the rain and the roads are a crazy slick and muddy mess. Makes for some really fun driving! Sadly for the farmers in the surrounding areas, this rain came during the normal dry season and before the normal wet season, so they hadn’t had anything planted yet.

9/5
We went down to nanyuki to get supplies and such. We had an interesting encounter b/c as we were leaving the nakumat shopping area someone yelled at us “we’re going to cut off your heads and ship it back to your country” It was just some crazy guy on the street, but still a bit unnerving considering the recent beheadings we’ve been reading about in the news.
The director is gone on vacation for several weeks, so she is letting Sally use her house. It’s a super nice house, so Sally had us all over for a mac ‘n cheese and wine party, which was a lot of fun

9/6
Today was the first day of sun we’d had in a while, and we had a great breakfast in the glorious sun on the porch as we overlooked the bushland. We also had a sundowner by the river which is 100m from the house. The property also has a track and path along the river and through the property that is about 1.25 miles long. The entire property is closed in by an electric fence that keeps out elephants and buffaloes, though they do often get leopards in the area. We have some cool photos of a leopard on a camera trap from the trail.
I met the landlady who owns the house that we are renting. She actually lives right next door. She’s a really nice lady, who is sharp as a tack even though she’s only 80. She has a beautiful house with a beautiful garden and some little ponds. She feeds the birds so there are lots of pretty birds around. She invited us for tea. It felt so colonial british, b/c her househelper brought us down the fancy tea with biscuits. She’s of course had a very interesting life living in Kenya. She remembers as a kid how the country was just so covered in wildlife, but now it really isn’t, except in a few areas. She told us how she raised a cheetah cub as a girl b/c the cheetah mom was killed by a car. She said the cheetah used to cuddle with her and the dogs and when it got bigger it would sleep in the bathtub.
Sally was having a sleep-over for a select view (Tyler, Julia, and myself), so I headed up to the centre for it. Since the director’s house has special internet that is super fast, we were able to stream movies from the web. The director’s bed is giant, so we were all able to fit onto it to do our movie marathon. She also has a blender so we made banana milkshakes with baileys. I slept in the guesthouse which has a bed that is so nice it definitely doesn’t belong in Kenya! In the morning, we made crepes and sat on her porch which looks out towards Mt. Kenya. Since her house is outside of the fence line, we also got to watch a family of elephants eat right in front of us. They were only about 100 feet away.

9/7

There is a guy, named Andrew, who is also helping out right now with the wild dog project. He’s from NC, but is working on his PhD in England at the same place Helen is doing hers. He’s studying carnivores, but his research is more on regional movements and conservation using GIS, so he doesn’t actually need to go into the field. He just uses data collected from researchers across Africa to do it. But he’s for 3 weeks just to see the methods behind where he gets his data. He’s a really cool guy and we are becoming good friends. He’s into sports, my age, and level-headed. I’m actually really lucky he’s here b/c it makes the move into a house with 2 girls a bit less awkward. And since he goes and does things with me, it makes it seem less like I’m just ditching the girls or something. Also, the 2 girls are really good cooks, and we really just get in the way of things when we’re trying to help with dinner. So we end up just sitting on the couch talking and laughing about how useless we are in the kitchen. And what is normally a guy’s go to thing to help out with—dishes—is not something we can help out with here since the house lady does the dishes. We’d offer to make some things, but the girls are real foodies, so they aren’t really into having our specialties of mac ‘n cheese, pasta, etc. They just like cooking, so would rather do that than eat our stuff and have the night off. But the food has definitely been amazing. We have fresh salads from the garden with Stef’s homemade dressing. And Helen makes curries and chilis and other fancy sauces from scratch. To me it’s all too much work to make it worth it, but since they enjoy it… The other funny thing is, every night they drink a large beer while cooking, a large beer while eating and then fancy whiskey while watching a movie at night. They poke fun of Andrew and I for not drinking, but for us it’s too expensive and too many calories, so it’s nice to have someone else to help keep away the peer pressure. Of course, special occasions is a whole other thing!

My knee has been feeling a bit better and I got a more stable knee brace, so Andrew and I joined up as a team to play Julia and Sally in tennis at the ranch. The teams were pretty even (Julia played college tennis), so it was fun. We then sat on the porch of the ranch house and sipped gin and tonics. That evening we also joined the rest of the crew for a cool sundowner on a rock I had never been before that had an awesome view of the sunset, rising full moon, and river. On the way up I nearly stepped on a puff adder hidden in the rocks and on the way home we spotted a leopard.