Kenya

May 21st:

I arrived at the Jacaranda Hotel on Friday morning at about 9am. I met up with Louise Buck in time for a nice breakfast of fresh mango, pineapple and granola and we headed out to the field at 10. We are, as the pitch goes, pioneering a ground-based photomonitoring methodology for eco-agriculture landscapes and this trip was a pilot test and a necessary first step in writing the draft for the final product: a ground-based photomonitoring user’s guide, more or less.

We visited the KENVO (Kijabe Environmental Volunteers) office to get some maps and then headed down through the Kijabe landscape to take some photos. If I had been there the day before I would have gone to several pre-established transects within the area with Louise and the rest of the group, but I wasn’t (damn you, Virgin Atlantic) so I was just able to visit some specific sites. KENVO has been initiating some “intervention” projects to promote biodiversity conservation and rural livelihood development within the area. Beekeeping, fish-farming, agroforestry, tree nurseries (the one we visited was in conjunction with a school) and forest rehabilitation sites are among these projects so we took a sample photopoint at each one of these sites.

After several hours of taking pictures along bumpy roads we made our way back into Nairobi to visit the World Agroforestry Center headquarters and met with the Director General.

The evening was topped off with a much appreciated meal and good night’s rest.

May 22nd:

Our prior plans for the weekend had been cancelled, so we decided to rent a driver and car and venture to Nakuru National Park for a safari (my first). We stayed at Mbweha Camp in the Mbweha Conservancy of the Great Rift Valley which was a slow 3 hour drive out of Nairobi. Louise, Simon (our guide) and I took an hour long evening safari on some tattered bicycles which my chain fell off several times, my seat tilted fiercely sideways and my ankles were eaten alive by mosquitoes, but we saw a lot of zebra and impala and the sunset was magnificent. It was well worth those few pains. The rest of the evening was spent by the fire enjoying some delicious Tusker.

May 23^rd:

A 6am wake-up call was in hopes of an early morning in Nakuru Park, named after Lake Nakuru within its boundaries, but we weren’t entirely successful. We didn’t get out of Mbweha until 7:30 and having to drive all the way around Nakuru’s border to reach the main gate meant we didn’t get into the park until about 9am. This unfortunately meant we didn’t see any cats (either that or the lush grasses from days of immense rain disguised them well). Regardless we saw plenty of zebra, buffalo, baboons, flamingoes, rhinos and more and the weather could not have been better.

We stopped into the Lion Hill hotel for some tea around 3pm, watched a flock of weaver birds conquer a tree and then headed back to Nairobi for the evening.

May 24-26th:

The Community Knowledge Service (CKS) Africa conference was being held at the Co-operative College of Kenya this week and we, arriving late Sunday evening, joined them a day late. Lots of people from different organizations and countries were present to discuss CKS issues, strategies and projects for the upcoming year. On the last day of the conference (Wednesday), I gave a presentation about ground-based photomonitoring as a potential CKS tool and we probed some discussion about its utility and how we could make the user’s guide as more suitable for its, well, users. We got some great feedback, heard from one leader who said communities in his working area were already successfully using this method, and from another who said communities in his working area were using the method informally and appreciated its formal capacity. All good notes for our draft which will be in the making this summer.

May 27-29th:

Peace out, Kenya. It was a short, but wonderful trip. I had a 2pm departure for Doha marking the beginning of a very long journey to Mongolia. A five hour flight to Doha and a twelve hour layover, an 8 hour flight to Beijing and a 21 hour layover and finally a 2 ½ hour flight to Ulaanbaatar.

Success! I’m exhausted and totally out of it, but I’m back! Turns out my apartment for the summer won’t be ready until Monday, so my host parents from the fall have graciously taken me back under their wing and offered me a place to stay for the weekend. I’m off doing errands tomorrow. I’ll be in UB for two months (and up in Selenge for about a week) looking into more of the vegetable agriculture sector here.

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My goal is to keep this blog up twice a week at least. I don’t have school or a priority blog to blame the neglect on, so hopefully the goal will come to fruitition. Check here for updates, stories and ventures.