Scott's First Day Off

I cannot believe it's been a week already or that's it's only been a week. There has been so much to take in and yet the time has flown by so quickly. Today is my day off, and since Monica was able to take care of almost all of our errands yesterday on her day off in Malindi, I have a lot of time to spend writing email and relaxing on the beach.

This place is strangely beautiful with a surreal mixture of technology and tradition. In among the corrugated steel roofed shops along the road from Watamu to Gede you see kiosks for cell phone charging and airtime cards about as often as you would see a Starbucks in Seattle. In Timboni (near Gede) I noticed two right across the street from each other for convenience of those walking on the other side of the road. All of the post offices in Kenya have two internet terminals now that are connected via 56K modem connections to the internet with rates that seem to be affordable to most. As with everything, though, there are issues with reliability. On Thursday, we had decided to finally get back to some email only to find out when we walked in Gede village that the electricity had been cut off for the day to allow crews to perform some unscheduled maintenance of the main power lines (which also affected Mwamba).

Regardless of the reliability of the infrastructure, it is fascinating to see just how much computer literacy there is and is interesting to wonder at how much this corner of Kenya will change in the next couple of years as the fiber optic trunk off the coast comes live and brings broadband internet (and maybe high tech jobs?) to the area. I've heard rumors that broadband service is scheduled for the area in 2007. Thinking of the broader picture, already the first offshore markets of Korea and Taiwan have come close to maturing, and there are signs that offshoring to India and China is also causing wages for tech workers to increase dramatically in those areas. It is only a matter of time before companies realize that they are not necessarily better off and begin looking again for a new, cheaper offshore labor pool ... probably in sub-Saharan Africa and then with a whole new set of lessons that they have learned in India and China to reduce the uncertainty of investing in such a move. Currently, there are large numbers of people making less than 300 Schillings, approximately $4, per day.

But I need to stop thinking of such things and enjoy the beauty of this land. The ride to Gede in the mornings is wonderful. Women in colorful wraps try to herd their goats out of the dirt road, as Land Rovers come roaring along at disturbing speeds, though, I learned that the vehicles are often very respectful of the livestock they share the road with. Killing a goat with your vehicle is considered the driver's fault and requires you to stop and pay the fair market value of the animal, which is no small sum. I also see scores of people walking or biking the roads in the morning on their way to jobs/school/ etc. The children headed to school usually come in large groups and are uniformed according to their school (e.g., pink button up shirts and dark blue slacks/skirts).

The homes are quite interesting, and, around Gede, often consist of a bound wood frame cemented with mud of the deep red color so characteristic of the Kenyan soil. The roof is often made of thatched panels that are, according to Liz, often hand-woven from palm branches by the children of some of the local families for 5 Bob (the local name for Schillings) for a panel of a couple of feet long. This is only about $0.07 per panel. Monica and I visited a Giriama village outside of the Gede ruins. When we walked up, we saw a copious amount of mnazi (palm wine) being poured into a large (5-gallon?) container, though, this practice is apparently banned by the government. The village is a wall-enclosed clearing with houses composing parts of the walls. Most of the dwellings are constructed of a wood-reinforced mud plaster (Swahili influence) or woven thatched grass sides (Giriama) with a thatched palm frond roof and consist typically of two rooms with possessions stowed in hammocks above the bed. We took a tour of the place with Joro, who showed us how to play the traditional drums and sold us a fun mouse trap.

For our more immediate activities, monkey watching yesterday was frustrating. Our group went about their normal routine of migrating from the southeastern part of the park to the northwestern side, making a stop at the ruins and other points along the way to relax in the tasty tamarind trees (it bears red fruit encased in a papery brown shell that we like to eat if we can, since it is a nice tart wake-up and is full of vitamin-C). I even was able to see why they had been moving to the northwest corner ... I spotted our male stealing a mango from beyond the northern fence. Unfortunately, they encountered another group of Seykes monkeys and after an intense chasing and shouting match, which was difficult to follow in the dense brush, they ended up scattering. I followed what I thought was our group but then saw I was mistaken. Despite a couple of hours of searching I could not find them again, so I instead set off to chart the rest of the park and improve the map we are using to record our monkeys' activity. Stanley and I sat down again last night to recreate a database that had been lost from a backup error; we had tried a few days ago to finish during a power outage where we sat on his balcony by candlelight at the laptop to design the tables but were not quite successful. Instead, we got about as far as finishing the configuration of a new PCMCIA modem he purchased, which will give him the ability to finally connect directly to the internet. No more receiving emails on the Mwamba computer, downloading to diskette, and then re-downloading them onto his laptop.

Well, that is about it for today, and I want to get outdoors :).