TD 2013 Summer: Keepin' it Kenyan

Mambo vipi rafiki!

From sheng, the youth slang of Kenya, that roughly translates: what's up my friend!

Ellen, China sounds incredible, especially the Shanghai expo, and getting to see Heatherwicks seed cathedral! I was working for a metal company this summer and ran across his work while digging for clients and it's great, but most of it's in the uk. I ran across these air vents of his (pic on the left) in June in London.

But that was then, and now is now, and I'm in Mombasa with an oddly free night following finishing our fourth paper (and third to last; apparently we have to work for 2 credits in six weeks) of the East African History & Health Class. As everyone else is still trudging away through colonial medical files - terribly exciting - and with Clementine, the last tder left in Mombasa, having left today for Chicago, now seems the perfect time to write a post.

Apart from the work, and there's plenty of that (frighteningly, I actually used the 5am call to prayer as an alarm clock two days ago to wake me up in time to finish my last paper), life here in Mombasa is fairly idyllic. Our class is housed in three locations throughout the old town (also referred to as stone town) of the city; as of the last three days I've got a single with an immense four post bed to myself off a suite three of us are sharing on the third floor of a former house of the sultan of Zanzibar. With the Indian Ocean literally at our back steps, if the tide is in, when out it's a scruffy beach, life ain't so shabby.

However, we've only been back in Mombasa for a few days now after taking a two week spin around the highlands of Kenya. For the most part our location is decided by the subject we study. Accordingly, our first two and half weeks studying everything from arab traders to early 20th century Indian protests were spent here in Mombasa where we can conduct interviews with individuals who's family may have come centuries ago but is still connected to Yemen and Oman, explore Portuguese forts and see where the East African Indian Nationalist Congress led its protests.

We then spent two weeks in Nairobi, on the slopes of Mt. Kenya and on safari (although safari really refers to any kind of trip) where we could see the Norfolk hotel terrace from which white tea sipping (and pistol carrying) settlers took pot shots at African protesters, interview former Mau Mau guerilla fighters at a goat roast and learn from ranchers about how destructive elephants are, but they can't do anything about them because they're preserved for the sake of a western tourist's camera (which makes me feel guilty for not having taken a photo of one).