Day 2: Makindu, Farmers and Back to Nairobi

We stayed last night in a village in a provincial town, in a little guest house "inn" type of place. It was clean and nice, simple but cute. Randomly, with a really huge, nice swimming pool! But it was too cool to use it. Reminded me of a colleague I used to travel with a lot in Asia, who was crazy dedicated to working out all the time, even on field trips. That guy would have gotten up to swim laps, just because he could. Me, I didn't even bring running shoes, mainly because they take up so much space in my suitcase but also because I'm lazy and field trips are long days plus jet lag. 

Speaking of not bringing sneakers, I have sturdy sandals but managed to, I think, break or maybe bruise badly, my pinky toe yesterday while traipsing through a farmer's field. I barely remember tripping on a rock, but last night it swelled way up and hurts nicely. Should feel delightful next week in the heels I had to pack for this conference in Ethiopia with fancy World Bank and other posh-side of development types. Hopefully it'll be fine in a couple days- I think I might live. 

Back in the Land Cruiser, another hour and a half to this morning's site visit, another farmers cooperative we work with. Was reminded this morning about this weird East African thing- they produce and export tons of coffee but serve instant Nescafé with breakfast. Note to self to warn my high brow coffee snob friend of this fact, who's moving here later this summer from Latin America. I used to travel a lot in Africa when I was younger with a woman who would go to the field with her own French press and ground coffee. 

The guest house had a little gift shop so I bought Griffin a wooden giraffe figurine for 100 Kenyan shillings, about $1.25 I think. We named it "Twiga" which is giraffe in Swahili. They had all kinds of carvings and trinkets (gotta love the giraffe salad tossing spoon sets) and for a moment I paused to appreciate our wonderful Baltimore friends who aren't in the development field and would actually appreciate these things, unlike our families or work or DC or overseas friends who have long since been bored with developing country souvenirs. In fact at the office we have regular games of tchotsky bowling but you didn't hear that from me.  I probably should have bought a bunch of those salad things but am a little short on local currency since I forgot to hit the ATM at the airport in Nairobi. Sorry guys. 

Ok now it's about 6:30pm and we're back in the Land Cruiser headed to Nairobi. We've been driving already a few hours, hopefully we'll hit the outskirts of the city soon because driving on these highways after dark is a no-no, pretty much in any developing country. The highlight of this drive is that we saw a few real giraffes grazing by the side of the road!! A huge treat. I always say I'm glad I started my career in West Africa where there's no real wild game, because you fall in love with the people. Once you get to East Africa you risk being so awed by the chance to see big game that you have to force yourself to remember there's a lot more to this place. 

We had a great day visiting farmers and learning about LWR's programs out here. I took a lot of pictures but tried to listen more and be a bit less intrusive. It's tough though, now that I have the picture taking bug. Today was a good example of why NGOs need good program people and/or monitoring and evaluation people to help dig deeper. We saw some examples of some amazing stuff- farmers growing plentiful, diversified, irrigated crops, being sold at good market prices. I think I got some really gorgeous shots- we'll see. But we also clearly saw all the best farmers- we asked and they told us that- and although we met some women, we didn't see any women's farms either. We saw a super cool mobile-based payment system for water users- they demonstrated how it worked and it was really cutting edge. Except it took me some digging to hear that only 5 farmers had switched over to using it, since December. Behavior change takes time, the projects not over, but it would be easy to get over excited about a good photograph and story about the innovative technology, without noticing the results.