About the Journey...

Armed with mefloquine, ciprofloxacin and a camcorder, I travel around in circles in East Africa.

Jumatatu 13 septemba

KiSwahili word of the day is "ndege" which can mean bird or airplane.

Newark take 2. Still stuck here for another 4 hours and some guy at the bookshop just called me "sir"...

I'm a lady!


Jumanne 14 septemba

KiSwahili word of the day is "kuzunguka" meaning to go around in circles, which is where the word, "mzungu" comes from, which is a person who goes about in circle, AKA a European in East Africa.

My flight from Newark was delayed for over 2 hours for a few drops of rain. I was positive throughout the flight that I would be spending the night in Zurich, getting to Kenya just seemed unattainable at this point. Luckily, a petite Swiss woman named Sylvia met a Southern gentleman and myself at the plane and we were sprinting through the airport and going through all these shortcuts and somehow made it onto the flight.

I later found out the other passenger running with me was an ER physician from Mississippi, named Phil, who was going to do medical work in Northern Kenya... so great!


Jumatano 15 septemba

KiSwahili word of the day is "asante", or thank you. Asante sana is thank you very much.

All day quest to find phone. Staying at Wildebeest hostel in Nairobi, where I stayed 2 years ago, really beautiful and I've met some interesting characters.

I met a middle aged man at breakfast who is a lover of travel and ! biking <3 He has taught English as a second language at Harvard and got really into taking long distance bike trips. He has biked from Montana to Alaska then also cross country then fluew to Amsterdam and biked to Bulgaria. Awesome. His crazy story of the day was in Syria, some man in an American military outfit was asking to see everyone at his table in a restaurant's passports. While everyone else was handing theirs over, this man said, "No! I refuse! You will have to kill me and everyone else in this restaurant to see it! You have no authority in this place!" Fortunately, no one was killed.

My favorite person of the day was a female UN employee. She is here to get married in Kenya to her Kenyan fiance in 4 days. She has done a lot of work in Africa, so was telling me about her experiences in Somalia.

She said she went on missions into Somaliland and also into the horn of Africa. The horn of Africa is where all the Somali pirates are based, so the risk of kidnap is so high she said the security had them changing locations every 20 minutes. Also about Somalia surrounding Mogadishu, she said despite that it is a religious fight, the religious leaders all employ the different war lords to do the fighting, and these people take sides with the highest bidder.

She said that aid coming into Somaliland, she can see the benefits because at least some of it is reaching the people but putting money into trying to help people in the Mogadishu area is essentially just throwing money away because all of it is taken by the people perpetrating the crimes. She said she hopes never to work in Somalia again, which was pretty depressing. The US military is also still involved in Somalia, no surprise when are we not involved, but just to gain intelligence on Al Quaeda, then we come in and bomb the shit out of their location and leave. It would be a mistake to have a permanent presence there, which we have not had since 1994. I asked about by-standers.

"Well there's always collateral damage".

We also talked about Uganda and IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) and now there is also more investigation of IDP in Columbia. The problem is, if people leave their country due to circumstances in the parent country, they can gain aid under a refugee status. However, with the LRA in Uganda, people moved from the north into camps in the south for 25 years, but were still within Uganda. Recently, the people have been able to return to their homes in the north but while in camps, the aid was given directly to women to manage as leaders of micro-finance (which has been shown to be more effective than giving it to men). However, during the time of internment the men lost their status as leader of the household and there was a rise in domestic violence and drinking.

Also, 25 years later, there are now land disputes because people cannot remember what land was theirs in addition to third party persons coming onto the land in their absence and making use of it. Essentially an entire generation of people has been raised in refugee camps and now that they return home, of course there are going to be issues in resettling.

The issue with IDP in Columbia is, of course, drug related but has been happening slowly and steadily so that the Columbian gov has refused to acknowledge a problem. Drug lords come onto the land and either require the land owner to grow coca, or displace the land owner from their land. Right now their is a discrepancy between the Columbian gov and an NGO on the number of IDPs (3.1 million versus 4.3 million), so this has been currently under investigation.

So interesting! I would have wanted to talk more, but I felt terrible for making her talk about work while on vacation. Its amazing the people one meets while traveling.