Saturday, March 27, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
13 Months of Sunshine
Nearly two months ago, Anni and I sat down to plan out what she calls our ‘first trip together' to Ethiopia. Personally, I count Kenya as a trip in itself, but in her defense, we are not doing Kenya together. Nonetheless, it was quite exciting for the both of us to visit another region in Africa – the Horn of Africa. As we looked into where to go in Ethiopia, it was clear to see that Anni had done her research and I was indeed getting roped into the “Historical Route” of Ethiopia. Dating a history major, I should have suspected. It wouldn’t have been the route I necessarily would have been drawn to (with all the churches on the list n’ all) but having done it, I wouldn’t have changed it as it was incredibly fascinating. Also just a fun fact, Ethiopia is one of the only African countries to have escaped European colonialism, so we were excited to compare the difference in cultures too.
We begin…
We had a packed itinerary, packed backpacks, and I packed a 7 year old Lonely Planet book on Ethiopia, which I found out later was the reason why none of the hostels and restaurants I was reading about existed any longer. Ha!
We arrived in Addis Ababa only to wake up at 3 a.m. the next morning to catch a “cozy” van heading to Bahar Dar (12 hours away) that should have seated 10, but took 14 people, how nice of them. Finally though, after hours of feeling like a chicken caged in a coop, we arrived in Bahar Dar where we rented bikes and cycled throughout the city, visited the Blue Nile Falls, and checked out the Island Monasteries... ahh yes, the first of many churches… here are the names of the monasteries we visited if you are interested in learning more. Debre Maryam, Dega Estefanos, & Kebran Gabriel. They were built between the 12th-14th century and have incredible mural paintings inside as you can see from the pictures.
The best was when Anni and I were walking around the main market in Bahar Dar when all of a sudden we started coughing profusely, we then noticed that everyone else was coughing and sneezing all around us. The coughing turned into this deafening thunder all around us and then we realized that we were walking amongst the hundreds of thousands of chilies that were being dried out… red chilies everywhere! It was hilarious!
From there we went to Gonder, also called Africa’s Camelot. We visited several castles including Emperor Fasilidas’ Palace which was build in the 1600’s and is still standing strong, even after the Brits bombed it! There too, were more churches.
Finally though, we were heading to the SIMIEN MOUNTAINS where we spent 4 incredible days hiking around incredible landscape and wildlife. Anni’s highlight was seeing 3 Ethiopian Wolves – which are incredibly rare and endemic to Ethiopia. My highlight was being 5 feet away from a male Gelada Primate in his habitat. We came upon this family of about 150 geladas, they are fairly use to humans so they weren’t threatened so I just sat down maybe 25 feet away from him and he slowly approached me until he was right in front of me, posing for the camera. It was quite a rush. (Photo of him above) Oh, and we also climbed the second highest peak at 4,436 meters above sea level!
From the Simiens, we traveled to Lalibela – the most tourist city of them all... It’s considered one of the holiest sites in all of Africa as King Lalibela traveled to Jerusalem for 11 years with the intention of coming back and building his people their own mini-Jerusalem in Ethiopia. More Churches! Woo hoo!!! King Lalibela came back claiming he had a vision from God telling him to build 10 churches. He built all of them deep within the ground and many are connected by underground tunnels. They are stunning! A funny story about all of this is that at the time, St. George complained to King Lalibela that there wasn’t a church being built in his name, so Lalibela built him the most incredible one of all… so there are now 11 churches. St. George’s Church is built in the shape of a cross and is the most famous one of all. (also in the photos) I figured that this is where it all began, children from the village watched as St. George complained and threw tantrums after tantrums and actually got not only what he wanted, but the best gift of them all. The word spread, kids tried it out on their respective parents, and it worked for the most part! So now, thanks to St. George, children all over the world turn to tantrums when in need.
From Lalibela, we went and hung out in Addis for the week… and drank a lot… of Ethiopian coffee. Speaking from the perspective of a true coffee lover, they have some of the best coffee ever. We took part in a coffee ceremony and saw the entire process from roasting the beans, to grinding them to the actual cup of coffee. We are so removed from the whole process of a simple cup of coffee so it was nice to be present for it all. For most of the week we just sat and read in coffee houses. I have started to really move into the role of my mother's son as I am falling in love with reading. I've been plowing through books as of recently and my new thing is to read a book by an author of every country that I travel to, or a book on the country. If anyone is interested in a good book that tells the story beginning on the eve of the revolution of 1974 in Ethiopia, you should check out 'Beneath the Lions Gaze', also another book is 'The Emperor' which is about Haile Selasie and his dictatorship. Right now, I'm reading 'The White Tiger' by Aravind Adiga, as I get ready for India.
Lastly, the city of Addis is really safe, and unlike Nairobi, you can walk around at night and not feel threatened. It was a beautiful city, music shouting all around from each window you walked past, lights were strung across the streets at night, and the music scene in Addis is wicked! (That was for you Boston) Great jazz scene, and Azmari scene. Azmari is a style of music / comedic performance where a griot-like musician is playing a stringed instrument and telling jokes, singing songs, talking about politics etc. It’s all in Amharic but it’s still fun to be there watching it go down. That was Ethiopia in a blog-shell.
I'm back in Nairobi now and there is a lot of work to be done with the school. Abdul and I are polishing out roles and responsibilities for certain staff and administration now and working on a 3 year plan for the school and the non-profit. I'll be spearheading the Journalism Club meetings for this month and getting their next issue ready for May/June. On top of that, you might have caught it above, I'm getting ready for my travels to India. Anni and I are leaving April 27th or so, so we have a busy month now getting ready before our next travels. I already feel I'm in the home stretch of this journey, which is both an exciting feeling and scary. I'm incredibly excited to see you all, but the thought of leaving Kenya is hard to even imagine.
I hope you are all doing well, keep sending me the updates as I love reading about what is happening back at home. Oh and if anyone has a connection to Joe Mauer these days, KGSA could sure use it!
Much love,
-Ryan
We begin…
We had a packed itinerary, packed backpacks, and I packed a 7 year old Lonely Planet book on Ethiopia, which I found out later was the reason why none of the hostels and restaurants I was reading about existed any longer. Ha!
We arrived in Addis Ababa only to wake up at 3 a.m. the next morning to catch a “cozy” van heading to Bahar Dar (12 hours away) that should have seated 10, but took 14 people, how nice of them. Finally though, after hours of feeling like a chicken caged in a coop, we arrived in Bahar Dar where we rented bikes and cycled throughout the city, visited the Blue Nile Falls, and checked out the Island Monasteries... ahh yes, the first of many churches… here are the names of the monasteries we visited if you are interested in learning more. Debre Maryam, Dega Estefanos, & Kebran Gabriel. They were built between the 12th-14th century and have incredible mural paintings inside as you can see from the pictures.
The best was when Anni and I were walking around the main market in Bahar Dar when all of a sudden we started coughing profusely, we then noticed that everyone else was coughing and sneezing all around us. The coughing turned into this deafening thunder all around us and then we realized that we were walking amongst the hundreds of thousands of chilies that were being dried out… red chilies everywhere! It was hilarious!
From there we went to Gonder, also called Africa’s Camelot. We visited several castles including Emperor Fasilidas’ Palace which was build in the 1600’s and is still standing strong, even after the Brits bombed it! There too, were more churches.
Finally though, we were heading to the SIMIEN MOUNTAINS where we spent 4 incredible days hiking around incredible landscape and wildlife. Anni’s highlight was seeing 3 Ethiopian Wolves – which are incredibly rare and endemic to Ethiopia. My highlight was being 5 feet away from a male Gelada Primate in his habitat. We came upon this family of about 150 geladas, they are fairly use to humans so they weren’t threatened so I just sat down maybe 25 feet away from him and he slowly approached me until he was right in front of me, posing for the camera. It was quite a rush. (Photo of him above) Oh, and we also climbed the second highest peak at 4,436 meters above sea level!
From the Simiens, we traveled to Lalibela – the most tourist city of them all... It’s considered one of the holiest sites in all of Africa as King Lalibela traveled to Jerusalem for 11 years with the intention of coming back and building his people their own mini-Jerusalem in Ethiopia. More Churches! Woo hoo!!! King Lalibela came back claiming he had a vision from God telling him to build 10 churches. He built all of them deep within the ground and many are connected by underground tunnels. They are stunning! A funny story about all of this is that at the time, St. George complained to King Lalibela that there wasn’t a church being built in his name, so Lalibela built him the most incredible one of all… so there are now 11 churches. St. George’s Church is built in the shape of a cross and is the most famous one of all. (also in the photos) I figured that this is where it all began, children from the village watched as St. George complained and threw tantrums after tantrums and actually got not only what he wanted, but the best gift of them all. The word spread, kids tried it out on their respective parents, and it worked for the most part! So now, thanks to St. George, children all over the world turn to tantrums when in need.
From Lalibela, we went and hung out in Addis for the week… and drank a lot… of Ethiopian coffee. Speaking from the perspective of a true coffee lover, they have some of the best coffee ever. We took part in a coffee ceremony and saw the entire process from roasting the beans, to grinding them to the actual cup of coffee. We are so removed from the whole process of a simple cup of coffee so it was nice to be present for it all. For most of the week we just sat and read in coffee houses. I have started to really move into the role of my mother's son as I am falling in love with reading. I've been plowing through books as of recently and my new thing is to read a book by an author of every country that I travel to, or a book on the country. If anyone is interested in a good book that tells the story beginning on the eve of the revolution of 1974 in Ethiopia, you should check out 'Beneath the Lions Gaze', also another book is 'The Emperor' which is about Haile Selasie and his dictatorship. Right now, I'm reading 'The White Tiger' by Aravind Adiga, as I get ready for India.
Lastly, the city of Addis is really safe, and unlike Nairobi, you can walk around at night and not feel threatened. It was a beautiful city, music shouting all around from each window you walked past, lights were strung across the streets at night, and the music scene in Addis is wicked! (That was for you Boston) Great jazz scene, and Azmari scene. Azmari is a style of music / comedic performance where a griot-like musician is playing a stringed instrument and telling jokes, singing songs, talking about politics etc. It’s all in Amharic but it’s still fun to be there watching it go down. That was Ethiopia in a blog-shell.
I'm back in Nairobi now and there is a lot of work to be done with the school. Abdul and I are polishing out roles and responsibilities for certain staff and administration now and working on a 3 year plan for the school and the non-profit. I'll be spearheading the Journalism Club meetings for this month and getting their next issue ready for May/June. On top of that, you might have caught it above, I'm getting ready for my travels to India. Anni and I are leaving April 27th or so, so we have a busy month now getting ready before our next travels. I already feel I'm in the home stretch of this journey, which is both an exciting feeling and scary. I'm incredibly excited to see you all, but the thought of leaving Kenya is hard to even imagine.
I hope you are all doing well, keep sending me the updates as I love reading about what is happening back at home. Oh and if anyone has a connection to Joe Mauer these days, KGSA could sure use it!
Much love,
-Ryan
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Mfangano Island
I was lucky enough to spend some time on Mfangano Island in Lake Victoria the past couple weeks and it was an incredible experience. I was able to see what Anni has been up to the past 5 months, and share in her excitement of the development of the Organic Health Response's new building - the Ekialo Kiona Center - a VCT Clinic / Community Center that a friend of mine, Mookie Tierney helped design. The story of Organic Health Response is fit for a fairy tale - hence why I'm going to tell it to you. This comes straight off of their website. www.OrganicHealthResponse.org Check em out!
When he was thirteen years old, Richard Magerenge’s mother died on Mfangano of a mysterious wasting illness. Some said she was bewitched, others said she was afflicted with a condition known for generations among the Suba as chira.
When Richard’s father died two years later, whispers in the village included new Swahili terms: UKIMWI (“AIDS”) or virusi (“the virus”). Richard managed to find his way through high school, and later jumped at the chance to complete a training workshop in Voluntary HIV Counseling and Testing (VCT). With his new VCT certificate, Richard was able to “sneak” onto the computers of an international development organization on the mainland. He started “surfing the net.”
Navigating the web, Richard was attracted to a series of websites regarding the Organic Agriculture movement in the US. He was excited to realize that the cultivation techniques these websites described were not radically different from the techniques his family had been using for generations, long before the introduction of industrial chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Richard began talking to his uncle, a farmer named Joel Oguta, and convinced him to fully convert their farm. On Mfangano, Joel’s grandfather had been respected as the first farmer to plant mango trees; Joel agreed with Richard to try and plant a new kind of seed. After three hard years of work, they registered their organic farm at Kitawi beach on the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms website (www.wwoof.org).
In 2006, Adam Sewall and Lauren Friedman, two students at Evergreen College in Washington, came across Richard’s online post. They were impressed by Richard and Joel’s passion, and decided that Mfangano Island was the right place to realize a long-held vision for a “sustainable life.” They emptied their bank accounts, dropped out of school, filled two backpacks, and joined Richard and Joel on Mfangano Island to start an experimental farm.
Six months later, while working in Kenya, an Oxford medical anthropology student named Chas Salmen crossed paths with Adam and Lauren at a bus stop in Homa Bay. After visiting their farm on Mfangano, Chas decided to make the Suba the focus of his ethnographic fieldwork on the roots of HIV/AIDS in Western Kenya.
Like Lauren and Adam, Chas was hooked on Mfangano. He returned with an Oxford colleague named Malini Daniel, president of a student-run non-profit called STRIDE, to conduct a community health needs assessment. This time, Richard and Joel approached them with an interesting idea. Joel wanted to donate a piece of his land to build a solar-powered Internet library to coordinate HIV testing services and teach about sustainable agriculture.
The Organic Health Response was born…
Amazing, right?
So for the few weeks that I was there, I worked on Joel's farm. We harvested, weeded, transplanted, weeded, watered, and did some more weeding. I like to call the Island "A paradise short of a refrigerator," because as great as it was, wow did it get hot. A few days it was 104... in the shade! Sorry I guess I shouldn't complain to those experiencing winter huh? Anyways, It was a great break from my Nairobi city life and I really took to gardening. So dad, Lori, whomever, look out when I get back because you'll be getting calls from me for assistance! Mom would have really loved the Island too... except for the no running water/flushing toilet thing, she would have been in her own little paradise. I guess maybe she's there now... I thought of her a lot there as there are so many exotic birds, butterflies, and wildlife all over.
In another update, because of Kenyan immigration policy, Anni and I must leave East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) after 6 months if we wish to stay because we are not technically with a job or organization that can sponsor us. So, we are using that as an excuse to travel! We found some cheap tickets to Ethiopia and are leaving Thursday morning until the 22nd of March. We're flying into Addis and will stay there for a few days, then we are off to the Simien Mountains for some trekking. I still can't believe that it's been 6 months already... I'll be seeing you all soon!
with love and blessings,
-Ryan
When he was thirteen years old, Richard Magerenge’s mother died on Mfangano of a mysterious wasting illness. Some said she was bewitched, others said she was afflicted with a condition known for generations among the Suba as chira.
When Richard’s father died two years later, whispers in the village included new Swahili terms: UKIMWI (“AIDS”) or virusi (“the virus”). Richard managed to find his way through high school, and later jumped at the chance to complete a training workshop in Voluntary HIV Counseling and Testing (VCT). With his new VCT certificate, Richard was able to “sneak” onto the computers of an international development organization on the mainland. He started “surfing the net.”
Navigating the web, Richard was attracted to a series of websites regarding the Organic Agriculture movement in the US. He was excited to realize that the cultivation techniques these websites described were not radically different from the techniques his family had been using for generations, long before the introduction of industrial chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Richard began talking to his uncle, a farmer named Joel Oguta, and convinced him to fully convert their farm. On Mfangano, Joel’s grandfather had been respected as the first farmer to plant mango trees; Joel agreed with Richard to try and plant a new kind of seed. After three hard years of work, they registered their organic farm at Kitawi beach on the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms website (www.wwoof.org).
In 2006, Adam Sewall and Lauren Friedman, two students at Evergreen College in Washington, came across Richard’s online post. They were impressed by Richard and Joel’s passion, and decided that Mfangano Island was the right place to realize a long-held vision for a “sustainable life.” They emptied their bank accounts, dropped out of school, filled two backpacks, and joined Richard and Joel on Mfangano Island to start an experimental farm.
Six months later, while working in Kenya, an Oxford medical anthropology student named Chas Salmen crossed paths with Adam and Lauren at a bus stop in Homa Bay. After visiting their farm on Mfangano, Chas decided to make the Suba the focus of his ethnographic fieldwork on the roots of HIV/AIDS in Western Kenya.
Like Lauren and Adam, Chas was hooked on Mfangano. He returned with an Oxford colleague named Malini Daniel, president of a student-run non-profit called STRIDE, to conduct a community health needs assessment. This time, Richard and Joel approached them with an interesting idea. Joel wanted to donate a piece of his land to build a solar-powered Internet library to coordinate HIV testing services and teach about sustainable agriculture.
The Organic Health Response was born…
Amazing, right?
So for the few weeks that I was there, I worked on Joel's farm. We harvested, weeded, transplanted, weeded, watered, and did some more weeding. I like to call the Island "A paradise short of a refrigerator," because as great as it was, wow did it get hot. A few days it was 104... in the shade! Sorry I guess I shouldn't complain to those experiencing winter huh? Anyways, It was a great break from my Nairobi city life and I really took to gardening. So dad, Lori, whomever, look out when I get back because you'll be getting calls from me for assistance! Mom would have really loved the Island too... except for the no running water/flushing toilet thing, she would have been in her own little paradise. I guess maybe she's there now... I thought of her a lot there as there are so many exotic birds, butterflies, and wildlife all over.
In another update, because of Kenyan immigration policy, Anni and I must leave East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania) after 6 months if we wish to stay because we are not technically with a job or organization that can sponsor us. So, we are using that as an excuse to travel! We found some cheap tickets to Ethiopia and are leaving Thursday morning until the 22nd of March. We're flying into Addis and will stay there for a few days, then we are off to the Simien Mountains for some trekking. I still can't believe that it's been 6 months already... I'll be seeing you all soon!
with love and blessings,
-Ryan
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