And No Matter Where I Go

read this article about my favorite person at one of my favorite places. 

Incredible stories. Familiar faces.

Stay strong and stay together, New York. 

every time you close your eyes

you know what's great?

sharing what you love with people you love.

dust bath at Sheldrick's.

Offbeat Pride bros.

Mother and Child Reunion.

an implausibility.

lekker.

best.food.coma.ever.

up close and personal. thank you Charlie for the best hike refreshment ever.

peace.

Music Like Dirt

in honor of some friends who drove to northern Kenya this weekend and because I couldn't go (damn you, commitments to this opportunity that brought me to Kenya in the first place!) I've put together 

the 31 core tracks of The Ultimate Northern Kenya Playlist. 

These songs have accompanied me on all my travels, in various stages of repetition (see play count).

A few notes:
Boxer, The National: This music is the sandy roads outside of South Horr. For some reason, while composed thousands of miles away in Brooklyn, this one of the most fitting soundtracks for northern Kenya. I had to include the album in its entirety.

"Strangers in Strange Land," Leon Russell: This song is the perfect accompaniment for a flock of birds catching a thermal, spiraling high above the desert.

The King of Limbs, Radiohead: While Radiohead’s entire canon could have been written to score a trip to northern Kenya, this album is the most precise. "Bloom" will forever conjure images of dropping down the final escarpment and speeding along the shore of Lake Turkana, sun beating down, hot air pounding through the vehicle, the water shimmering, people out floating on rafts or casting nets from the shore.

"Juicy," The Notorious B.I.G.: A slight departure from the other, more contemplative selections, this song is equally representative and emblematic of northern Kenya. To listen to music in the Land Cruiser, we have a basic memory stick reader that plugs into the cigarette lighter. Often, someone will insert a stick containing 11 songs that are played, on repeat, for the duration of a three week trip. However, if we are lucky, someone will throw on a mystery stick containing hundreds of potential gems. Hearing "Juicy" while driving through the Kaisut Desert was perhaps the gem-mest of them all.

rocks off

There isn't really anything to say about Lalibela. 

Or rather, there is nothing I can say. 

No words can replicate how it feels to stand at the foot of these epic, mythical, living structures, 

what it means to get up close to the walls and see individual chisel marks, 

or the intensity of standing next to someone kissing the floor, praying under their white cotton shawl. 

I'll try and show you instead:

unreal. 

every picture tells a story, don't it?

I took a lot of photos on this last trip to the field. It was the first time I seriously started to consider composition, framing and light. Most of the photos I took were for work; we want to have a collection of images to use for reports and newsletters, showing our participants proudly holding record books or packets of tea. While I was taking the photos, I always imagined displaying them all at once, a relentless deluge of faces/colors/struggles. 

It is a remarkable experience, to take a photo of someone who has never seen their picture before.  Digital cameras have revolutionized the act, making it possible to instantly show someone what your camera sees.  I came to really appreciate the routine: we would finish the interview, I would ask if it was ok to take a photo, I would dig out my camera and the interviewee would jump up and run off to her house, or would shriek to some neighbor/friend/child to bring her beads.
Every woman I've ever met in northern Kenya wears a stunning mass of beads around her neck. My favorites are the plain strings of one color, stacked on top of one another ten or twenty rows high. I also love ones with keys, pendants, bottle caps or shells woven in, the juxtaposition of ordinary objects with these grand ornaments.
Before I started taking pictures, I thought these beads were fantastic, but I couldn't believe women wore them all the time. As someone who tends not to delight in dressing up, I found it hard to imagine wearing such finery to carry water and milk goats. Then I realized that these were only the everyday beads. The serious stuff came out only for special occasions and was even more outrageous than I could imagine. Women were weighed down by incredible helixes, beaded Kenyan flags, layers upon layers that obscured the endless beads below.
Taking a photo was no longer just pressing a button. I had to do justice to these precise and calculated displays. Women sometimes took five minutes, changing their clothes, arranging their beads, finding their children and standing still, all for something that took only an instant.

I'm happy with my images, but I wish I could have recorded what happened after I took them, when I turned the camera around and showed it to the eagerly waiting faces. The surprise, the laughter, the delight, the shock, the pride...the sound. Again and again, women made the same exclamation, a combination of wonder (at actually seeing yourself), disappointment (that you don't look quite like you thought you did) and glee at the complete insanity of the whole situation. There was a moment, where my hand was holding the camera, where it would be held by everyone else's too, clamoring to get a glance, that sound rolling from woman to woman as they each in turn saw themselves.
For the first time, I also took a few photos of the omnipresent kids, sometimes fifteen or twenty deep, hanging around the outskirts of our interviews until an adult got frustrated, picked up a rock, acacia branch, dried goat poop or whatever else was lying around and sent them scattering, squealing with laughter.
More than anything else, I wish I had a picture of these guys seeing their picture. You'll just have to trust me, it was incredible.

Words Fail

30 October 2011

9 December 2011

Laisamis.

So Long, Big Bite

It is with heavy heart that I write about the likely permanent closing of Big Bite in Arusha, the best Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to and the physical manifestation in Africa of some of my greatest friendships in America.

One of my best friends from college transferred to Columbia after taking a year off, part of which he spent working at an orphanage outside of Arusha, Tanzania. Of the many, many things I have in common with this friend (an unhealthy obsession with The Wire, a year of 8am Kiswahili classes, a deep appreciation of James Brown, a love of professional basketball and a problem with coveting sneakers), food may be our holiest shared space. When talking about his time in Tanzania, my friend would lapse into a dreamlike reverie whenever he mentioned Big Bite, an Indian restaurant run by a benevolent old man where, if you asked politely, you could go in the kitchen and watch your food be cooked in an ancient clay oven. Big Bite took on mythical proportions and I vowed that if I ever made it to Arusha, I would go.

Three years later, I found myself studying abroad in southern Kenya. And my two best friends invited me to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro with them:

After a truly magnificent but exhausting five days, we decided to visit Arusha, partly for access to more direct return to Nairobi, but also because I had started talking about Big Bite. We arrived, stunned by our transition from the highest point on the African continent to our first city in five months. We wandered through Arusha’s big market, bought some cheap flip flops to give our feet a break and somehow negotiated for the three of us to stay in a room with one double bed. The evening sky began to hum with the call to prayer echoing from several of Arusha’s mosques, and we started our hajj to Big Bite. Without too much difficulty we found it, on the corner of a side street, and we made our way inside. I don’t remember many details about the interior, or even what we ate exactly, but I remember telling Mr. Big Bite that we had been sent by a tall mzungu who used to come there and that we were very happy to be seated in his warm dining room, ravenously pulling apart naan with our hands, drinking cold cokes and laughing at the majesty of our enormous and small world. Bringing my Kilimanjaro buddies, people I had spent the most intense five months of my life with, to a place that had been so important to one of my most kindred spirits in the US was a remarkable experience. For that, I will always remember Big Bite with utmost fondness.

Friends that live in Arusha now sent an email a few days ago. They’ve heard Mr. Big Bite died while visiting his home in India, likely making his temporary closing of the restaurant permanent. It will be missed.

meeting of the minds

Barack Obama and Edward Said.

I bet they were talking about the Knicks.

thank you, Africa is A Country, particularly, here.

Cryptic fecal covering in aardvarks (Orycteropus afer)

In honor of a thrilling nocturnal wildlife sighting, in the middle of an EPIC all-night drive, I want to share my favorite assignment from my semester in southern Kenya at the School for Field Studies. With a few other contenders, it may be my best.titled.paper.ever.

Cryptic fecal covering in aardvark (Orycteropus afer)

Kilimanjaro Bush Camp//Kimana Group Ranch

6 February 2009

7:15 am

Weather Conditions: cool, slightly overcast

Observation: While on a morning nature walk, Daniel and Marias noticed a seemingly freshly manipulated area of dirt. Daniel and Marias began sifting through the dirt and exposed approximately 15 pieces of aardvark dung. They were rounded, smooth and relatively small (4 or 5 pieces were able to be held in Marias’ hand at once). When Daniel and Marias broke open the dung pellets, the interior was relatively dry, consisting mostly of dirt and termite heads. The dung pile was proximate to the opening of a burrow, possibly inhabited.

Hypothesis/Questions:Why would the aardvark work to conceal feces near its burrow opening when several other aspects of its behavior clearly indicate its presence?

Research: Alden et al. (1995) classify the aardvark as nocturnal and solitary. Despite the fact that the aardvark is active predominantly at night, there are several aspects of its behavior which indicate its presence. Stuart and Stuart (1994) describe the aardvark burrow as completely obvious with seemingly little or no effort made to disguise its existence. The entrance of the burrow can be up to 1 meter wide and is evident from surrounding areas (Stuart and Stuart, 1994). The aardvark’s physiology is also such that when it digs it uses its large, strong tail for support, leaving a distinctive marking in the soft dirt (Stuart and Stuart, 1994).

In addition to leaving signs indicating its presence, the aardvark frequently positions its burrow relatively far from its foraging grounds, thereby necessitating a walk each night between the 2 areas (Kingdon, 1997).

The aardvark does, however, simultaneously occupy several “camping holes” which are significantly less developed and more temporary than the full burrow (Kingdon, 1997). While aardvarks tend to generally be solitary, females are often accompanied by 1 to 2 offspring and in some rare cases more than 1 adult has inhabited a single burrow (Kingdon, 1997).

Rather than use feces as a territorial marker, aardvarks secrete a strong musk. Both males and females have glandular areas located on the elbows and hips. Kingdon (1997) suggests that this sophisticated olfactory system most likely regulates the spacing of individuals. Aardvarks make a significant effort to disguise the location of their feces, as they are deposited very near to their active burrow (Stuart and Stuart, 1994). Aardvarks dig a hole prior to defecation, which they fill with as much as 0.5 kg of feces (Shoshani, Goldman& Thewissen, 1988). After completing defecation, the hole is covered. The hole’s position, at a slight incline, makes the feces even more difficult to detect; not only are they covered, but if a predator were to dig vertically it could miss the fecal deposit. Shoshani, Goldman and Thewissen (1988) propose that this behavior contributes to predator avoidance.

Discussion: Despite their relatively obvious burrows, aardvark behavior is generally inconspicuous. Their nocturnal and largely solitary habits greatly reduce their exposure. As an individual aardvark can have several burrow options (a main burrow or one of several “camping burrows”) it may be further able to confuse predators about its specific whereabouts (Kingdon, 1997). As feces do not serve a territorial or larger social role, they remain merely an indicator of presence (Kingdon, 1997). Thus, it is logical for an aardvark to go to significant lengths to conceal its feces. Feces may then be the only temporal and spatially relevant indicator of an aardvark’s location and therefore a considerable danger to its survival.

Conclusion: Although it may seem unnecessary given the very visible nature of the aardvark’s primary habitation, cryptic fecal covering is a behavior of great significance. As feces are one of the few temporal and spatial locators of an individual, it is logical for the aardvark to minimize evidence of its presence as a survival mechanism.

References: Alden, Peter C., Estes, Richard D., Schlitter, Duane, McBride, Bunny. 1995. National Audubon Society Field Guide to African Wildlife. pp. 523-524, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

Kingdon, Jonathan. 1997. The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals. pp. 294-295, A&C Black, London.

Shoshani, Jeheskel, Goldman, Corey A., Thewissen, J.G.M.. 1988, January. Orycteropus after. Mammalian Species, No. 300, 1-8.

Stuart, Chris and Stuart Tilde. 1994. A Field Guide to the Tracks& Signs of Southern and East African Wildlife. pp. 154, 194-195, 244, Southern Book Publishers, Cape Town.