I'm home!

After being awake for most of 48 hours, I got home last night. It was such a good trip, and I have so much that I want to share with everyone. I took my disposable cameras in to be developed this morning, and I'll work on getting pictures edited, labeled, and uploaded as soon as possible. I'll also be getting excerpts from my expedition journal posted to the blog over the next few days. For now, I just want to say that this was an amazing trip and get a couple of little tidbits of information up here for you.

I know that Elizabeth H. posted a couple of questions for me the other day (thanks!). I'll write more about the wedding when I get my journal excerpts posted, but I think the bride and groom were both in their 20s. I was told that they met at university in Nairobi, and men in Samburu culture can't marry until after they serve their time as murrans (warriors), which usually takes about 14 years. The bride was fairly old for a Samburu bride; I was told that girls can legally marry at the age of 14 with parental consent, and many Samburu girls do marry that young (if not younger...the Samburu district is so far removed from the rest of the country and the lifestyle is nomadic, so it is often hard for national laws to be enforced).

As for the animals I saw, here's the list. There are bird species that I don't know the names of (although we tried to identify a lot of them), but I'll try to make sure I have all the mammals listed!

• Grevy's and common zebras
• Ostrich
• Kirk's dikdik
• Kori bustard
• black-bellied bustard
• Hornbill
• Vulturine guinea fowl
• Baboon
• Rock hyrax
• Vervet monkey
• Gerenuk
• Klipspringer
• Rabbit
• Impala
• Mongoose (I'm not entirely sure about this one; we saw something that looked new, and Sam, the principal investigator on the Carnivore project, said it was a mongoose, but I didn't get a good enough look at it. If it was a mongoose, my guess is that it was a dwarf mongoose.)
• Yellow-necked spurfowl
• Waterbuck
• Lion
• Grant's gazelle
• Malachite kingfisher
• Warthog
• Elephant
• African fishing eagle
• Greater and lesser kudu
• Reticulated and Maasai giraffe
• Beisa oryx
• Bush buck
• African buffalo (Only at a difference, unfortunately; both my friend Pete and I forgot our binoculars when we went to Nairobi National Park.)
• Kongoni (also called hartebeast)
• Eland
• Black eagle
• Black rhino
• Monitor lizard
• Go-away bird
• Starlings (I forgot to write down the actual species name, but they were really beautiful turquoise and yellow birds.)
• Livestock: cows, camels, goats, sheep, donkeys

Not a bad list! Some of those animals we saw more than others, of course. It didn't take long for us to get sick of dikdiks...they were everywhere in Samburu! On the days that we had to count and record every animal we saw, we really came to hate dikdiks because we had to count so many of them when we really wanted to see more exotic animals. It got to the point where, on the way to the Samburu Reserve early one morning, my friend Jordana asked, "Does anyone speak dikdik? Maybe they know where the elephants are." We REALLY wanted to see elephants at that point; we'd spent days seeing lots of evidence of them without seeing the actual animals, and we wanted to see more of an elephant than just its dung.

The other thing I want to post now, just to give you a taste of what the trip was like, is my "Things I Learned in Kenya" list. I wrote this over the past couple of days, starting on my last day in Nairobi when a friend and I had finished our sightseeing and were hanging out by the hotel pool until we had to get on the plane. The list is long, but I think it has a good selection of the cool, interesting, and sometimes bizarre things I learned. The items are in no particular order, and are based on observations and conversations with Kenyans. All the information is as accurate as I could get based on those conversations and my memory, but I do apologize if there are any mistakes in the information.

1) Never wear touristy Kenyan t-shirts to open-air markets unless you want to be harrassed. (You'll be harrassed anyway, but the t-shirt just adds to the level of harassment!)

2) Elephants are really dangerous and people are very much afraid of them.

3) African buffaloes are even more dangerous than elephants when they charge, because unlike an elephant, they don't ever try to just fake you out, and they will even stalk you.

4) According to the Samburu, lions will only attack murrans (warriors), not women or children.

5) There comes a point where you just stop caring about walking through dung because it's everywhere.

6) You can't escape dung in a manyatta. (Samburu homestead)

7) Elephant dung is really big, as are elephant footprints.

8) The Samburu don't generally bury their dead, but instead leave them out to be eaten by scavengers. When someone at a manyatta is dying, they are left outside the manyatta to die, and the rest of the people living there move. (In Wamba, the staff of the mission hospital drive around the district a couple of days a week looking for people who may have been left for dead but are actually still alive; they bring them to the hospital to try to help when possible.) Anyone with the same name as the deceased person changes their name. If someone dies at the hospital, the family rarely comes back to collect the body.

9) The biggest diseases (at least in terms of causes of death) are TB and HIV, with animal attacks and childbirth being other leading causes of death. HIV is spreading rapidly, probably help by the polygamous practices of the Samburu.

10) Samburu women have very few rights. Men will have the most say over the lives of the women in their families.

11) For a month after circumcision (which occurs for all boys in an age set--there is a new age set about every 14 years--at one time, so there is no standard time for the ceremony), newly circumcised boys wear black and kill birds to stuff and wear on their heads. The birds are supposed to scare off girls, but they also try to kill a lot of birds in order to impress girls. It is believed that these young men will turn into baboons if they are not inside their manyattas before sundown. After about a month, these men will kill a cow or a goat, give a special piece of meat to their mothers to symbolize that their mothers no longer need to feed them, and they become murrans.

12) There are certain smells that seem to be everywhere in Africa, at least based on my experiences in Kenya and Madagascar.

13) Roads in Samburu are REALLY bumpy.

14) Always bring binoculars when attempting to view wild animals.

15) Classic American light rock/easy listening (with an emphasis on the 80s) seems to be the preferred soundtrack for safari/taxi drivers. Our driver in Samburu frequently had it on (prompting one friend to take a "Michael Jackson break" from studying my Swahili guidebook one day), as did the driver who took me and Pete to Nairobi National Park. With the latter, we heard George Michael, ABBA, "Lady in Red," and "Sometimes the Snow Comes Down in June," to name a few. Really a little odd when you're looking for rhinos and lions.

16) Language lessons:

• Hello in Kiswahili is jambo, in Kisamburu it is supa.
• Goodbye in Kiswahili is kwaheri, in Kisamburu is lessere.
• Twiga = giraffe
• Simba = lion
• Punda = donkey
• ndovo = elephant
• sowa = OK
• tayari = ready
• twende = let's go
• kuja = come
• pole = sorry
• pole pole = slowly
• ngombe = cow
• ngamia = camel
• ambuzi = goat
• habari = How are you?
• asante = thank you
• asante sana = thank you very much
• karibu = you're welcome

17) Birth defects are not uncommon due to home births in the manyattas attended by unqualified "traditional birth attendants." The hospital in Wamba has a special ward for Samburu children abandoned by their parents for such reasons.

18) Buying beads from someone with whom you have a personal connection means so much more than buying them in store or big market.

19) Hyena scat is white (because they eat the bones of animals they feed on and the scat is therefore high calcium) and sometimes looks like styrofoam balls. Lion scat is so high in protein that other predators will eat it. The leopard scat I saw was very hairy.

20) Elephants will strip away the bark from branches because it is the most nutritious part, and they'll leave the rest behind once they've gotten out all the moisture.

21) Adult giraffes can eat about 75 pounds (or more!) of food a day...unless I've mixed that up and it's 75kg, but I think I'm right. Baby giraffes are 5 feet tall at birth.

22) Giraffe saliva is really slimy when they eat out of your hand. They have really long, very flexible tongues.

23) Samburu men wear skirt-like clothes called (in Swahili, anyway) shukas. They're very comfortable!

24) If you're being chased by an elephant, throw a piece of clothing in one direction (in the elephant's path) and run in the other. In theory, the elephant will attack your clothing because it has your scent, and you'll be able to get away.

25) If you're attacked by a buffalo, lie flat and try to get a stick up its nostril to kill it.

26) If you need to shoot an elephant, shoot it in the ear. The skull has big holes one the sides there.

27) Elephants have very sensitive trunks, so if worse comes to worse, pinch the trunk!

28) If a bull elephant is traveling with a herd, it will usually be a ways behind the rest of the elephants. Make sure you don't get stuck between the herd and the bull!

29) They Kenyan government burned 60 million shillings worth of ivory tusks in 1989 as a protest against poaching of elephants and the illegal ivory trade. The tusks burned after being doused with gasoline, and the ashes can still be found at a monument in Nairobi National Park.

30) Dikdiks almost always travel in pairs (a male & a female), but sometimes an offspring will be with them too.

31) A mixed herd of sheep and goats can be referred to as "shoats" for note-taking purposes on Samburu CRI projects. When in doubt, call them shoats! The way to tell goats and sheep apart (harder than it sounds because Kenyan sheep are not fluffy and wooly like American sheep) is that the ears and tails of sheep always point down, while goat tails always go up and their ears are up or our to the sides.

32) The big Samburu necklaces (collars) are really heavy and hard to put on. Women actually sleep in them.

33) Solid color necklaces (red, from what I saw) are "at home" decoration, while the more colorful collars and strands are added for leaving the manyatta.

34) "African time" moves much more slowly than American time.

35) Camel and ostrich are pretty tasty, but crocodile is a bit disgusting.

36) Hyenas are more likely than other predators to make off with a goat from inside a boma.

37) Murrans can have girlfriends, but they'd better not get them pregnant. If they get a girl pregnant, they may even be killed by other murrans, or at the very least they will have to pay a fine to the girl's father if they don't marry.

38) Samburu women are circumcised (also referred to as female genital mutilation because this practice is considered barbaric and unacceptable to a lot of the world) the day before their wedding or at the age of 30, whichever comes first. A woman cannot have a child in Samburu culture until she is circumcised.

39) A Samburu woman's hair is shaved and her clothes given away before her marriage because she cannot bring anything old to her new life.

40) Sons must marry according to age/birth order. If a man marries before his older brother, he must give that brother 2 cows and he cannot live in the family manyatta with his wife until the older brother marries.

41) Dowries are negotiated between the bride's parents, the groom, and the groom's family before a wedding. In at least one Kenyan ethnic group/tribe, the bride is not actually allowed to know what dowry was paid for her. Even in tribes that pay dowries in cash money, the contacts are still written in terms of livestock.

42) Goats are an acceptable wedding gift when attending a Samburu wedding.

43) Sandals made from old tires are cheap (100 shillings, or about $1.50) and do not wear out for a very long time. I was told that mine come with a 10-year warranty.

44) To make one of the really elaborate bead collars/necklaces so that a daughter can attract a husband (girls with very few beads are not considered attractive), a mother can pay as much as 7500 shillings for the beads (in other words, the price of one cow or about $100).

45) All Kenyan children are supposed to attend school, but the law is not always enforced. Samburu families also keep their children home to herd livestock, etc. instead of sending them to school. Girls also leave school after they are married, so that many do not finish primary school. The national government has a hard time enforcing the law because Samburu is so remote.

46) Educated Kenyans generally speak 3 languages: their native tongue, Swahili, and English. They'll often switch back and forth between the 3 in the same conversation without realizing it.

OK, I guess that's enough for today! Pictures and more information are coming soon, I promise!