Deep Sky Productions

South Africa (Johannesburg) – Reality

2008-10-04T01:22:00.016-07:00

“So Frank, what are you returning home with from Africa?” Tineke asked. Her and husband, Tom, moved from the Netherlands years ago and in addition to retirement activities, they also tenant a guesthouse for accommodation.

I sliced a piece of egg white, pierced it with my fork, but paused before lifting it off the plate. “A lot of things, outside a few material possessions.” I sank into the kitchen chair. “Last night, I kind of reviewed the last seven weeks traveling through Africa. I find it difficult to imagine that I’m returning home; I’m not even sure I want to go home, but I miss a lot of people.” Answering the question, “Certainly, I’ve learned a lot and been to places I’ve only dreamed about visiting. There’s a also the appreciation value as well.”
“You know, Africa is like AIDS,” Tineke linked together. Not sure if I liked that comparison, though. “It lives with you for the rest of your life. Africa will always be a part of you.”
That is very true.

Alan, lead researcher for the Arbovirus division, and I arrived to NICD to find the power off in the Special Pathogen Unit (SPU) offices. Running blackouts are not uncommon in Johannesburg, but today’s outage was due to someone stealing the power cable outside the institute.

“Someone stole the power cable?” I asked amused by the concept.

“It’s not the first time this has happened,” Alan explained. “People steal the cables to resell the copper. It’s quite a problem. They’ll take a truck and rip the cable from the ground.” Backup generators provide power to computer systems and prevent key areas like the BSL4 lab from going down.

Under bright fluorescents and leading into the closed-door BSL4 lab, Bob and I were welcomed into the office for the Head of Special Pathogens, a position once held by Dr. Swanepoel, but passed forward after reaching retirement age. I sat against a corner behind a small round table and poured milk into the coffee graciously brought by Janusz’s secretary. I leaned forward over the mug and introduced myself and project—a monologue I delivered by that point with plenty practice.After much agreement and topic reinforcement, Janusz added, “Aside for maybe next year, you might be back here in a few weeks.”
Bob’s attention was piqued. “Something happening?”

“A guy died three weeks ago mysteriously, and now a paramedic servicing him has also died. Blood samples from the medic are on their way.”
Lucile, a woman highly respected for her work with hemorrhagic patients entered the office. The three talked over details; I leaned onto the seatback and listened. This is how the process of research, mobilization, and control begin: First a case mystery, agency notification, and then old-fashioned detective work.
“The key to identifying any disease is through determining an exact case history,” Bob strongly instructed me, his South African accented voice rising with commanding purpose deeply punching each word. “Before anything is done, the epidemiologists must get an exact history on the patient. How many days from contact? What are the symptoms and when? Who and where has this patient been?” Different pathogens incubate (the time between contact and symptoms) in a host at different lengths of time with varying onset symptoms. Many false alarms can be avoided if doctors can get a correct history from the patient.

Returning to the SPU/Arbovirus offices, Bob added, “And that’s how things happen, but more often than not it’s chasing at nothing or some coincidence, but we have to treat it seriously.” A lot of money and resources are spent investigating potential special pathogen cases, which is why a good report is necessary. “Of three thousand leads, maybe ten go somewhere.”
With grid power back online, Alan walked me across the brick building campus to one of the smaller structures on the lot; the block path leading in cut by an unmarked meter-wide trench to piping deep below. Through the tinted glass entrance and maze-like corridors, we stepped into a room dominated by a space-filling cage, housing dozens of bats huddled together in a tight roost. On the floor are a couple round trays of water and nicely diced assorted fruits.

“So, they’ve been tested for rabies, Marburg, etc., right?” I semi-jokingly asked Alan, both of us ducking into the nest.
“A lot of them are second generation born here. So, yes, they’re clean. And they have to be for control purposes.”
Once the BSL4 lab is operational again, the bats will be used for Marburg and Ebola studies including transmission means from bat to animal and human. Is the virus transmitted via direct contact, birthing, guano, or some other means?

Inside, the bats became agitated by our presence and several leapt from their perch and flapped to any corner of the cage. A small drop of urine splattered on my arm.
“Hmmm, that’s nice.”
“They’ll do that when nervous, especially jumping into flight.”I stood still and watched one on the floor scale the linked rod cage wall to his mates above, its long reaching caped arms and stubby feet reminding me of a skilled rock climber with his stro

ng body agility.
“Can I hold one?”
“Sure.” Alan gathered a box and covered one in flight. With a thick rag, he covered the bat and flipped it upside down into the cradle of his palm. “This one is a female and she’s pregnant. Probably why she’s very hostile”Obviously unhappy, she reared her canine like teeth and jaw, struggling for freedom. Alan gripped the bat’s feet and allowed her to hang naturally. After a moment, she flew off into the mass gathering.
“It’s interesting, even though they’re away from any predators and when no one’s around, they still jockey for space on top of each other, scratching and cutting each other.”
I looked at one motionless female, her baby clinging to her underside, staring at me with huge black eyes. “This one hasn’t moved at all.”
Alan looked around her to notice a male mounted behind. “That’s because they’re copulating.” It’s an Animal Channel soap opera in the making.

Early into the evening now, I sat at Dr. Swanepoel’s desk reading into the first chapter of his memoirs, the tiny headset speakers for an iPod Nano blasting character music in my ears. Like the couple other virus hunter books available, his story epitomized the excitement surrounding the events leading up to an outbreak. In this case, an Ebola case in Johannesburg amidst an outbreak of Crimean-Congo Fever, another viral hemorrhagic fever. But I couldn’t help draw an ironic parallel with what was going on behind me.
On the phone with CDC-Atlanta’s top special pathogen brass, Bob elaborated on the details pertaining to the case discussed that morning, however intensified. Now there were potentially five suspected related cases included two fatalities. Illustrating his point to me earlier, Bob ripped into the epidemiologists for not getting exacting facts. Within the few hours transpired, PCR tests had not confirmed the existence of Ebola, Marburg or any other known tropical disease, but more testing was in the works. Symptoms suggested a contagion like Lassa or a Hantavirus, but the incubation times were much too short, even for a filovirus like Ebola and Marburg, on the order of a couple days—as described by the epidemiologist already in the field.
Lucile entered the office and discussed flying to the location a couple countries north of South Africa the next day. Bob expressed hesitancy knowing though he would return to the office later that night after shuttling me to the airport to follow-up on lab results.
“Should I cancel my flight?” I asked. In fact, I had already spoken to Tyler Batson from the Kenya documentary inquiring about making a flight change through his travel agent just in case.
“Frank, like I said, the reality is, this is most likely nothing. This is our bread and butter. We deal with things like this on a regular basis.”
“And the PCR tests confirmed negative for Ebola and Marburg,” I reconfirmed. “And if it were a new strain?”
“If it were a new strain, we wouldn’t be able to detect it.”
A PCR test, short for polymerase chain reaction, detects viral nucleic acids and tests them against a database of known genetic sequences.
“So, like what happened in Bundibugyo,” I identified.
“Yes, exactly. And the only way you can tell it’s a new strain is by isolating the virus through an electron microscope and looking at its shape.” In the case of a filovirus, a cigar shaped moderately large structure sometimes curled at one end like a Shepard’s crook.
“Look, you can do whatever you want, Frank, but I’m telling you we see this stuff all the time.”
Less than eight hours before departure, and according to Tyler, I need to make a decision real soon… like now. I have a tendency to draw patterns as if there’s some mystical significance behind what goes on in my life. That “A Chance for Peace” would bring me to Africa when the opportunity to capitalize on this project—a project I’ve waited over ten years to produce—would conveniently occur at the same time. That almost everything to this moment has seemingly fallen into place with gentle effort. And now, reading in a memoir the exact events transpiring right now as they did almost two decades ago on my last day in Africa. (I know that’s a stretch.)
Earlier the day before, Bob and I discussed previous journalists tagging along in the field. During the Kikwit outbreak of ’95, one went on to follow a lead that claimed having seen patients prior to the suspected index case. Apart for Bob redefining ‘index case’ as pertaining to the first case bringing attention to an epidemic and not ‘patient zero’, he defended, “People can believe what they want to believe, but this is our job and we’re not going to let something fall through the cracks for whatever reason. What makes a journalist think he can do our job better?” After all, they are the pros, and for that reason…
The reality was, I chose against my instincts and would board the KLM flight 23:30 that night; the action of not staying a haunting thought. I would have to wait until I got home, twenty-four hours later, perhaps even a couple days before knowing if my decision to leave was amiss.

South Africa (Johannesburg) – BSL4

2008-10-04T01:19:00.005-07:00

A gray haired man treads his way through tall blades of grass and brush into a forest of tall bare-trunk trees with bushy leafed tops. A local man scales a single stock of bamboo, its branches trimmed into ladder rungs to a height exceeding thirty feet. From his high vantage point, he connects one end of a net to an adjacent tree forming a near invisible barrier in the forest canopy. Here bats are caught and taken into a mobile lab for bleeding and dissection, stored in liquid nitrogen for later analysis. The process is repeated for other animals and insects alike. The year is 1996 outside the then Zairian village of Kikwit a month following one of the most historically devastating Ebola outbreaks.
In a lab-office at the Special Pathogens Unit of the National Institute of Communicable Diseases, three of us stood around my laptop watching Final Cut Pro ingest footage from a mini-DV tape recorder. One of many investigative studies filmed over the last ten plus years in search of a reservoir for the Ebola virus.
“I was old then doing that,” Dr. Swanepoel commented watching himself wrangle a bat.
“If you were old then doing that, what did you do when you were young?” I asked smartly.
Bob grinned under his large tinted wire frame glasses, “I was doing as many girls as I could.” We laughed.
At 72 years, Dr. Robert Swanepoel is as sharp, witty and energetic as someone in his middle ages, or perhaps younger. That was the idea those who’ve before spent time with him impressed upon me. He did not disappoint.
I sat behind Bob in his office sipping a Singapore knockoff of Nescafé, which for an instant coffee was surprisingly good. I was on my second cup. Bob scrolled through pictures from previous outbreaks and field investigations and painted a deeper story to the virus with each instance.
“So why has it taken so long to isolate the virus?” I asked.
“Timing.” On a used sheet of paper, Bob drew two circles, one within the other representing the basic structure of a cell. He labeled the inside circle ‘nucleus’ and its surrounding space ‘cytoplasm’, noting each one as headquarters and factory respectively. “If this were Henry Ford’s assembly line, the headquarters sends out a blueprint to the factory in the form of messenger-RNA, or we call it mRNA. The factory assembles many spare parts, but inefficiently produces more than it needs.”
He dotted the cell’s interior and continued, “Windscreens, tires, steering wheels—nucleic acids to build proteins for a virus.” A third circle was drawn on the cell’s outside and labeled virus. Again more dots. “So of all those parts, you get a few viruses with all these spares. We were always seeing the parts, but never the whole virus because we weren’t catching it at the right time of production.” Bob went on into more detail, involving the factors involved with determining the ‘right’ time and the tests used.
I asked Bob about Kitum cave.
“The Dutch schoolboy’s family lived on the Kenya side; he went in on the Kenyan side.”

The next day following lunch, Bob led me to a tall brown speared fence. Inside the fence is a three story isolated brick building, two large stainless steal vents piped into the walls.
“This is our maximum security lab,” Bob explained. “There are only two like this in the world. Here and at the CDC.”
There are more labs like it sprouting up throughout the world, but this lab was the second to be built a year after the Centers for Disease Control constructed the first high containment lab in 1978. “I am going to take you inside, but I cannot take you onto the floor. We are under surveillance now being close to operational again.”
The lab is under the process of being remodeled, and after four years in the process should open again by the end of the year. We crossed through a narrow opening through the gate and entered from the back of the lab. Beside a bright red biohazard flower emblem in small letters, a sign read: BSL4; for Bio-Safety Level 4, also known as a ‘P4’ or ‘Hot Lab’. Within these walls, the most infectious diseases known to man including at the top of the list Ebola and Marburg are grown and studied. Bob swiped his card key, the red LED light turned green, and he opened the door. The heightened risk of bio-terrorism has made such facilities a security fortress, and as of right now, I do not have clearance to photograph or film anything.
In contrast to many of the other hallways I’ve walked through at NICD, the paths skirting the outside of the lab proper breathe a sterile slick laboratory atmosphere of expansive white walls, pipes and polished steel. We passed a series of narrow windows looking in at glove box workstations, tables and storage closets and cabinets. Hanging from the ceiling, a number of yellow hoses.
“Those hoses are what you connect to your suit for air-intake for your suit,” he walked past a couple steal boxes marked, ‘Autoclave’. “Here you can put something in and close the door for someone to access from the other side with out it being incinerated, but anything put in from the lab is automatically autoclaved.”
Down another corridor, and through a series of open airlocks, we could look onto the lab floor and through to a locker storing yellow spacesuits. The lab directly in front of us is labeled, ‘Animal Room 2’. On one wall are a dozen cages for small animals including rats up to perhaps guinea pigs. Between this room and another lab leading to the suit room is a double heavy door airlock. The space between those two doors acts as an intermediate shower room decontaminating an individual crossing one area into another.
The decontamination and undressing procedure is a cumbersome and timely process. Coffee is not recommended, as bathroom breaks require exiting the lab. Wearing a diaper is a touchy subject and is useful for long stints inside the suit. From what I gather, people do not freely admit to wearing a diaper even if they do so.
The hair on my arms stood and I couldn’t help stop smiling excitedly. “You know Bob, to me this is an equivalent to visiting the space shuttle.” And going inside would be equivalent to going into space—or close to in my book.
“The engineering and control for this lab is on par with the space shuttle, monitoring everything to prevent contamination. There is a lot of money built into here,” Bob added.
In contrast, my visit to the developing Ugandan Virus Research Institute (UVRI) a week earlier in Entebbe illustrates the use of a barebones operation. Primarily built for HIV research and immunology, the limited BSL3 laboratory is authorized to handle viruses like Ebola with very specific restriction. The CDC, through the introduction of the BSL3 lab, is fostering a long-term relationship with the Ugandan government to establish a foothold in east Africa for VHF (Viral Hemorrhagic Fever) testing.

South Africa (Phinda) – Vacation

2008-10-04T01:09:00.023-07:00

When I return to the States, I will face what I’ve come to recognize as reverse culture shock, and oddly, that reverse culture shock is greater than the culture shock from arriving on the continent. I do not quite understand the difference except something about returning to a common routine is… well, shocking when everyday is literally a radical experience.
So when I got off the South African Airways flight from Entebbe, Uganda and walked into the main terminal at Johannesburg International Airport, my mind wasn’t prepared for an appetizer to western culture.
Suddenly I’m not in minority, but that seems alien to me. Technology is everywhere and I feel like sitting down to absorb everything. I was told the drive to Phinda Game Reserve is a rough road, but subtract driving manual from the literal right side of the vehicle on the proverbial wrong side of the road, a speeding ticket halfway out to the South African ‘bush’, and trucks making half the designated speed on a one-lane highway, the handful of potholes and windy roads are a Sunday pleasant drive compared to where I came from. Even the eight-hour haul from Jo-burg airport to the game lodge felt like a regular commute to work, minus the persistent freaking out about stalling into 1st gear (seldom happened, in fact, but I think the gear box will need some work).
Roughly 10 kilometers of grated dirt road through darkness, past warthogs and zebra brought me to Phinda Mountain Lodge. I was warmly greeted by the pleasant and confident smile of host-manager, Karen, then directed to my cottage for a brief freshen-up before riding into the reserve for a bush dinner.
Room 21: the bathroom is four times bigger than the thatched roof hut I slept under in Transmara with an indoor and outdoor private shower and stand-alone bathtub. I guess it’s like taking a hand-bath with running hot water. Brilliant!
A soft knock at the door.“Hullo, sir. Are you ready for me to take you to dinner?”
At night, all guests must be escorted on the property in the event a lion or some other ‘Big 5’ animal wanders into the lodge premises. Later, when I would actually ‘camp out’ on the reserve, I wouldn’t have that protection.
“What would you like to see tomorrow, Frank?” Ian, my arranged group’s park guide asked at the dinner table. Two couples, one from the UK and the other from South Africa sat across from each other. I was seated at the head of the table across from Ian.
“I’ve seen pretty much all of the ‘Big 5’ animals, except I would like to see a cheetah.” The ‘Big 5’ include: lion, elephant, leopard, rhino and buffalo; not based on tourist appeal—I had thought giraffe was on that list—but based on the most dangerous animals to hunt back in the day. I can understand the first four, but asking how buffalo made the list, the answer I received summed up explained that a wounded buffalo is extremely vicious. Meaning, if hunting a buffalo, best you kill it on the first shot.
“We haven’t seen cheetah in a while, but that’ll be something to work towards tomorrow morning,” Ian offered.
Although I slept comfortably in Room 21’s pillow queen bed, I couldn’t shake off the awkwardness of sleeping in luxury.

At lunch that afternoon, I met with Ilze, former general manager of the Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge (refer to the first four Namibia blog entries). Ilze and Bryan had moved to Phinda after a short stint at SML, and now conduct training for new rangers into the CC Africa organization (they are undergoing a name change as their lodge expands into India and South America).
“Bryan has a tough life here,” Ilze joked. “He travels to Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia to train rangers and look at wildlife.”
I laughed, “I get the same thing. It’s like a vacation, only I’m operating a camera and working pretty much every day. Admittedly, I can’t imagine myself doing anything different though, but today is the first day in, I don’t know, weeks I haven’t done anything regarding ‘work’.” I lied. Later, on the afternoon game drive, I would bring out the camera even though I said I wouldn’t.
“I’m in a bit of a shock, Ilze.” I took a taste of my drink cocktail. “Not only am I in a bit of a shock, but I guess I’m really sensitive to snob bullshit right now—pardon my language.”
“Oh, tell me. I must hear this.”
“For one, this morning on the game drive we’re following this cheetah and her three cubs and from the looks of things she’s on the hunt for food. I want to see a kill, and this would be just awesome if we could catch something like that, you know. So we loose track of the cheetahs ‘cause the stupid cubs go off chasing some zebra and disappear behind the trees. Ian suggests we look for a little longer than go back to the lodge for breakfast if that’s all right with everyone. Well, everyone’s all for getting some food, and I’m like, ‘What? Screw breakfast. I want to see a kill!” Of course, I just thought that and didn’t say anything given I’m not really a guest. But seriously, it’s not like you can witness a kill anytime.”
Ilze agreed.
“Then all I hear is moaning and bitching at breakfast about the water being shut off. So go wash your hands in the pool or use the bottled water so nicely left for you. C’mon, this is Africa. T.I.A. Be resourceful. I understand they paid hundreds of dollars to stay here, but you’re in the middle of the f-ing bush and shit happens.” I took another taste of my cocktail. “Guess I just see things a little differently now is all.”

Not that I didn’t enjoy being pampered the first two nights, but the real fun was ‘camping’ out with the guide trainees a few kilometers outside the lodge overlooking the reserve’s flood plain.

‘Camping’ is in quotes because there is running hot water and modern amenities on generator power switched on for a couple hours at night. So not quite roughing it, but living with restrictions. I felt more at home and certainly the company of the trainees made for a fun experience through their practical joking.
My job was to present an applicable introduction to naked eye astronomy for the purposes of entertaining guests during night drives. The night was overcast, so the trainees had to endure a two hour lecture in the conference hall. Drawing from my experience at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge, as well as a night drive the day before I condensed Astronomy 101 into a dramatic narrative of human insignificance through bright object examples. As with all astronomy lectures, the green laser pointer became the instant star of the presentation.

You know how cats are captivated by a laser dot? How do you think a lion would react to it?” I half-jokingly inquired.

“Hmmm. I don’t know. It would be interesting to try.” Bryan offered.
“I asked Ian that same question on the evening drive yesterday when we were parked beside a lioness and her four cubs, but he suggested trying it when no guests were around.”
A good idea, but unfortunately the experiment will have to wait for my next visit. After my last experience with lions (Namibia – The First), I’ve since evolved like modern man has from throwing rocks to shooting laser beams.

Uganda – Bundibugyo: Part Two

2008-10-04T00:27:00.024-07:00

Accepting a stranger with a camera into your home must have been awkward to say the least for the Myhre family. Who is this guy? What does he want? And awkward doesn’t begin to describe what emotions surface reliving a difficult past.
Arriving with the Chedester family, I was welcomed to a weekly team meeting dinner party. Today’s menu: brick-oven roasted pizza, plain cheese to supreme and everything in between. Not that I dislike east African cuisine, in fact I very much enjoy the native dishes, especially the charcoal barbequed bush meet speared and sold on the street. From the bus window, I would spend the thousand Ugandan Shillings (~.65 cents USD) for two long toothpick-like skewers knowing very well my digestive track would hate me for it that night and day after. But a change in menu is very appetizing, especially a taste from home. Odd I would find it here far removed from anything near western civilization, and better tasting than most pies back at home. After a brief astronomy lesson navigating around tree canopies, followed by an episode of Band of Brothers on DVD, Scott and I sat across from each other in the family living room and talked about Ebola. I looked at my arms; the skin looked like a few dozen mosquitoes had bitten me. The pink blotches in fact were bukukuni bites, a gnat-like fly with a taste for human skin. Bob had warned me earlier about wearing a long sleeve shirt at night, and that in conjunction with not taking his advice about getting on an empty bus because it won’t be leaving anytime soon (that morning, resulting in a three hour departure wait), were now two things I should have listened to.
“Don’t say too much, you’ll end up repeating it,” Jennifer suggested from the kitchen, switching off the lights. Jack, Julia and Caleb, three of the Myhre’s four kids had already retired on the school night. The next day would be a whirlwind event at the school celebrating Parents Day, which in addition to their respective doctor roles at two different local institutions, both Scott and Jennifer are heavily involved with the school’s development.
“I, Dr. Sessanga, and Dr. Jonah were in the room together looking over Jeremiah Muhindo’s chest x-ray trying to figure out what was causing the illness, this was before knowing it was Ebola,” Scott recounted the days just before the announcement. “He was having shortness of breath, his eyes were real red, and I remember putting my hand on his hand to check his pulse. His hands were just cold as ice; the man was in shock. We all came in contact with the patient. In a way, it’s not fair two of the three of us would get Ebola, and one of us would die.” “Were you afraid?”

“After Jonah got sick and Sessanga gets sick, then Ebola is confirmed … I was afraid. It was right at that point we decided we had both been exposed because of our visit to Kikyo and having been in contact with a number of patients that had died, we had twenty-one days to determine if we were developing symptoms or not and decided we needed to send our kids away from us. If we got sick, we didn’t want to expose them.”

“What were you going through those twenty-one days?” I feel like the answers to my questions are obvious, but I needed to ask. Scott and later Jennifer were pros; going beyond what I thought was an obvious response.
“You’re super-sensitive. After Jonah was buried, I was sitting at church and had a headache. I don’t usually get headaches. I leaned over to Jennifer and said, ‘I just don’t feel well,’ and she said, ‘Well go home and go to bed.” There was a knowing exchange of looks that this… and I laid down and I thought, ‘Well, this could be it.’ And I told her, if I really felt like I was sick, I was going to go across the street to a vacant missionary house and lock myself in there, because I wasn’t going to have her take care of me and expose herself and leave our kids as orphans. Nothing ever came of that, but I talked to an MSF worker [Doctors Without Borders] and she said that, ‘Typically if you do come down with Ebola this late after contact, you’ll get sick, but probably not die of it.’”

The following morning, Scott drove me the thirty minutes to Bundibugyo hospital. We stopped

at the gravesites of the four healthcare workers, including Dr. Jonah Kule, whom died caring for Ebola patients during the outbreak.
“Not many people came to Jonah’s burial in fear of getting Ebola. Afraid they might get Ebola from the air, or from the bodies. It doesn’t help to see the MSF burial team, dressed in their Tyvex spacesuits disinfecting the bodies sealed in bags then dropping the coffins into their graves,” Scott quietly explained before he and I walked across the medical campus. Men and women of all ages loitered through the open covered pathways. Some women waited outside the x-ray building for an ultrasound. Some just sat on the sidewalk ends looking at the many people passing by. Through the antenatal ward where the Ebola infected healthcare workers we treated, an education workshop was underway. Nurses sifted through disorganized books and records; I honestly couldn’t guess what was going on. Over a shallow hill of drying grass took us to a chain link fence enclosing the isolation ward.

We walked around the two-car garage-sized building to an unlocked door. I walked inside.
Sunlight seeped through a gap where the wall would meet the floor, and from the middle seam between blue painted wooden window panels. Eight bed frames, four on each side are planted on the grey polished cement floor, their white latex coatings peeling from its metal bars. I visualized the beds made and occupied. A suited individual examines one patient through his plastic helmet mask and thick blue gloves, checking the still individual’s pulse and examining his eyes.

“I was partially conscious, but not alert to all my senses,” one Ebola survivor told me. “I would not be able to drink. I would not be able to turn my body. I would sleep like that until someone could assist me. The thinking was not so easy. You could think of either surviving or death. And you just hand everything to God to decide on your fate.”
I then pictured myself inside one of those Tyvex suits and contending with the heat and humidity compounded underneath the protective garment. Leaving the isolation ward, I further imagined drenching myself with a concentrated bleach solution in one of the many white tents established by the MSF team, sealing the suit in a biohazard bag before redressing into my clothes and allowing the thickness of the air become a sad refreshing relief.

“You. What are you filming? What are you doing here?” a burly man in a suit approached me mounting the back of a motorcycle, the camera gripped tightly by my left hand over my lap.
Denato spoke to him, but the man ignored whatever was said stepping over banana bundles charging forward. People in the market stopped in mid-commerce to witness the exchange. In particular, I recall one older woman holding a food item frozen in transaction.
Being the only mzungu around draws enough attention, regardless of the few white families residing on the outskirts of town. But a mzungu with a camera rivaling anything the country begs special attention whether by lens happy children or protective elders.
“I ask you, why are you here?” The man stood dangerously close. I looked to Denato; no more help there.
“I’m filming a documentary,” I calmly stated, knowing I’m not going anywhere unless I direct Denato to drive.
“What again?”
“A documentary on the Ebola outbreak here last year.”
“On Ebola?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. And almost immediately, his whole body relaxed and he said shaking my hand, “Oh, that is good. Thank you. Welcome. Be free, you are welcome here.”

Not quite the reaction I expected, but a welcome one. Denato, Scott’s assistant, revved the engine and I prepped the camera to film over the driver’s head while riding the uneven dirt road. Even after replaying the footage days later, I’m still shocked at myself for putting faith into a motor bike and its driver at the stake of breaking my camera—or injuring myself. I did regretfully pack the camera for the thirty-minute return drive back to the Myhre’s on a motor-boda. Over steep inclines and sharp drops, dodging people and potholes, the choice was probably a good idea, although the mountain and valley views were breathtaking.

In her blog, Jennifer drew a parallel between the Ebola and HIV viruses, “HIV attacks the disease-fighting cells of the body, so that a person succumbs to other illnesses. Few AIDS patients are technically killed by the HIV virus alone, almost all die from things like TB or fungi or common bacterial infections that can no longer be resisted. On a macro level, Ebola acts in a similar way. Ebola attacked the disease-fighting personnel and programs of this society. Only 37 people died of Ebola during the epidemic, but many more, untold numbers, have died because of the lack of medical services. I think we will never really know the true impact.”

*Pictures from the 2007 outbreak courtesy Scott and Jennifer Myhre.

Uganda – Bundibugyo: Part One

2008-09-26T13:47:00.013-07:00

Four brothers ascend into the Rwenzori Mountains, crossing orchards of cocoa trees, coffee and kasava to reach the untouched woodlands approaching national park land. The sky is most likely clouded over from their perspective, but through the cold mist, not much ahead is seen other than the dense forest at arm’s reach. Perhaps the monkey was already dead when they found it, or maybe out of hunger or pleasured desire they killed and then consumed the mammal together.
Each brother would tend to his lively duties as normal over the coming days visiting the local markets, socializing with neighbors, seeing to their crops, but after the second or third day, one of the brothers falls mildly ill with a headache and fever. Malaria, he may have thought. Maybe he had a blood smear done at Kikyo Health Unit and found evidence of the parasite, or maybe they simply prescribed the necessary drugs on a clinical diagnosis, but regardless of the treatment his symptoms progress with vomiting and diarrhea. His body is weakening, and by the disease’s fifth or sixth day, the brother’s eyes are turning red, his neck and body is stiff, and his kidneys, liver and respiratory functions are failing. A week has now passed and the one brother falls into sudden shock, maybe bleeds out then dies. The three other brothers follow.
The passing of a community member is followed-up by a series of funeral rites to bring closure to a person’s life. The body is washed and embraced by loved ones before carried then lowered into a grave outside the home. Here the virus is spread and over the next couple months a mystery illness rattles the local countryside.

ONE YEAR LATER…

The Kenya documentary brought me good reason to visit Uganda and South Africa. Proximity is one factor. A round-trip airline ticket is another; and serendipitously timed near perfect. Until a little more than a week before arriving in Kampala, I really had no solid plan for Uganda except I wanted to visit a cave and talk to people. For that reason, I allocated one week’s time in the country before hoping on a one-way flight to Johannesburg before returning to the States. In retrospect, I should have blindly planned for two weeks as I initially felt before the perceived absence anxiety set in.
Through my contact at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, I was initially provided with three leads to follow and a link to Scott and Jennifer Myhre’s blog, a pair of doctors living with their family in western Uganda. Through a snail’s paced Internet connection in Kericho, I downloaded and printed 67 pages of entries dating from the end of November last year to early this year chronicling a local’s perspective to the most recent Ebola outbreak in the remote town of Bundibugyo. Admittedly, I had difficulty sleeping one night in Transmara after reading up to the passage, “Grief and Fear”.
With only a couple days of preparation, I met Bob Chedester and family from the World Harvest organization in the city of Fort Portal. I was creating space in the aisle for departing passengers, when a mzungu got the attention of the driver who then directed me to get off the bus. By coincidence, Bob and family were planning to visit the Myhre family in Bundibugyo and offered a seat in their already packed Land Cruiser saving me the adventure of hitchhiking with my equipment and bags over a 100 kilometer stretch of narrow, non-maintained dirt road around and through the Rwenzori Mountains.
“Bundibugyo is about forty kilometers straight that way,” Bob pointed, “but there’s no way to go through the mountains so we have to go around. You could hike it though; it’ll take about six hours—at a good pace.”
Instead, I’ll settle for a three-hour rocking fest squeezed between my luggage in the SUV’s boot seated across three year-old Samuel. I said this before we started and I seriously meant it after, “This will make up for the four and half hour bus ride, and three and a half hours of waiting for the bus to depart, because I let myself be directed to the wrong departing bus.”
Almost immediately I picked up air off my seat and smashed my head on the ceiling.
“Watch your head,” Bob smiled through the rearview mirror.
“I’m used to it, that was number twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five?” Someone asked like I had already hit the ceiling that many times.
“Twenty-five times since arriving in Africa I’ve hit my head on low door frames, beams, rocks, whatever. I’m keeping track.”
“You’ll hit it a bunch more times on this road,” Bob assured me.

“I can’t wait.” The road snaked over what seemed like dozens of ridges in replace of switchbacks as we climbed to probably 8,000 feet.
“We have to stop at the lookout. It’s my favorite spot,” young Elizabeth claimed, one of nine passengers in the vehicle including Samuel and myself. The vehicle bounced.
“Twenty-six.” And bounced again. “Twenty-seven.” Everyone laughed. Glad I could provide comic relief.

From the lookout, a vast gully between mountains receded into the flat plains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Outside the Rwenzori National Park, the mountains resemble a quilt, as Elizabeth observed, of various crop plantations patching the landscape. It is believed by one tribe the land is more fertile on the mountain slopes. Either that, or people don’t want to admit location, location, location is everything and worth the insane effort it must require to haul material and food through the forest and up onto those slopes.

By thirty and thirty-one, we arrived at what must have been the most anticipated destination on the

entire drive, second only to our destination: the bridge. But not just any bridge, at maybe three cars’ length it is the flattest surface anywhere in the region.
The Land Cruiser shutters with bated anticipation then … silence. Everyone sighs a happy relief enjoying the moment of tranquility. Then, back to shuttering. This brought on a series of songs from “B-I-N-G-O” to “Ol’ McDonald”. In between travel ballads, my dialogue exchange didn’t quite go this way, but I’d like to remember it did:
“Can’t you sing some

thing with a little more pep to it?” I asked to no one in particular.
A pause. “It’s a small world after all…”
“No. No. Anything but that!” I cried. But in actuality, I prompted the song just so I could shoot it down quoting that last line.
Thirty-two.

OCTOBER 2007

Unlike traditional Ebola, this new unofficially titled Bundibugyo strain is weaker and partially asymptomatic killing roughly 30% of patients against a typical 70-90% mortality rate without the sensationalized “bleeding” from every orifice. These factors contributed to a prolonged identification and the much needed guidance of outside experienced organizations.

By late October, the mystery illness inspired the attention of Dr. Jonah Kule from nearby Bundibugyo hospital. The following is excerpted from Scott and Jennifer Myhre’s blog titled, “Grief and Fear” with an excerpt from “Bundibugyo, Where the Tears Never Run Dry”. The entry summarizes the events transpired at that time, text and pictures courtesy of the Myhres:

Jonah was a man of integrity. He refused to charge patients extra fees for his services, even though that is widely practiced in government hospitals. He was completely trustworthy with his responsibilities and resources. He was a leader who knew how to motivate, listen, draw consensus. He was not afraid.
Jonah first went to investigate this epidemic weeks ago; it was probably still October then. Rumors had reached him of a mystery illness. I remember well the day he came into the Pediatric Ward and told us about it. I gave him gloves and my bottle of alcohol hand gel, pitifully inadequate measures now. We had not heard of any bleeding, just vomiting and diarrhea and unusual deaths. We wondered if it was a cholera outbreak. I remember him slinging his backpack on, and getting on his motorcycle saying, “If I die, I die.”
When he came back he guessed typhoid fever, due to the prominent abdominal pain and even what seemed to be two cases with intestinal perforation. He noted the family grouping of the cases and held some community meetings to sensitize on hygiene, the basics of hand washing and latrines. He dispelled rumors of witchcraft and poisons. He wrote up a report. Then over the next week or two there was a task force set up, some Ministry of Health epidemiologists came and took blood samples.
We got the good news that it was not Marburg or any Viral Hemorrhagic Fever based on samples sent . . . Not sure where. Then there was the message that more samples had been sent to South Africa. Days went on. Uganda’s attention was on CHOGM. Jonah continued to attend to patients as they came into Bundibugyo Hospital, as did Scott. Jonah was the primary doctor for Muhindo, Jeremiah, an older gentleman who had been active in visiting the sick in Kikyo then fell ill in Bundibugyo. [Friday November 23 is the day Jonah believed himself to have been infected. That was the day he and Scott examined Jeremiah Muhindo. In between two of the times they saw the patient together, Jonah went in alone and arranged a facemask of oxygen onto the dying man, hoping to provide some relief or comfort. He was not wearing gloves because he could not find any at the hospital at that moment, and he felt that his friend needed the oxygen. That was his greatest exposure.] A week and a half ago Muhindo died.
A few days later Jonah went to Kampala on personal business; he has a house there still from medical school days with rooms he rents out, and three of his daughters are in school in Kampala, and his mother and brother stay with them there. We went to Kikyo the day Jonah went to Kampala, all of us still wondering what this disease could be, still being told the samples had been sent from South Africa now on to the CDC in Atlanta. Then last Thursday the bombshell announcement came, that it was Ebola, a new strain. That day we talked to Jonah on the phone, he had a headache he said, maybe early malaria, he’d watch. By Friday morning he found it prudent to admit himself to Mulago hospital. That was his last act of bravery and wisdom. We talked on the phone that day, he sounded so normal, so himself. I went to find his wife Melen who was still here. We prayed and wept and embraced and called him again.
Saturday morning I drove her early to town to get on transport to go to Kampala, even though she knew she would not be allowed to see him. She’s six months pregnant with their sixth child. From Friday until 4 pm yesterday every report we got from the doctors was hopeful. He was walking and talking, drinking. His doctor even said he was wanting to call and talk to us but they were looking for a way to charge his phone which he had with him in the isolation. He did have a couple of days of reduced urine output indicating an effect on his kidneys, and he did continue to have fever. With each new symptom and passing day the hope that it was all just malaria became less and less. Still Jonah is a strong man, healthy, smart. He was in the country’s main hospital, not out here in Bundibugyo. He was getting lab tests. He had a team of doctors, including MSF Spain. We had hope. Then suddenly last night they called back. He had died. Maybe there was bleeding, involving his kidneys and lungs, I don’t have the real story yet.

You can read the Myhre's complete blogs entries at: http://paradoxuganda.blogspot.com

Kenya/Uganda – Conclusions and Beginnings

2008-09-26T13:28:00.019-07:00

For the consistent reader, I only posted a summary—at best—of my one month through southwestern Kenya. Many worthy stories remain scribbled in one of two notebooks or are vividly retained by memory. Stories of generosity and salvation at a government hidden IDP camp. The love and insecurity of a mute outcast mother and her leashed preteen son (one of many touching and complicated stories at Sister Freda’s Clinic). Meeting an American missionary family living in north Kenya and learning of their life with the Trukana tribe deep in the north deserts (and their unexpected ties in the film business), are only to highlight a few as I reflect on the past four weeks walking down a foot-worn trail over green pastures.

A Maasai herds-boy bowed his head in passing. I laid my hand atop of his head and continued forward. I had made the mistake of shaking a child’s hand in greeting early in the visit. Shaking one’s hand is a ritual reserved for adults in the Maasai tribe— those having passed the rite of manhood (or womanhood) through an annual community public circumcision ceremony for adolescents aged 14-17 followed by a month of isolation together into the bush. Wearing nothing but animal skins, the boys are mentored by the generation previous to become fearless adults under the influence of intense “medicine”. The details are kept secret, and for this herds-boy, he must continue to bow his head in respect aspiring to prove he is ready to be a man.
“It’s a form a brainwashing,” Emmanuel Tasur explained the following day with utmost respect for the tradition similarly shared by many tribes in Kenya, as well as eastern Africa. His son will go through the rite next year at age 13.An eastern breeze cooled the beads of perspiration formed on my brow. I easily weaved between the cypress and eucalyptus trees crowning Pirrar Hill. The steep hike reminded me of climbing SP Crater, an extinct cinder cone volcano in northern Arizona, but without the cinders sinking me down. Along the tree line, I sat on an exposed rock overlooking one side of Transmara.The name Transmara is indicative to its meaning. The area is a transition zone between the mountainous Rift Valley and the low-lying savannahs. “Mara”, a Maasai word for “spotted”, refers to the sporadic grouping of trees dotting the land similar to the spots on a leopard or cheetah. From above, a word for “checkered” would be more appropriate, as farming has quartered the grassy hills like a relief chess board. I spotted the school Emmanuel is building on the slope of another hill and where I played football with the primary-grade students at break.
Last year, Emmanuel campaigned for a Minister of Parliament position, but backed out of the race for one of many reasons, including the construction of a primary and secondary school system in Transmara.“I would like to bring hockey into our sports program,” he expressed, but not referring to the common field hockey version. “Something no one here I Kenya could offer. We would be the first.”
Ice would be a logistical and expensive impossibility, but roller or plain street hockey is certainly doable. Emmanuel walked me down the hill from the four classrooms, over the rocky slope soon to be developed into a soccer field and to the future secondary school site.
“Right here is where we could place the rink.”
“Problem is there wouldn’t be much competition,” I noted.
“At first, but I plan to have five schools throughout Transmara, which they can play against each other.”
I pondered the idea. A hawk glided overhead and dipped down the hill blending into the background as a distant dark speck. A small pack of goats grazed just below my position, and I could hear the steady ringing of cowbells further down. As the day approached noon, I watched the evening clouds develop on the horizon and eventually engulf the sun.

Heavy rain fell long into the night. Victor’s bus had broken down followed by his matatu while en route to meet me in Kericho, a small city two hours north of Transmara. Fifteen past midnight, I bid farewell to Tyler before squeezing into the taxi to take Victor and I maybe two kilometers at most to the Akamba bus station.
After haggling down the cab-fare, I tried to sleep through the rough eight hour highway bus ride, stopping several times at towns along the way discharging and accepting passengers until the border. The predawn hours dragged me down as I brushed off money-exchange hawkers at the visa office to the sound of Islamic chants broadcast over loud speakers from a nearby Mosque.
Looking out the bus window at passing southeast Uganda and its shallow contrasting hills of banana palms and eucalyptus against rusted earth trails and corrugated metal roofed homes this is what I pictured Uganda and east sub-tropical Africa to look like, but seeing it in person sends a slightly apprehensive chill down my spine. The cold humidity bites hard and for the first time in weeks, I’m wearing pants on purpose. But as morning turns to afternoon in Kampala, a near equinox sun cooks the air and I wish I were wearing shorts.

"Can you take us to a hotel near a bus station that'll take me to Fort Portal?" I asked a taxi driver gathering my bags from the bus's boot.
Moses, the taxi driver, delivered us to the Amber Hotel in the local commercial district--not the best part of town--just outside city-center Kampala. Even though the traffic is just as congested as in Nairobi with matatus inches from each other and motor-bodas skillfully weaving in between, the air is cleaner, and thus the city is brighter.
“Uganda is a very friendly and safer than Kenya,” Victor restated what so many others have said before.
“Is that because of Museveni?” President Museveni over threw the Amin regime around the turn of the century starting with a guerrilla army of 26 men and since has turned the face and future of Uganda one-eighty.
“It’s time for change. He is on his third term and needs to step down. A man he fought with is now fighting against him,” Moses laughed. Afraid of handing over the country to another corrupt regime, one could say Museveni is forming a dictatorship while also preventing the creation of additional political parties to serve a Western democratic system. But, why break something that’s making positive steps?
My first positive step that afternoon was taking a warm continuous shower. Although one can turn hand-baths into an efficient cleaning process, streaming water does the job faster and is a relaxing pleasure I take too much for granted. Four minutes later, I am dressed, shaving and fifteen minutes from my first meeting.

A thirty-minute ten-kilometer taxi ride brought us to the front entrance of the Ugandan Ministry of Health. Taped to a window is a yellow poster titled from small print to bold:

FACTS ABOUT EBOLA

Over ten years of interest and study have finally paid off, and even after months of legitimate preparation, I have to pinch myself to its reality. And as I sit across the Assistant Commissioner of Health Education for the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the feeling dawns on me that this is really happening.
“Tell me about your assignment,” Paul Kagwa directed handing Victor and I a cold bottle of Coca-Cola.
“In the mid-nineties there was a documentary called, ‘Ebola: The Plaque Fighters’…”
“Yes, I know of it,” Mr. Kagwa pushed forward.
“This is its sequel, picking up where their story left off. It’s been over ten years and we now know where Marburg hides and Ebola hopefully soon to come. This is a historical time forty years in the making. But beyond that, this documentary is not necessarily about the virus itself, but the human story behind dealing with it,” I explained and continued with the current plan. “Right now, I’m establishing the contacts and gathering the necessary knowledge so when I get the phone call that something is happening in … the Congo, I’m prepared to move forward immediately and mobilize my crew to best achieve our purpose.”
“You know, we shot a one-hour documentary to show the community. The footage from that would be very useful to you. Let me make some phone calls and get this to you. Also, you need to speak with our director general, Dr. Okware. He is in charge of all outbreaks and has been around them since the beginning. There is no better person to talk to.”
And so the week in Uganda begins.

Kenya (Mount Elgon) – Kenya Side

2008-09-26T13:22:00.013-07:00

The tiny stream cascaded over the eroded pyroclastic rock wall and splashed onto rounded solid black basalt boulders and vibrant green shrubbery. I shielded the camera and tripod from the tiny waterfall’s spray behind a large volcanic block and hopped from stone to stone over a heavily cratered pond of mud and shallow still water into the wide mouth of Kitum Cave. The rocks disappeared beneath a porch of fine dry dust that exploded into ankle-high plumes of soft mist with every footstep—one of many different animal prints pitting the floor. With the entrance now a broad sliver of iridescent green vegetation, I switched on the headlamp before handing my spare flashlight to the guide. Dressed in military green camouflage with an AK-101 gripped tightly by his right hand, he kindly led me up a series of large blocks. His narrow face and wide smile reminded me of the rapper Tupac.
Echoing around me, the cries and whooping of short screeches and dull fluttering quickly escalated in volume. I turned my light to the vaulted ceiling and caught the glitter of hundreds paired rusty-gold blinking beads.
The screeching stopped to give way to waves of rubbery flapping. Dozens upon dozens of agitated Rousettus fruit bats fled from of an unseen cavity in the dome roof and surrounded us with movement. I turned the light away and almost as immediately as the storm began it subsided with the bats returning to their roost. We pressed forward, I every now and then glimpsing clusters of citrine eyes nestled overhead in shallow indentations. The unsettling chatter and movement continued.
“You can see here,” the guide said tracing his finger inside one of many pickaxe scrapings in the wall, “these are ‘tuskings’, where the elephants carve at the rock to get to the salt.” Elephants, as well as many other animals like buffalo and bushbuck, will eat the porous soft agglomerate for the salt embedded within. “Some predators will take advantage of those animals and eat them for food,” Tupac noted over piled hyena bones beside an enclosed underground pool.
“When do the elephants come around?” I asked.
“At night, but you cannot see them now because they are on the other side of the mountain.” The “other side” meaning the elephants are on Ugandan portion of Elgon Mountain, which both Kenya and Uganda share including the national park. “Kitum cave goes into Uganda.”
“Really? That’s like forty kilometers from here.”
“Yes, but you cannot get there because a few years ago there was a cave in. You see, the elephants scrape at the rocks and can sometimes cause large boulders to fall.”
“Can you access the Ugandan Kitum entrance?”
“Ah, I don’t know. I think it’s spelled, Kip-tum. Kitum means sacred, I do not know what Kiptum means.”
Could a “border” be all that separates the transmission of a virus? I absurdly mused. What would make the bats on the Ugandan side harbor the Marburg virus, and not those from the Kenyan side? …A number of factors drew in my head, assuming the virus does in fact exist in Kitum cave as spotlighted in Richard Preston’s book, The Hot Zone. The truth is, two victims of Marburg during the early 1980s had visited the cave prior to dying from the disease, but it is not known if the virus was contracted there. Field studies of Kitum cave and its occupants (bats, rodents, insects, etc) revealed no evidence linking Marburg or sister virus Ebola to Kitum cave. As a result of the book, Kenya’s Kitum cave has received a bad stigma, and when asked about the virus in association with Kitum cave, park rangers will quickly laugh and assure you there is no association. Unrelated though, a few scientists studying the bat flu disappeared in the cave and never returned, Barasa, the grounds keeper informed us over a campfire.
From the top of Endebess bluff we watched the late afternoon bring its routine seasonal downpour to Elgon’s east facing forested slopes and the endless crop fields dipping below the horizon. In timelapse, the clouds develop and expand over the world’s broadest mountain slope returning to the valley with brief but sometimes drenching rain. Upon clearing, the mass movement of bushbucks, dik-diks and baboons roll past our banda’s doorstep near the park’s entrance below. Dusk passes and the clouds part revealing a moon-washed southern Milky Way overhead. Like last summer, Jupiter graced its yellow brilliance at zenith now positioned on the handle side of the teapot shaped constellation, Sagittarius. Although being just north of the equator, I noted the north and south poles at the horizon and from my seat beside the fire and watched the sky rotate directly toward the west. I discussed elementary (college) astronomy to a skeptical Carolyn and quiet Michelle. Both girls were volunteering at Sister Freda’s for the month, and knew Tyler from last summer’s volunteer work in Transmara; our next and last destination.

Kenya (Mount Elgon) – SLDF

2008-09-26T13:11:00.007-07:00

Reverend Steven Mairori leaned his head through the open window over a vacant driver’s seat and said, “Wait here and I will let you know when you can come out.”
Following Mairori into the Mount Elgon District Commissioner’s Office was Africa Inland Church’s (AIC) bishop leading 4000 homes of God and Kenya’s retired military general under former President Moi. Just an hour earlier, we prayed over glasses of water and Sprite while munching on butter cookies together at the AIC’s Mt. Elgon home office. Neither Tyler nor I expected such a meeting, let alone an opportunity to film in the village of Kapsocony that suffered tremendously two years ago when the Sabaot Land Defense Force (SLDF) attacked and chased off people from their land. With the exception of a French medical team, we were the first film crew invited to visit this area of Mt. Elgon and report on the events that transpired over the last two years.
“The French medical team filmed activities in Kopsiro shortly after the elimination of the SLDF, but were given 24 hours to evacuate the area. One doctor was arrested.”
“Why was he arrested?” I asked the retired general.
He chuckled, “For practicing medicine.”
“For practicing medicine?”
“For practicing medicine,” he finished the conversation.
The question I wanted to ask was, “Why was the French team instructed to leave,” but I surmised an answer.
The French medical team, there to lend assistance to the violence affected Sabaot members delved too deeply into the torture inflicted by military forces ordered to hunt down and exterminate members of the SLDF and were evicted from the area. The creation of the SLDF followed former President Moi’s directive opening land t all Kenyan’s with a price tag. Land bought by those financially able left those struggling to make ends meet homeless, thus forcing the need for Internally Displaced Person camps (IDPs). Those buying the land include politicians, as well as rich tribal members. In the case of the Sabaot and Mt. Elgon, rich Sabaot bought out the land of their brother tribesmen forcing many to seek refuge. Some though took action and created a guerilla militia force out to punish the new landowners and reclaim the land. Punishment included humiliation, mutilation and death. In response, the Kenyan government deployed its national military force to combat the situation. The military went door to door and without due process executed the right of extrajudicial enforcement, which included similar tactics employed by members of the SLDF. The Mt. Elgon Sabaot population now had two forces to fear, their brothers and the government. Some sided with the SLDF in order to place food on their family’s plates, while others ratted out members to the military, sometimes erroneously with sad outcomes.
“I was hearing some youths that were saying that after their parents running away, that they have no food to eat, so they thought that it was good to join the militia so that they can steal the cattle and eat in the bush. Others were forced to join the militia because if you are a youth and you do not join the SLDF, it is better that you go outside Mount Elgon,” Crispin, a Pasteur in Mt. Elgon church community explained to us.
“My nephew was killed and damned into a pit latrine,” a man told us outside a primary school converted into an IDP home. “We only found him after twenty-one days in the pit latrine, removed him and buried him. Those people [SLDF] called me and used a private number and they told me the direction where they damned my nephew.”
Fast-forward two years to present day and peace—for now—is on Mount Elgon.
“I’ve never felt more insecure being a mzungu in Kenya than now,” Tyler expressed emphatically.
“Here at Mount Elgon?” Michelle asked.
“Yeah.”
I rested my head on the rear passenger window and in bold letters on the District Commissioner’s office wall read:

WE AS SERVANTS OF THE KENYA PEOPLE PLEDGE OUR COMMITMENT TO THE PUBLIC THORUGH OUR MOTTO: INTEGRITY AND JUSTICE.

The reverend, bishop and retired general exited the building with an entourage of district officials and church members. Mairori opened the driver-side door and sat behind the wheel, “Okay, we’re going.”
“To the rally?”
“Yes.”
A couple hundred or so locals attended the government/church/military presentation encouraging the public to accept the military’s presence and the construction of a permanent base. Although the leaders assured justice would come to those who committed the horrendous atrocities, all parties urged the community to forgive their neighbor as Jesus would.
Crispin a couple days later elaborated, “So people joined for different reasons and as the church, that is what we are telling people about who joined the militia group unwilling, forced, others were desperate, they had no where to go so they saw the option that they must join those people so they can continue surviving.”
Even though the military deniably condemned innocent lives, the public did express support for a military presence to protect the population.

Two days after the rally, we received word the military had left Mt. Elgon.

Kenya (Kitale) – Sister Freda

2008-09-09T23:45:00.009-07:00

“Come inside, Franck,” Sister Freda offered under the doorframe of a mud-brick house the size of a middle-class apartment bedroom. “It is okay. The mother just gave birth ten minutes ago.”
Mother lay on her side with her back to the door. I stepped quietly on the dirt floor, tiptoeing over scraps of firewood and the checkered blanket she nursed the newborn above from.
Sister Freda caressed the top of mother’s head with her thumb speaking to her softly in Swahili. The girl, late in her teens, removed the suckling infant from her breast and allowed Sister Freda to pick up the child wrapped in a sparing bundle of cloth, the umbilical still attached and disappearing under the sheets.
The infant cried. “This little boy was born just ten minutes before we arrived. It was a quick birth. Very easy for the mother,” Sister Freda quietly repeated and expanded upon, cooing the child with her delicate and calming demeanor. Her heavy white fabric dress and overcoat against the dark walls holding the baby made me think of Mother Theresa.
An old woman arrived at the doorstep with a small blue and white striped T-shirt. Sister Freda set down the baby beside his mother, opened the sheets and carefully with assistance pulled the shirt over his pudgy head and thin arms. Mother then drew him onto her chest and the newborn quieted.
“You can see the conditions she lives in. Thirteen people sleep in this tiny space and this is all the food she has.” Sister Freda pointed to a small pot of unpeeled maize, sighed and folded her hands across the waist. “I do not have my delivery package with me, so she will have to wait. Either I or I will send someone to take her to the hospital.” She made an accepting murmur and stepped outside after speaking with the old woman.
I remained standing at a corner in the hut and watched the mother and her infant together.

I followed Sister Freda’s white Land Rover through the camera’s viewfinder as it turned the corner and disappeared behind a wood fence. Further down the two-wheel track dirt road fenced by a crop of maize was 31-year old Catherine, stabilizing with her right hand a yellow container of water balanced on her head. A cattle-herding boy snapped his switch ushering the group of animals up a shallow embankment out from her path. The woman turned the same corner as Sister Freda and disappeared.
Appearing no older than a girl in her mid-twenties, Sister Freda took Catherine’s free hand into both of hers and graciously bowed her head, gently closing her eyes with a kind and humble smile. The girl shyly smiled.
“This is Catherine,” Sister Freda introduced, “She is HIV positive, but her son Issac is not. We did all we could during the pregnancy with anti-viral drugs and instructed the mother not to breastfeed after birth.”
Issac, just under the age of two, ran to Catherine for a brief hello before bouncing around the front porch and my camera. “Issac’s father left Catherine after finding out she was pregnant. We have been helping in whatever way we can. Providing food. Providing medical care. It is a miracle he is negative,” Sister Freda continued slowly.
Catherine directed us to the far corner of her yard where two shallow mounds lifted the dark green lawn. She spoke in broken English and Swahili, and Sister Freda translated, “Her first husband and daughter are buried here. They died of HIV.”
We paused for a moment. “What do you do to comfort yourself, Catherine?” Tyler asked.
The same shy smile, but no answer.
“Come on. You can tell us,” Sister Freda encouraged.
“Sing,” Catherine whispered.
“Sing? Can you sing for us?” asked again Tyler.
And as soon as he completed the request, Catherine and the surrounding family neighbor children clapped and sang in unison about the love of God. Catherine embarrassingly laughed finishing the verse. Sister Freda hugged her.
“You’re very close to your patients.” Tyler stated later, his eyes watering after listening to the story of Catherine’s life.
“Yes. They are my children.”

I could write a book about Sister Freda, and in fact one has just recently been published. The lady works non-stop from dawn until dusk, caring for her patients and staff, overseeing the construction of nursing classrooms, organizing and treating community clinics, and guiding volunteers and guests around the hospital and Kitale. Everyday hovering around fourteen and fifteen hundred hours (2 and 3PM), the volunteers, guests and Sister Freda with her husband Richard, a retired Bishop, assemble for dinner at ground’s cottage and eat lunch together after sharing a prayer together. On our last day in Kitale with Sister Freda, she gave thanks to our visit and prayed for each one of us individually and together as a group.
Sister Freda is fond of saying, and said this while fastening a bead necklace around my neck made by a displaced Kenyan refugee as an opening gift, “A neighbor is not someone who just lives next door. Whether it is the Congo or Uganda or the United States, everyone is a neighbor and this is your second home. The doors are always open.” And they are.

Kenya (Kitale) – Polythene

2008-09-04T22:54:00.003-07:00

“You must be strong,” Pasteur John encouraged me. With his nice dress shoes, he casually treaded sewage soaked mud from a topped-off set of latrines past an adjoining shamba (vegetable garden). The fecal mix caked to my hiking boots like wet clay. I dragged my feet on the dry earth, but a sliver of plastic wrapping had wedged itself between my right boot’s indents, carrying with it a thick mass of sludge. I sighed and followed the only suit in the village Kipsongo to a woman washing rotted tomatoes and potatoes in a metal bowl of intense brown water.
“See here. This is from town. They went to town to collect this from garbages,” Pasteur John explained picking up a perished head of cabbage from an assortment of low-grade produce. The holy momma continued with her task uninterrupted by our presence. “They use as a food. They wash with this dirty water. But because of poverty, there is no other way to get food.” He held up a tomato and with gentle pressure flattened it. “You use this as a food to kill hungry for a day.”
Kipsongo is a small slum of roughly 300 families not far from Kitale, but hidden from the roads by a wall of flowered trees and shrubs. During the early 1960s, members of the Picot tribe pillaged the Trukana people forcing their relocation. Forty years later, tribal segregation has kept these people from creating income, and the same government land policy that affected the Sabot and the resulting SLDF has isolated these people into a compact area of polythene huts—plastic wrappings over a wooden dome frame.
“Come, let’s move on.” With a brisk stride Pasteur John weaved his way between corridors of tarnished plastic and few mud-brick homes. “See the girls sleeping—no job. Hungry,” he elaborated like a real-estate agent showing off the corners of a mansion. One girl flapped her arm in the air shooing us off.
Born in 1967 Kipsongo, Pasteur John, through the Christian church and the goodwill of westerners, has brought meager portions of food, housing, education and money to the community, but many in that same community accuse him of abusing his position for self-gratification. This is a common criticism shared by all those providing good to a community, even by those of a similar mission.
“Okay, you can see this house,” he pointed to a polythene hut standing beside the narrow curtained entrance. “The owner has died and he is sleeping inside. You canna go inside.”
“Inside?”
Pasteur John was already halfway through the tight arch signaling for me to follow. I squatted down and waddled up a slick slope leading to the entrance. My right foot gave way and I fell to my knee. I quickly picked myself up and crawled inside.
The translucent plastic coverings lit the space with a deep orange hue. A myriad of shirts and trousers hung from a curved branch-frame wallpapering the enclosure like a closet wardrobe gallery. At the hut’s center, resting over rain soaked cardboard tile, a red and green-checkered wool blanket and a pair of chigger gnawed feet exposed from underneath the cover.
Pasteur John bent over the opposite end and unfurled the blanket’s end. I sidestepped to my left.
The man’s right fingers pressed ever so softly to his forehead as if in despaired thought. A fly scurried across his sunken cheek and into the hollow of his shriveled and bluing left eye before dropping through the stubble of his graying beard and parted frown. Through his frozen expression and empty stare, I could feel his sorrow and pain. He was like a statue chiseled from marble into a symbol of Kipsongo.
“We have been giving him a treatment, but now he’s lost his life. He’s dead. Do you see this house? His polythene house?” Gaps in the plastic allow for rain to drip through and soak the floor. “This is hard for me as a Pasteur here.”
I better get used to this, I thought.
Pasteur John continued, “Now I have to look for money for a coffin, and for a cemetery.”
I zoned out of what he was saying and interrupted, “Can we say a prayer for him?”
“A prayer?” He seemed surprised. “Yeah, but I can say it Swahili.”
The man’s son joined us following Pasteur John’s plea. The twenty-something year-old sat across from his father, his eyes wide and tearing. He wiped the dry and bloody mucous from his nose with the palm of his hand and spoke helplessly with his arms, barely forming words.
“He says he has no money to bury his father. He has beaten his knees because he has lost his father. So he needs only help.”
The man’s son turned to his father then to the Pasteur and then to me. I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes so wide and vulnerable.
Pasteur John stood. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I dreamt of our visit to Kipsongo that night, but through a skewed reality. I imagined what Havasuapi Falls must have looked following this summer’s scenery altering floods. Instead of the clear blue-green water, mud now spilled over Havasu Falls into a chocolate river also rich in sewage. At the waterfall’s base, the same polythene huts and Trukana people of Kipsongo.
An old woman plainly washed her clothes in the torrent stream, while soiled children picnicked at its shore, tinged avocado creaming their fingers. The sky began to rain and I ducked for cover under a polythene hut, slipping again on the same slick slope. Rainwater poured through seems in the plastic and pooled at my boots; the hut’s owner resting as he did when I saw him that day. I hugged my knees and leaned against the thin wood frame. Several other children and adults sat as I did, or slept cuddled beside the old man*. We waited for the storm to end.

*The week before our visit to Kipsongo, we were told, a mother had passed away in her plastic tent and left there for five days. Her children slept beside their mother until the necessary funds were gathered for a proper burial.

Kenya (Kitale) - Easy Coach

2008-09-02T08:01:00.002-07:00

We negotiate between police blockades of spiked hurdles and ascend through the Rift Valley, a segment of a continental fault spanning from Jordon to Mozambique. Low-lying clouds bathe a mesa of agriculture in mist, and my lungs inhale relief abandoning the dark haze that is Nairobi now a memory. Below the hills of golden savannah and spire trees is Lake Naivasha. On the horizon, the Mau Escarpment lifts the prevailing winds and gives birth to cotton candy clouds checkerboarding the mountains with light and shadow.
The driver slows the Easy Coach bus to a crawl and slips through the narrow arch of an abandoned toll stop. A baboon crosses the 100 highway ahead and shoulder checks us as we accelerate past him and several others loitering on the shoulder. Herds of Zebra graze the shrubbery plains peppered by sharp contrasting farmhouses and shanty hawkers. Steep green cliffs feed into Lake Elmenteita and blankets of cornfields around weathered sheds. The bus stops, and picks up an Easy Coach employee. He gnaws on a toothpick checking tickets before dropped off again on the side of the road beside sporadic bouquets of red daisy-like flowers and thickening flattop acacia trees.
Passing the flamingos in Lake Nakuru and its respectively named city, we cross the equator and continue along the geographical divide into the north Rift Valley. The road tightens and rides like washboard over pits and seals of dirt. Outside the window, three smoke billows blend and disappear into a milky-blue broken sky. An old man follows a dirt trail weighing heavily on his walking stick towards the village stop at Muserechi. On my right, a boy leans on his staff under the shadow of a tree watching cattle pick off the pasture, and not long after, a late middle-aged woman dressed in a long purple and white floral dress sees to the needs of her goatherd.
The driver shifts into 2nd and then 1st gears powering his was up flowing verdant hills of deep green short and tall pines rooted from the red earth and cut by an asphalt highway rivaling a forest service road. Locals say the red earth is stained from the blood spilled in Africa. A sad allegory for a beautiful land.
Rising ahead and peaking behind poached thunderheads is the broad slope of Mount Elgon and the Ugandan border. The terrain is a fertile sub-tropical paradise of vivid flowers and acres of plantation land. We have arrived in Kitale, a small quiet town where boda bodas (bicycle taxis) grossly outnumber gas-guzzling four-wheelers and the air has a sharp humid chill that is thick with the sweet scent of a botanical garden.
The low-hanging sun shines around frayed cumulus and glistens through beaded raindrops atop petal ferns. First on the agenda: one-on-one soccer barefoot on the soft earth against the guest home caretaker’s nephew. Final score: Amos-6, Mzungu-4.

Kenya (Nairobi) - Matatu

2008-09-02T08:00:00.005-07:00

In Swahili, Matatu translated means “of three”, but its east African connotation is a fourteen-person occupancy van privately owned and operated as Nairobi’s most common means of public transportation. The “three” represents the van’s driver, conductor and its passengers. Although built from the same mold, a matatu’s identity is unique and special onto itself—a representation of the owner’s sight and sound tastes.
Over a minimal but slick paint job, a matatu is customized through a combination of social icon photographs from American pop-culture performers to Osama Bin Laden, decaled catch phrases, character names or religious messages, and on a select few, fixed ornaments like a basketball hoop.
The interior is—if not more so—as ghetto as the exterior. Pastel ceiling cushions, soul-print seat covers, red and yellow tinted windows, as well as flashing neon and track lighting that culminate around a flat LCD television screen screaming hip-hop and afro-fusion (traditional instrumentation fused with rap or reggae) music videos through a theater-style speaker setup.

“Fifteen hundred?” Tyler scowled at the nearest driver. “The most I ever paid was seven hundred.” He turned to me. “We’ll just take a matatu.”
An earshot taxi driver cut us off. “Where do you want to go?”
“How much is it to Doonholm?” Tyler asked, exhausted and frustrated.
“Eight hundred—because of the time.” Traffic is bumper to bumper; a fifteen minute ride can take upwards an hour depending on the driver.
“Fine,” Tyler yielded and set the tripod and boom pole in the trunk. The driver pointed to my camera backpack.
“No, this stays with me.”
With Tyler at shogun, I slouched on the backseat beside the camera and unwrapped the last of three chocolate bars, revisiting a scene from Kibera earlier in the week.

“How are you?” A young boy asked leaning against the concrete barricade of an overpass. He toyed with rubrics cube and spoke with a high-pitched voice. Children everywhere throughout the Kibera greet and repeat, “How are you?” as if pre-recorded and automated, sometimes screaming from great distances.
“Fine. How are you?” I answered nicely walking past him and only glimpsing him from the corner of my eye.
The child dropped the toy box to his waist and quizzically peeked at me. “Una kula waru?” He asked himself.
Victor chuckled beside me, carrying the camera tripod. “Do you know what he thought you said?”
“No. What?” I swapped hands with the camera.
“He thought you said, ‘Fine. I eat potatoes.’”
“What?”
“'Una kula waru’ sounds like ‘How are you?’ in Swahili and means, ‘I eat potatos.’”
I laughed and the taxi abruptly slammed the brakes, but not before bumping the bus ahead of us. With traffic literally bumper to bumper and side mirror to side mirror, the damage would be minimal.
Our first accident, I thought. It was bound to happen. SLAM.
Our heads whipped forward then back. The camera pack bounced and wedged itself between the driver seat’s back and the rear cushion.
“Are you alright?” Tyler asked immediately.
Surprisingly, the impact didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, I was grinning. “I’m good—great actually. How are you?”
“My neck is a little sore, but I’m fine.”
A matatu crushed the passenger-side taillight and collapsed the trunk. I joined the driver outside and forcibly retrieved the stowed gear from the now sunken metal frame. No damage fortunately.
The traffic policeman rushed over, assessed the damage and passed judgment on the matatu driver.

The matatu conductor serves many roles besides retrieving less than 1USD worth of fare from each passenger. He frequently hangs to the roof leaning out from the side sliding door whistling at bystanders and hollering route and destination, banging the van with a fist alerting the driver to stops or danger. During heavy traffic, he spots the driver skimming centimeters from adjacent vehicles forcing his way across imaginary lanes, where one lane can become three.
The driver is a breed of adrenaline junky and arguably an artist helmsman. He makes driving a van cool despite its ghetto appearance, cutting into oncoming traffic, riding over cratered shoulders or pedestrian packed sidewalks while honking a warning to all for the sake of position. The matatu universe is one where any negotiable space is traversable; and where space seemingly does not exist, it is created. There is no regard for traffic law, if there is such a thing.
Like in the wrecked taxi we ditched, I found myself settled on a backseat, this time hugging the camera pack to my chest squeezed between two other passengers inside an over-capacity matatu. The rear tunnel perspective provided an accentuated sensation of movement no different than one experienced from the trailing car on a rollercoaster. An alternating red and blue neon light in conjunction with a deafening beat of 50 Cent further heightened my sense of absurdity over the driver’s power weaving and the van’s rebounding in and out of pot-holes.
Una kula waru?
I smiled and enjoyed the ride. Damn, I’m having fun.

Kenya (Nairobi) – Kibera: Part Two

2008-09-02T08:00:00.004-07:00

The thickening clouds gave way to early morning rains and overcast skies. Cindy, a Kenyan resident student at the Village Volunteers home bundled herself with warm clothing. I walked into the kitchen wearing my usual gym shorts and a button-down blue shirt as she prepared breakfast, an assortment of avocados, bananas, chopped vegetables mixed with scrambled eggs and warm indescribable chai tea.
“Aren’t you cold?” The temperature felt like low 70s.
“No, this is great. The temperature back at home is hovering mid-30s C, so I’m liking this a lot.”
“You are crazy.” She annunciated with a grin. “This is cold for us, and this rain is not normal. Climate change.” Unseasonable rain and droughts, receding glaciers on nearby Kilmanjaro, Mt. Kenya and the Rwenzoris, are significant markers to a changing climate on equatorial east Africa. I expressed how cool it would be to hike the Rwenzoris, also known as the Mountains of the Moon, on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) then ski down only for the novelty of skiing at the Earth’s equator.
“Better hurry.”
I picked up a Matatu and met Victor for lunch in downtown Nairobi. A plate each was placed in front of us of tilapia fish caught at Lake Victoria and served fried and complete with slits carved vertically across the body. On the seat between us rested an Orutu, a traditional Luo single string violin-like instrument made for his half-brother.
“I’m surprised your brother sold it to me.” His brother is local Kenyan traditional/hip-hop fusion artist. I would have liked to meet him at his studio, but our time was limited.
“Actually, he didn’t want to,” Victor laughed. “The goat skin on its drum was slaughtered on his tenth birthday.”
“You’re kidding me? I can’t take this.”
“It’s okay. He has two, and he figures it’ll have special meaning to have one here and in the U.S.”
Victor, a university student and unofficial guide to Tyler and myself throughout Nairobi, finished his tilapia meal long before I finger tore through one side of mine. He picked at his plate of ugali (a loaf of maize) and talked of our similar and contrasting cultures.
“In this Nigerian film, a Nigeran man visits the United States and goes into a bakery. He receives a loaf of bread, but when he goes to pay for the bread, he realizes he left his wallet and money at his hotel. He offers to take the bread, but return with the money later that day. The cashier says, ‘No,’ and threatens to call the police ater he insists to take the bread, but return later. The Nigerian man is dumbfounded,” Victor described then added, “We find that really funny why the cashier would act in such a way. Here, it would be okay to take some food from a vendor with the intent of returning with money.”
“Meanwhile, people in the U.S. would side with the cashier and distrust the man, finding his actions humorous,” I generalized, picking up the check before meeting with Solo7 in Kibera.
“I finished it very nice for you,” Solo said handing me a wood canvas painting of Jesus Christ carrying his cross, mounted on an 8x10 hardwood slab.
“Thank you, Solo. This is great. I would have bought this piece off of you if I could ship it home,” I admitted pointing to his “fire” painting.
“You could take it off the frame and roll it.”
“That’s a good idea, but I don’t have enough money on me to give you and we leave Nairobi the day after tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
A pause then I had an idea. “You said art supplies are hard to come by, right? Would you want to work out a barter deal where I mail you paints and brushes in exchange for the painting? You could ship it to me after receiving the supplies.”
“That would be great,” Solo responded beaming with a smile. “You can take the painting now.”
“You trust me?”
“Yes. Sure.”

Margaret, Alan’s mother, dressed under a long thin purple dress with an off-white zipper-down sweatshirt rose from a stool at the foot of her kiosk and hugged Tyler and I. Hugs and other public displays of affection are taboo in east African culture. “Frank, I saw a picture in Tyler’s journal of his mother and father kissing,” Alan laughed with the same innocence of a kindergartner confronted against coodies.
“Don’t people kiss here?”
“Yes, but only in private. It is not acceptable in public.” Later I would learn dates are comprised of talking before going straight to business. There appears to be no middle ground. I don’t know how much of a generalization that is, however.
Toi Market, as it always appears, bustled with foot traffic through the narrow corridors between shops. An elderly woman lay on the dirt beside Margaret; her cheekbones prominent beneath crumpled paper skin. The woman pulled a brown blanket over her face, muttering something in Swahili to no one in particular and hid from us. Only pruned fingers tips gave hint someone huddled underneath the fabric heap. Not once did I see her peek from under the shroud.
Seven days since arriving in Nairobi and all but one day we visited Kibera, alternating visits with Solo7 and Alan’s family.
“You are free here, Frank. Do whatever you need,” Alan’s father John explained to me walking to Toi Market the first time. “People know me, they know Alan, and if they see you with us, you are accepted. Be free. Film what you want.”
That was a relief. Many either hid from the camera or shouted at me not to film in their direction. Many reasons can be cited for people’s negative reactions to any camera, video or still, professional or consumer. Exploitation ranks at the top.
Following the post-election violence, and to a lesser extent before, shantytowns like Kibera were under the spotlights of sensationalizing media attention. Although definitely a stark contrast to western standards, many residents of Kibera feel their lives are being pitifully portrayed as a means for profit. One cannot argue on either of those accounts, although on the other hand the truth is what it is and in rebuttal all media—journalistic and art—is exploitative under either negative or positive connotations. This is both an ethical and sometimes moral dilemma documentary filmmakers face, and it is not an easy path to follow. Fortunately, everyone who understands our purpose and project has not only been accepting of the camera, but also very forthright with insight through a candor that is shocking.
Serendipitously meeting Alan presented an amazing inside look into not just his family’s life, but also the inner workings of Kibera, specifically the surrounding villages of Mashimoni and Lainisaba, both areas of Kibera hit by the post-election violence.
“It was dangerous,” John explained to the camera. We sat at the center of a blackened tin siding enclosure, the remains of one’s home and now a site for trash dumping. “People were running everywhere. Some were running to the churches. The tear gas was all over Kibera. Houses were being burned. So many people were circumcised. Women were being raped. So many people were killed. You could not see Kibera. All you could see was smoke.”
Margaret added, “You see Toi Market. During the violence at Kibera, all of he shops were looted and everything was burned.” Months after, an NGO rebuilt the market place; the new shiny new siding stands in sharp brilliance against all of Kibera.
“Now we are staying very peaceful in Kibera,” John noted. He presented the view behind him. “You can see now we are restructuring ourself. We are coming together and I hope another election in 2012 such a thing will not happen.”
Following church a couple days earlier, we met with a self-initiated youth group of twenty-some children and teenagers brought together not only through faith, but a common interest in self-educating each other and those younger about everything from peace to AIDS through rap, poetry and plays. No adult guidance or direction; the assembly designs and creates everything privately and attendance is voluntary. Groups like this one, as well as other larger organizations covering poverty to women’s rights sprouted as a result of the post-election violence.

The shadows disappeared with the crowds and sun. Toi Market reflected all too well with its shiny metal roofing and dark wood foundations the cold blueness of nautical twilight. Tyler itched to get a move on.
We shook John’s hand and thanked him and his family for their support and cooperation with us. Together we bowed our heads and he led us in a short prayer.
“God, I ask you watch over and guide Tyler and Frank through Kenya that they may help bring peace to our country. I ask this of you Lord. Follow them. Protect them. Amen.”
“When are you coming back to Nairobi?” Margaret asked.
“I will be back in three weeks, but Frank will be traveling to Uganda and South Africa,” Tyler answered.
“Oh, you must visit us when you are in town. I am making a bracelet for both of your mothers. You tell her, ‘hello,’ for me from your mother in Kenya.”

Kenya (Nairobi) – Kibera: Part One

2008-09-02T07:55:00.005-07:00

Alan squatted down on a bare spot of ashen rubble and shattered office ware he had kicked clear. His slightly torn red shirt contrasted him apart from the charred blue concrete walls, balanced by a shallow glow of daylight from an empty window behind him.
The 12-year old flipped scraps of burnt cardboard with a plastic shard as he explained, “I was just at home giving stones to my father and one of my friends was shot here,” he pointed to his thigh. “There was a fight in which enemies were fighting, and people were fighting each other.”
“Who exactly was fighting? What happened?”
“Police and also people. They go to house by house, house by house. They open the door, they beat you, they beat you, they rape you.” Alan clapped his hands together. He sat quiet for a moment. “You know most of them were my friends. One of them is in Kenyatta hospital.”
Alan continued, “In Kenya, tribalism is the thing which is going on and it is not finished. Because there are a lot of tribes and every tribe wants a land. You know there are forty-two tribes in Kenya.
“There was a tribe called Kikuyus—you know there is a place, Lainisaba, if they find you there, they take you and they circumcise you,” Alan waved his hands over the rubble. “Just like that, because they are their enemy.”
Public circumcision is a means humiliation and dominance, especially for tribes opposed to the traditional ritual as in the case between the Kikuyu and Luo. The Luo tribe set off the violence in December of 2007 after the Kenyan incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, apparently stole the election from Raila Odinga, a Luo. The police, mostly of Kikuyu origin, joined the violence. Their orders and execution are subject to debate.
“Do you think peace is possible?” Tyler Batson, the director of our documentary, A Chance for Peace, asked.
“No. I do not think so.” A pause. “But now there is grand coalition government of Kibaki and Raila. They are the ones who are in power now. Raila is prime minister. Kibaki is president.” In Kibera, Prime Minister Odinga is refereed to by his first name. “Raila” is painted on the walls of homes and businesses always in reference to “peace”, especially in Kibera.
A melting pot of over 600,000 residents—and on some estimates, one million—Kibera is the largest slum in Kenya, a scant fifteen-minute matatu (bus/van) ride from downtown capital Nairobi. Along the main one-lane highway, hundreds of private vendors hawk goods and services to town residents and adjacent Nairobi. Although bustling with heavy foot-traffic and mass transport, commerce appears scare from competition and poverty.
Tens of thousands of shanty shacks, few of concrete construction, many of corrugated tin siding wired to blue gum branches, blanket gentle rolling hills as one seamless rusting contoured floor. Home to many Kikuyus, as well as Luos, a dozen occupants may sleep in a space the size of a small studio apartment. Water is provided through a well system, but still boiled before drinking. Before the wells though, streams running between villages was potable, but a careless regard for rubbish and unsanitary latrine use has made the watercourse a reeking exposed sewer system.
Post-election, Kibera epitomized the example of violence from tribalism and political outrage. We met Alan while filming the ruins of a government building mobbed by protestors and torched by petrol bombs. I was told three people were killed just a few feet from where I set the camera. Alan, curious about the camera approached us.
Over the concrete fence, a choir’s praises resonated through cracked and scorched walls of a church still in use after fire bombed. A felt a drop of water splash on my neck, and although the sky looked as if it wanted to rain, nothing more fell.
“Can I ask you a question?” Alan asked me studying the camera as I reviewed footage from his interview.
“Sure.” No question followed. He slid two fingers over the camera’s focus ring. “You said you want to be a journalist?” I offered in exchange.
“Yes, but it is not going to happen.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not have money to go to college,” he stated quickly. (Refer to a previous post titled, “Namibia – Sundowner”)
“Do you need to go to college to have a job?”
“Yes.”
After a pause second-guessing my response, I explained to Alan how through persistence and unpaid labor for a local television station, he—in a sense—would get a “free” education, as well as establish connections that could lead to a paying job. In the States, internships especially in the film business are common practice, but here in Kenya?
He looked at me as if his heart, in all seriousness, skipped a beat. “I want your e-mail.”

Dressed in a flannel overcoat, forest-green beanie and enamel-splattered jeans, Solo7 carried a bucket of white paint to a wood fence and brushed the words, “Keep Peace by Solo7”. Local bystanders call out his name with affection as he crossed the Ngong Road to an advertisement wall. Smoke burning from heaps of trash blacken and peal the already muted colors of Melvin’s Chai Tea. “No Dumping” a sign reads. Solo writes, “Keep Kibera Clean by Solo7”. The bold white letters join the hundreds more political statements on every other surface in and outside Kibera’s main throughway. The vandalism is accepted and appreciated, and as a result, Solo7 is a hometown celebrity artist.
A tight dirt corridor between dividers of brown corduroy and pasty mud opens to a four-man Kenyan board game situated across from Solo7’s communal art studio, M2. A heavy metal door pushes into the enclosed cramped patio of a two-story shed. At the edge of the door’s swing is Gambo, another artist dabbing yellow acrylic onto a near-finished art canvas, his studio dubbed, “China”.
I walk up the bottle-cap coated staircase into “Amrika”, Solo7’s stage. Paintings, collages and sculptures shield the rusting tin wall. A window peers over the patio and surrounding Kibera framed over a bench littered with Giger-esque wire-frame figurines and woodcarvings.
Solo7 clears a space, sets a legal-letter sized composition against a propped-up translucent Coca-Cola banner, and outlines an ominous depicted figure with a soft lime-white glow. He dabs the acrylic paint heavily against the canvas; his brush blunt and hardened.
“After people heard that President Kibaki had won election, people grew mad ‘cause they expected Raila to be president. People say that they rigged election results. After that people had grown mad and they started torching people’s properties, setting them a blaze, and they were hunting Kikuyus from this place claiming Kikuyus are responsible for election rigging. So I saw in such a fashion, people cannot live that way forever since we are all suffering. All tribes of Kenya, because it was not business as usual.” He dipped his brush into a cap of green paint and touched the canvas. “Children were dying of hunger, and old men and women too. I decided to come up with this peace initiative writing on the walls at least to educate my fellow youths. ‘Cause they are the youth causing all this chaos. So I wanted them to understand and retreat back.”
Solo7’s penname originates from a series of coincidences: his proper first name, Solomon, being the seventh child in his family, and a series of life incidences that relate or reference the number “7”; in a much more significant way the number “17” has impacted my life.
“How has the post-election violence influenced your creativity?” I asked.
“It only affected the sense of my artwork, but not the creativity. I paint these pictures I normally see a kind of fire feeling. Like this piece that you see here,” Solo turned his body and pointed a large fabric canvas of human shapes worked into a flare of red brilliance. “Its got a lot of warm colors that depict fire.”
Solo continued to describe his depiction of the violence he experienced. I admired it for its composition, but above all the meaning from an artist of resistance.

Kenya (Nairobi) - Pieces

2008-09-02T07:51:00.003-07:00

On the cover of Lonely Planet’s Guide on Kenya are the confident and anxious gazes of a cheetah family. Flip a couple pages past the front cover to the introduction page and you immediately get the sense Kenya is the premier tourist destination of eastern Africa. When taking into account the extensive wildlife, vistas and culture, nowhere in Africa is arguably so diverse and so accessible.
Outside the terminal gate at Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, forty or more drivers crowd a painted line on the floor holding paper name signs. Four middle-aged women decked out with outdoors safari attire, apparently a tour group, rant about the lack of pages provided in their passports. No free page, no visa, no entrance. They find their driver and laugh out the sliding door.
At the end of the line, a short, bald-headed Kenyan holds a sign with the title, “Village” for Village Volunteers, an NGO (Non-Government Organization) who’s purpose is to create sustainable development projects with other NGOs. This is achieved through grants, fundraising and importantly, to send volunteers where the help is needed.
Not far from the airport is Embakasi and the Doonholm district, a middle-class suburb of gated—and guarded—communities. (The term “suburb” is used to reference the upper-class locations of Nairobi.) Homes in Doonholm are like townhouses in the States; a two-minute walk from the Village Volunteers transition home however, will take you to the outer fringes of the Pipeline slums, a shantytown of makeshift huts and development housing. Interspersed between the shanty shacks and cement-framed apartments is a communal market of produce, services and apparel, in particular a wide assortment of shoes.
Vendors hawk their goods from a blanket or branch constructed shed. Higher end services, including salons and computer repair to government offices are walk-in closet-sized alcoves found along tarred roads leading into city center. The term “hole-in-the-wall” must have originated from the slums.
I stepped away for the rail track and let the six-car train chug over puddles of murky rancid water. The uneven chatter frightened a nearby chicken to flutter its wing fruitlessly. Scrupulous hawkers followed Winnie, a 26-year old Kenyan girl, and myself from behind their disheveled kiosks.
“Mzungu,” a group of guys ID-ed me smirking. We kept walking.
Two girls whispered.
“Go find your own mzungu man!” A man passing by witnessing the exchange yelled in Swahili at the girls. Winnie laughed.
“I’m going to open my own kiosk and call it the ‘Happy Mzungu’,” I joked. Happy white man.
“You should. You would have everyone’s business,” I was told. “You could listen to people’s problems and give them money,” Winnie suggested.
Maybe not. White is the color of Kenyan Schillings, in fact, and wearing an Arsenal jersey and speaking through an acceptable South African accent doesn’t change the fact I am a mzungu out of his element. Time is key.
An hour through standstill traffic brings me to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. A dense commercial market centered by the Hilton hotel—a landmark reference surrounded by rail, bus and matatu services, as well as a cluster-fuck of vehicle and pedestrian madness. And madness is an understatement, as a thick skin and ample patience is required to deal with the daily commutes and transfers of the mass population, where everyday is an endeavoring experience. Government willing, a civil engineer would generate serious bank to organize the civil chaos that is Nairobi.
Eight nights will be spent here, an excessive amount for anyone visiting without necessary purpose. But our purpose is necessary. And as the country regains credibility, we will examine the pieces that led to its fallout, and what picture it will construct as a result.
I’m sure somewhere in Kenya, Simba is presiding high on Pride Rock and those same middle-aged women from the airport are locked comfortably in their Land Rover jovially snapping pictures from a safe distance. As much as I’d like to join them (privately and unguided where one can break park rules and throw a rock at Simba for the sake of an exciting shot), that is not my purpose here in Kenya. Behind the tourist veil is a forgotten and misconceived reality, raunchy and impoverished, rife with corruption and hope of peace through a morbid recent history and uncertain future.
“This is Africa,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character states in the movie, Blood Diamond. Although used expressively before the movie’s release, the phrase—and its variation—is spoken with heightened popularity; at least it is here in Nairobi. “T.I.A.”
And as the electricity randomly switches off and on, herding pedestrians narrowly dodge reckless traffic, taxis and buses alike regularly fail or demonstrate the effectiveness of driving on empty, and political passions run rampant from city center to the bush, I am in Africa. No singing lions or wisecracking meerkats. This is Kenya.

Namibia - Epilogue

2007-09-18T15:46:00.001-07:00

Six weeks prior and one week after arriving at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge, I joined a Dutch couple on their visit to Sossusvlei proper. The mountainous iron oxide tinted dunes are a striking contrast of form and color in the early morning sunlight. Not a far hike from a 4WD track into the dunes, are dozens of dead camel-thorn trees, some over 500 years in age in a desolate clay pan. A location for many commercial and feature film productions, the dead valley and surrounding red dunes are a photographer’s paradise. Camera aside though, the landscape is surreal, alien and unique, a sensation only hinted by some of the best photography. I found myself walking the mud-cracked turf alone; the Dutch couple had snapped a picture from the valley shore and return hiked to the game truck.
How do you travel thousands of miles from home, hike a fair distance then turn around and leave? I thought. The couple had in fact traveled tens of thousands of miles across the globe, visiting locations I personally dream about experiencing, for what? And there lies a difference: visit or experience.
Experiencing another country, culture, landscape, activity is not always easy. On the surface, we paint for ourselves an idea about the world seen, but often without context. Revealing that context takes flexibility. A flexibility in time, tolerance, adaptability and open-mindedness. The rewards are not always tangible, but it’s the intangible where ideas begin. What those ideas are and where those ideas take me, I do not know. I guess I could say, “My experience is not over yet.” Writing this blog has helped explore that experience from breaking preconceptions to shedding new insight on not only another part of the world, but our part as well.

This video was edited at the conclusion of my stay at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge for demonstration purposes only, and revised shortly after returning home to include a select few settings during those two weeks in northern Namibia. Structurally, the footage follows my travels in rough chronological order. This is just a tease of the 21+ hours of HD footage captured and soon to be logged and edited into proposal demos and short docs.

Namibia - Sundowner

2007-09-18T15:43:00.001-07:00

The score was tied nothing each at halftime. I looked at the sun: a brilliant maroon and gold disc now less than an hour from setting. Peter and Theresa sat beside the truck on collapsible camping chairs at the sideline, waiting. We would need to leave now to catch sunset in Rundu, twenty K from the field.
Although tomorrow would be my last full day in Namibia, over half that day will be spent driving to Windhoek. Today, I considered, would conclude my seven-week journey.
I did not like to think about it. Two months is a lot of time. A lot of time to explore, experience, and build relationships. Relationships that I know will and already have impacted my life. The feeling is nostalgic—to the letter of its definition.
I jogged from mid-field to the sideline, joining the team in huddle.
“It’s time for me to go. Thank you for letting me play and all the best this season.”
Leaving at halftime was never my intention. We arrived just past three to an empty field and yet another example of “Namibian Time”. This punctual flakiness was more frustrating to Theresa than myself, and she would have to deal with it for the next nine months. We talked about watching the sun set overlooking the Kavango River and surrounding flood plains the last two days, but changing plans and a never-on-time/laid-back approach left this evening as our only chance.
The game would not start until a quarter to five; almost two hours after the team was scheduled to arrive.
“Let’s all be here on time at three o’clock tomorrow. And let’s make sure we get here before Mr. Frank and show him we’re ready to play,” Andrew the team’s trainer mandated the day before at practice.
“Andrew. If the team wins their first game, I will pay for the season,” I offered to
the team’s excitement.
The players are a mix of ages from maybe eight to twenty-something. They have no jerseys, and one soccer ball for practice. Each player is expected to cough up a dollar to cover the $30 Namibian league fee. Doesn’t sound like much, but even a dollar carries a lot of value and makes winning that more important. The sum gathered from all teams is awarded to the season champions a couple weeks later.
The players have talent, perhaps a function of playing on an inconsistent surface, but regardless of their age differences, they play like a team. Discipline is not a problem, but punctuality is an issue. I thought a lack of timepieces was the reason, either by a watch or cellular phone, but no, “Namibian Time” means anytime an hour or so after a scheduled appointment. Incidentally, pay as you go cell phones are very common and make up for the complete lack of landlines. A cell tower is much easier to construct than laying kilometers of wire. Government patience paid off.
“So how did I play? …I know, you don’t have to tell me, I sucked.”
“No, you played well, just off-sides a lot,” Theresa noted loading into the truck. “Peter would say, ‘He’s off-sides again.’”
Coming from a hockey background, getting behind the defense is key. No wonder soccer’s goal counts are so low. Then again, so are hockey’s, just not as bad.
“Erick, are you coming?” I invited.
Erick is a 14 year-old from Zambia and a sponsored student finishing holiday before returning to class in Rundu. He was found living with his aunt by a couple from Florida and brought to Valerie Peyper, n’Kwazi Lodge’s owner and community foundation organizer. Valerie and her husband Weynand, sponsor several students at various ages and levels through lodge profits and visitor donations. Only self-motivated and academically driven learners are given scholarship, and in exchange must return and better the area’s community. At present, two students are studying abroad, one as far away as Moscow, and several working their way through secondary education (high school).
I read about n’Kwazi in Lonely Planet’s guide on Botswana & Namibia. The brief but touching article painted an accurate representation of Namibia’s and most of southern Africa’s third-world education and living environment. In the months leading to my trip, I would collect several hundred U.S. dollars to sponsor a student’s education and living expenses for a year. An effort I hope to continue well after returning to the States.
School runs year-round on a trimester system with breaks in August, December/January and April/May. My timing was impeccable for the holiday, although I never did get to visit a school in operation. Something I wish I could have filmed and experienced.
The government supports a child’s education until form (grade) 10, and on to form 12 if a learner’s marks warrant continued learning. Otherwise, he or she is dropped out—if family needs have not already commanded that course of action. The ability to attend school may be paid for, however school funds and materials like uniforms, textbooks, pens and stationary are left to cover by a learner’s family. Doesn’t seem unreasonable, however even these taken-for-granted items are a needed commodity throughout public schools in an almost all-rural Namibia.
The Mayana Primary School caters to a student body of almost 600 from grade 1 to grade 7 with only a staff of 18. Many children are orphans reared by families in the community, yet they still attend class, sometimes malnourished—an issue being addressed by the school. Although wired for electricity, the last couple years brought potable well water to the school and a block fence restricting wandering animals; all through donated, typically foreign support.
“It doesn’t look like I’m going to play, so yes, I’m coming,” Erick answered.
“Are we going to stop at the lodge and pick up your camera?” Theresa inquired.
“We don’t have the time. I think this’ll be one picture for the memory and not the camera.”
I would wish I brought at least one of the cameras. The town of Rundu rests atop a shallow mesa. Not far from the gate crossing into Angola is a bluff facing the west and a flat countryside sinking distantly below the horizon. The Kavango River defines this part’s border between Namibia and Angola, and during the rainy season spills into the adjacent plains quite some distance from its present banks. The sun was just minutes from disappearing behind thickening haze, and reminded me of a color stamp used on Bingo cards at the casino. I thought how cool it would be to witness a partial or annular solar eclipse near sundown from this location, but for now a normal sunset would be my last scenic vista of the country.
“This is great, Mrs. Tha-ray-see-a. Thank you.” That’s not how her name is pronounced in Germany or back in the States, but it is here. Apart for aiding in community education project building, Theresa tutors Erick and the other sponsored learners over holidays and weekends by their choice. As Erick and Elias, my sponsored student would tell me, “Education is the key to success.” And they believe it.
We sat on the edge of a stone pit. The sun had by this time disappeared, although the sky was just as bright as when the sun was visible. Peter left to walk into town leaving the three of us admiring the view.
“You don’t mind me asking about your parents, do you?” I asked Erick knowing only a little about his history through Valerie.
“No, it’s okay. You can ask.”
Erick is always smiling, always seemingly happy. It’s hard not to be the same around him. He speaks softly, and sounds both humble and accepting. His English is very good for a second language: articulate and proper. I could speak to him with speech no different than I would to someone back at home.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen your parents?” I asked.
“For many years now.” I think he said since 2002, five years ago for one parent.
“Why aren’t you with your parents now?”
“I don’t know why my parents aren’t taking care of me.” Erick explained about his father’s alcohol abuse, his parents’ separation, and tossing between aunties before being found by the American couple. He does miss his family very much, but that doesn’t appear to affect his behavior or goals. All the while, working in a smile.
I couldn’t help feel piteous for the all-too-common situation, but at the same time inspired by the drive to overcome adversity. No complaints, no excuses, just action.
Elias is opposite only in that he doesn’t smile as often as Erick (that’s changed with the nickname of “Smiley II”, a former hockey player reference). Orphaned at an early age after both parents passed away, Elias, now fifteen is independent and very self-motivated especially with his studies.

“How was your last report card?” Theresa asked Elias at the conclusion of an on-camera interview the following morning.
“I would say it was good as the way people saw it,” Elias began somberly, “But then to myself, it was not good, ‘cos that was not what I supposed to get. But when the people saw it, people like my relatives, my friends, all the people that saw it, they said it was good. For myself, I wanted more than that … For example, I will say that if I want to achieve maybe a B in science, of course I must get that. I’m not happy when I get lower than that,” Elias explained. In fact, he is a lot stronger student than he credits himself.
Independence is a quality I noticed with many youths at a young age, perhaps a function of living in the bush. I do not know how the level of education compares with the States, but from what I briefly saw during a tutor session, some subjects appear on par.
The day was getting late, well past “Namibia Time” for my departure to Windhoek. The time was one o’clock with a six-hour drive ahead, and we still needed to pick-up Peter’s daughter, Anna (nickname: Dik-dik for the world’s second smallest antelope).
I dropped Peter off to visit a day earlier and captured the reunion on video. I don’t know what surprised Anna more, a long overdue Daddy or the white man with a big camera.
“See that man over there,” Peter told his little Dik-dik in Oshivambo pointing at me, “That’s your Daddy.” I had no idea.
“No. No,” Anna cried.
At the conclusion of Erick and Elias’ interviews, I asked if there was anything they’d like to say before switching off the camera.
“How about we interview you?” Erick requested.
I work behind the camera and not in front, but in this case… “Fair enough since I put you through it.”
We reversed places. I connected the microphone to my shirt and sat in the hot seat. As part of the scholarship deal I put together for the students, both Erick and Elias are required to write a letter every couple months and take pictures with the three disposable cameras I brought from home. The night prior was spent teaching Erick how to handle a camera and compose pictures using my digital camera—a challenge after a previous sponsored project left virtually every picture unusable I was told.
Behind the HD camera, Erick smartly composed the frame then asked me the following questions:
“Why are you in Africa? Did you enjoy Africa, and what did you like the best? You’ve been to places where those places are not developed and the people are not wealthy, what ideas would you give those people besides working that those people can change things and get a better living? When are you coming back to Africa?”

Namibia - Kavango Night Life

2007-09-08T12:46:00.002-07:00

There are no streetlights on the one lane B8 highway leaving Rundu towards the Caprivi Strip. Donkeys and goats cross with alarming regularity, as do the hundreds of people walking the shoulder. An inversion layer of smoke front-lit by the truck’s high beams restricted my visibility to a hundred meters ahead on our path, and I slowed the vehicle accordingly.
“What are these people doing? Where are they going?” Peter and I asked ourselves for the umpteenth time. A week earlier on our approach to Ondangwa, I counted 88 pedestrians and seven vehicles over a ten-kilometer stretch ofvirtually nowhere. That ratio would be far greater here if I counted—granted the Rundu area is the second most populated region of Namibia with over 40,000 residents by the most recent census.
After several attempts to phone the n’Kwazi Lodge for directions with no connection, I pulled to the side, rolled down the window and waited for Peter to add more minutes onto his cell service. All was not quiet.
“There’s singing,” I exclaimed before grabbing the camera and exiting.Instead of expected footsteps and distant chatter, I eavesdropped into women singing over a slow drumbeat from a house deep in the bush across the road.
Song did not radiate from just one direction though. It came from everywhere. Different voices, different rhythms; we were surrounded by music. Surreal. Unfortunately, no broadcast camera can record the subtle light given only by stars, and although the video is dark, the audio paints a vivid landscape of Kavango region. Peter and I listened in darkness, but one song stood out and progressively grew louder and louder.
Twenty-some children and adults walked the highway spreading and contracting to the whim of light motor traffic. After finishing one song, the group would immediately start the next. We followed them another kilometer before converging at a roadside mission.
“Our village is ten kilometers from here. We are attending a conference,” the group’s leader explained upon our asking.
These conferences are frequently attended by many tens of church congregations across the area to share songs and ideas over a long weekend of sermon and celebration. Christian—and its various sects—is the primary denomination for Namibian nationals regardless of geographic location.
A Dutch-reform church I wearily attended on my last full day stay at n’Kwanzi is a humble painted brick structure cracking at the seams over a weathered concrete floor. Elder parishioners sit on wooden chairs leaving children to sit on the floor or if available, cement bricks. The attire worn by everyone young or old puts meaning behind one’s Sunday best with respect to the lifestyle. Women wear long colorful dresses, and the men wear suit trousers and a long-sleeve button-down shirt, some with ties and jackets.

Song dominated the service with three choir groups: youth, women’s and men’s. Each choir appeared to compete against the other trying to out-do the former with passion and energy. Regardless of friendly animosity, opposing members would occasional join in another group’s praise.
Concluding the feature length service, parishioners are required to donate $1 Namibian. The use of that money is discussed for hours afterward in a town hall-like meeting. I did not stay long, but not before presenting myself to the congregation.

Theresa, a German schoolteacher on sabbatical, and I pushed our way through a mob of music fans pushing the gate into the Rundu Open Market. We had alre

ady purchased admission and fought to have the faint stamp on our arms seen by police guarding the entrance. At 2:30am, all of us were tired and fed up with waiting for Stanley, a Damara R&B/hip-hop artist to perform after dozens of opening acts.
I spotted the concert poster at a supermarket—surprisingly well stocked and varied—that evening. I had come to appreciate many of the local pop-culture artists loaded onto my iPod before leaving SML, and couldn’t pass on an opportunity to experience a concert in Namibia, especially for Peter’s favorite performer. However, if I knew we wouldn’t see the featured guest on stage until early morning, we all would have opted for a nap and skip many of the weak acts preceding the performance.
“Are we having a good time?” the female MC asked lankily swaying across the scaffold stage to the antsy crowd.
“Peter. Have you seen the movie, ‘Full Metal Jacket’?” I asked. “No.”
“You should rent it. There’s a sleazy hooker that reminds me of this girl on stage.” Short skirt, high heels matching a high-pitched broken word voice with complimenting demeanor, I just waited for her to say, “Five dollar,” and seal the comparison.
“Who are you waiting for? Who do you want to see?” She teased in fashionable “five dollar” stride.
“Stanley!” The crowd answered.
“Okay. We’re going to give you want you want. Here he is … [someone other than Stanley]!”
Oh my two goats.
The Rundu Open Market is the local’s daily fair for food and homemade merchandise. Tonight the small booths were put aside clearing a large space for shockingly couple hundred participants. Surprising in my opinion, but given the number of people hugging the fence I’m guessing unable to afford the $40 Namibian admission charge (~$6 USD), perhaps the crowd is proportionate to the population.
Stanley would disappointingly perform all of maybe six songs to a recorded underscore. We left immediately at his conclusion.

I dropped Peter and Mathieu off at the lodge, a cluster of 12 quaint villas with an open dinning, bar and lounge area designed with

rustic class, and Theresa a short couple kilometer two-track sand road to the old Mayana Lodge. No longer a lodge, it is owned by n’Kwazi and in the process of being remodeled for community projects.
Many of these two-track paths weave in and out of each other leading to homes, the two soccer fields, n’Kwazi and I do not

know where else. “Straight” is a relative term when giving directions on these roads. Many V, and either left or right could be taken as “straight”. I had driven this passage through the sandy bush along the Kavango River a few times now, but that morning “straight” meant left and not right.
Driving some distance before realizing this was not the right course I turned around and followed another road. Not the right one either, I turned around again. Changing direction meant jumping off the tire tracks and into sandy grass fields. Just before completing the maneuver, the driver’s side-rear tire spun and dug itself into the soft soil.
3:30 in the morning and I’m buried in the sand. Happy day. Where am I anyway?
Angola loomed over the river. Sounds quiet. I thought about the Malaria infested mosquitoes piercing my skin—I think I took my vaccination pills yesterday—the Spitting Cobra, Black Mamba and a bad-tempered Puff Adder lurking in the bush—No anti-venom here. Shit. At least there’s a Mopane tree, and I do need to take a piss.
A cow “mooed” past me.
I laughed. We would make light of such exaggerated notions later that day. In fact, everything was plausible, but so is stepping on a Rattlesnake or getting stung by a scorpion back at home.
The waning gibbous moon provided enough light to see most of what I was doing, like shoveling sand and clearing a departure path. I secured the forward hubs, engaged four-low and the rear differential lock; all should be good now. Oh yeah, I need to get out of first gear.
Moving into first gear was not a problem until we received the replacement truck from the car hire several days back. This one, a Toyota, was more sensitive and both Peter and I (moreso me) would stall a number of times.
Repeated attempts and shoveling found the vehicle’s bumper flush with the ground. I was digging myself deeper and deeper into the trap.
“Peter. You enjoying your sleeping safari?” I asked after a kilometer-long bush walk guided by my GPS. Fortunately for me, I plotted the location of the lodge earlier the previous day.
Peter grunted.
“Would you like to hear some exciting news? … I got stuck in the sand.”
“How bad?” Peter was more awake.
I reluctantly admitted, “Bad enough I hiked here to get help.”
Excavating a path was no longer an option. The vehicle needed to be brought back to level. Peter jacked the vehicle; I replaced the sand under and around the tire. This required more than a couple resets until a wood plank could be squeezed beneath the tire as a solid launch platform. By the time we returned to n’Kwanzi, the sun had breached the horizon and a church commitment I made was less than two hours minus departure.

Namibia - The First

2007-09-06T14:46:00.001-07:00

Peter Nuugonya is a Owambo ranger and guide at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge. He is the father of two children: one on the way through a lodge relationship and the first, a five year-old daughter living with mom 1,500 kilometersaway near the city of Rundu. Peter’s two-week holiday would coincide with my two-week trek throughout northern Namibia and provide a great opportunity to live with his family in Ondangwa then retrieve his daughter before returning to Windhoek.

A seven-kilometer two-wheel track at the conclusion of an eight-hour drive would bring us to a Mopane wood fence under full moonlight.The Mopane tree is as useful as it is common in north-central/western Namibia. Aside for its termite resistantwood, Mopane leaves have medicinal properties. If falling victim to a spitting cobra’s venom, one could have someone chew the tree’s green leaf and spit the saliva mixture into one’s eye. It’s either that or flushing the venom out with urine; Peter experienced the former.
Strangely, spring brings a change of color to the leaves no different than autumn for the maple tree as an example. And with that change, a secreted crust forms on the leaf’s surface that is edible and is referred to as natural chips—tasting like a sweet potato chip.
“This is my home,” Peter announced as we narrowly squeezed the truck through a narrow passage.
The huts—or rooms—are built of clay bricks from soil at the base of meter-plus high, spire-like termite mounds, and the roofs are tightly bound Mopanie twigs or long grasses thatched together over a concave circular frame. The interior is decorated to the person’s tastes or interests, and can resemble a dorm room at one extreme. Peter’s room, though, is the only structure made from concrete brick and sports a tin plate ceiling and bare walls. These village-like homes make up the vast majority of houses through Namibia.
At night, everyone gathers together around a small fire gradually fed by long Umbrella tree branches. The smoke carries a sweet, yet pungent fragrance that is unique to this wood’s character. Peter is the fifth of nine siblings at age 24, with five sisters, the youngest being 13, Josephine, and the oldest, a 32 year-old brother, Philemon, and police chief in Opuwo whom we met on the way to Epupa.“Good evening, sir,” Nelao shook my hand speaking very slowly, as if rehearsed. All children are very polite and proper when formally meeting people, and Nelao, a family kid at age seven, was being trained as such. She seemed nervous though and had a very uncertain posture to her body language.
“You are the first white person to visit our village in seventeen years since the independence,” Peter’s mom explained in Owambo and translated by her eldest daughter, Benny. “They are afraid of you—well, not afraid, but they’ve never seen a white person before,” Benny added.
Nelao and two other younger children sat and stared at me with steady big eyes, Josephine though, would shy away every time I spoke to her.“You can expect a lot of people to tear away when they see you tomorrow. But it’s good because they will learn about the independence in school and they will be able to tell their friends how a white person came to the village and say how different you are.”
Nice.
The now-ruling Swabo political party revolted against colonists from South Africa on the 26th of August in attempt to make Namibia a state of the country. The first bullet against the South Africans began the liberation at a place named Omugurugwombashe. Every year the Namibian president addresses the nation on the 26th, also known as Heroes’ Day. In fact, President Nghifikebunye Bohamba addressed the nation from Eenhana, a small town an hour’s drive north of Ondangwa and east Oshinkango, a border city I tried to get into Angola on Heroes’ Day. I found this out after the fact, and would have visited the festivities instead of being interrogated about filmmaking in the chief border patroller’s office.
“Maybe you will come here and marry a Namibian woman.” Benny continued after I laughed, “It’s not about color, it’s about the person inside. That’s all that matters.”
I agreed. I wonder if I’m being groomed as a sugar daddy, I jokingly thought.
Peter’s mom spoke again and Benny translated, “You can have her daughter; do you want her?” Referring to 22 year-old Beatha.
I’ve been here all of an hour and already been accepted as a potential husband. Not bad for the first white guy in seventeen years, I thought.
Even under the moonlight, I could tell Beatha was blushing. I looked at Josephine; she shied away again.
“Does Beatha agree with that?” I asked. No answer, but the idea would be brought up a few more times into my stay. Maybe Peter’s mom wasn’t joking.
A metal tub was placed in front of me and a bowl of macaroni and fresh chicken is served to Peter and I. I asked why there wasn’t enough for the half dozen or so here.
“Because we don’t eat white food,” someone answered.
“Is that white as in white person food, or white as in the macaroni is white?” I joked as the others ate their “black” meal (maiz meal). Maiz meal: a sticky, thick porridge-like substance made of maiz seed, cooked into a porous cake and eaten like cotton candy for consumption. The meal has a plain taste, but I am told, provides all of the nourishment required by the body. Preparing it is the woman’s task in the mornings. She will sift sand from the seed then pound it to a powder. The women of the house do a fair amount of physical work, as the men maintain the livestock and bring money to the family.
The house has no electricity, nor running water and toilet facilities. Back in the States, we would call this camping—with all one’s personal effects. Water is drawn from a well and balanced in small tubs at the top of one’s head (usually the woman) sometimes a couple kilometers hike to home. The water is not always clean, and is boiled for drinking and cooking, but also to provide warm hand baths. Contrary to what one might think, hygiene is very important. Hands are washed before every meal and baths are taken every couple days.
The village spans many hectares and consists of dozens of homes and families, a community water well, shabeen (shack convenient store and major hangout), and one or more soccer fields made of cleared sand turf and wood goal posts. On the weekends, villages play against each other with teams made up of talent regardless of age. Soccer balls and jerseys are not in abundance, and cleats are a luxury. Children will wrap scrap plastic bags or ragged fabrics bound together by tape or string to fashion a ball. Shirts and skins sometimes define teams, and foot apparel consists of hiking boots, sneakers, sandals, or more commonly bare-feet. I tried all but barefooted and regret not trying.Playing in the sand, or gravel in the case of Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge’s village (identified as the “World’s Greatest Soccer Field in the World” by a local paper), has its advantages and difficulties. I found it easier to lift the ball on a pass or kick, but dribbling is chaotic on the inconsistent surface forcing many pass plays. Superstars shine controlling and protecting the ball, but rely heavily on support. I was pleasantly surprised by the strong team play and communication even with younger players, but given the playing conditions one really has no choice to rely on his teammates.

The sky wants to rain, or at the very least it gives that appearance. A white haze of fine dust mixes with the blue sky to create a concrete gray horizon. Only at the zenith does one know any different. Although this atmosphere extinction drastically dims the sun to a pale maroon orb at dawn and especially dusk, the sky is opaque to many dim stars. There may be a lack of light pollution, but that doesn’t mean anything if the transparency is opaque. And with a waning full moon, I could be in the center of suburbia and know no difference. Perhaps this is the reason for a lack of interest in the stars for many Namibians. An excuse shared by their light polluted counterparts elsewhere, although I found that impression changes when the stars are put into context.
No exception to the white haze is the Etosha National Park. At the heart of north-central Namibia and stretching over 22,000 square kilometers Etosha means “Great White Place” in Owambo for a giant pan at its center. This evaporated delta is not the reason of attraction for most all visitors to Namibia. Etosha is a living wildlife zoo. If the park were a state or country, its many water holes would be major cities teaming with springbok and zebra to elephants, rhinos and much more. By my second day, many species would eventually blend with the scenery in the hunt for more exotic game, like leopards and lions.
Finding a leopard was easy. Actually, spotting one was a case of being in the right place at the right time, and in fact a leopard sighting is rare. Lions are little easier to come by. Tipped by a ranger, we found two sleeping under a tree a short distance from the main road. Sleeping, how interesting is that?
We waited for the road to clear of spectators before trucking into the bush via an unmarked, near inexistent two-wheel track. The GPS coordinates I plotted earlier led us just a couple hundred feet away from the lions. They watched me as I unfolded the tripod from the rear cab window and locked the camera. I would have like to gotten closer, but this would do.
Even at a distance, the growl penetrated my chest hanging from the window like a deep thunder. A sudden noise. One lion sat up and looked at his mate as if asking him, “What should we do about these two?” Simultaneously, both jumped into a defensive posture, barking a much louder thunder. Looked more like they wanted to make a snack out of me.
“Oh shit!” I yelped grabbing the video camera and ducking in the truck. Peter laughed.
“It’s okay, they’re not going to do anything. They’re just letting us know to keep our distance,” Peter explained. “Besides, we’re safe in the car.”
Pitifully, I replaced the camera to record the lions’ trot into the bush.
Etosha National Park has a number of visitor-governing rules. Foremost on that list and reminded at every turn and place of interest is, “Stay in you car.” Michael, a guide at Onguma Resort just outside the visitor restcamp Namutoni told us a story our first night in the park—an opportunity arranged just hours before arrival to visit Onguma and meet with the lodge’s general manager about future video production.
“These Japanese tourists happened by a couple lions resting underneath a tree and decided to prop their video camera on the roof of their vehicle and stand in front of the lions. On the video, you can watch one of the lions stalk one of the tourists and take him out from behind.”
I can only imagine what that might look like on TV. Certainly, I get more than a few laughs replaying my lion footage.

Namibia - Sweets

2007-09-06T13:32:00.001-07:00

“Shit happens, I know that,” I paced behind the truck scowling into Peter’s cell phone. Although cell coverage is available throughout Namibia, it is only found in areas of major population and attraction. Fortunately, Epupa Falls is such an attraction and apparently so was I, as a small crowd of visiting Italians and Epupa natives had gathered to watch and listen in on my phone conversation. I would charge an attraction fee if I could. “If the vehicle needs repair work—like fixing the fuse problem yesterday—fine, I expect that; but what I don’t expect is not being prepared with the right tools to fix a simple thing like a flat tyre. That’s bullshit.”
We were given tools to change a tire, I made sure of that before leaving the car hire, but the jack rod would not connect with the axel and the wheel spanner’s socket was too large for the rim bolts. A rod for our tent sufficed as a replacement to raise the jack; but what good is that if we cannot get the tire off the bearing?
“What if this happened on the Kunene River Road? We’d be screwed with kilometers of nothing but four-wheel drive track in either direction. I’m glad it happened here than out there, but that still doesn’t help us.” Hitting the 96-kilometer, rough-going Kunene River Trail would be impossible this late in the morning and I made this very clear to the rental clerk as the reason I rented a 4x4 truck before searching and finding replacement tools from a local couple.
Nonna and Charles are residents of the Epupa Falls area. Charles, a spitting image of Captain Morgan, is a geologist with mines 400 kilometers south of us in Damaraland around the town of Uls and home to the Damara tribe, and elsewhere in Koakland, a region home to the Herero and the tourist-popular Himba tribes, as well as the Epupa Falls. We would unwittingly pass Charlie’s blue sodomite mine the following day in route to Peter’s home village near Ondangwa, another 400-plus kilometers east along the Angolan border.The couple also shares a special relationship with the Himba people. Only a selected few white people are currently accepted into a Himba tribe. This honor requires years of building trust and can easily be taken away. Such an acceptance offers the opportunity to participate in meetings, weddings and funerals, the latter two are of great significance bringing members from great walking distances for one to two weeks of straight partying. Disappointingly, the Namibian government does not recognize Himba marriage, but that will not stop the matrimony plans of Nonna and Charles.
The Himba are considered one of the last remaining traditional tribes in Africa. Painted in iron oxide from head to toe as a mosquito repellant, their appearances are unique to Africa and are endemic to northwestern Namibia and adjacent Angola. Settlements are first seen northward approaching the town of Opuwo.
I was writing when Peter stepped on the brakes looking through the side-view mirror. “Himba!”
Mistakenly classified as a village, the small arrangement of SUV-sized thatched-roof huts enclosed by a Mopane wood fence is regarded as a house. Beside the gravel road, three Himba women and two children construct apparel in the shade of a Mopane tree dressed sparsely in beaded necklaces, leather belts and a loincloth. Everything is painted rust red—with exception to a couple necklace bone ornaments—to match their skin. The language spoken is very close to Herero, in fact the Himba were once the slaves of the Heroro many years ago. Peter translated for me.
“They said, if you pay them $30 dollars, they will dress themselves up and you can take pictures of them.”
“Dress up?”
“Put on their traditional necklaces, bracelets.”
Although culturally the Himba remain the same with deep traditions, tourism has brought western product and money into their lives, thus changing their behavior to accommodate the wide-eyed interests of tourists. I’m not gonna lie, I too wanted to meet the Himba after viewing pictures online, but quickly became disinterested after feeling like I paid for a side-show act in the passing circus. The Himba are a people grasping to their traditions in the midst of temptation, and find its members untouched by aspects of the real world is difficult. Although, not far west of Epupa and near inaccessible to outsiders are the only Himbas sterile from outsiders. Many have not seen a white person, let alone a car or cell phone, but the genetic pool is running shallow and time is their greatest threat.

Roads in Namibia are labeled according condition maintenance. “C” roads are sub-major gravel highways in good riding condition, and the majority “D” roads equate to some of the best forest service roads in northern Arizona. A small percentage tarred “B” highways connect the few major cities/areas, and intersecting everywhere are two-wheel tracked paths joining villages and homes.
One can imagine a number of hazards facing motorists on these gravel roads. In fact, a week into my stay at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge, a family rolled their vehicle several times on the adjacent C27 highway; both children walked away, however both parents suffered major injuries. Even with a (gravel) landing strip a mere few kilometers from the acc

ident site, twenty-fours hours would pass before the couple would receive proper medical attention. Needless to say, the best way to survive an injury is to not get hurt in the first place. I’m no stranger to injury, but at the time of writing this, a few mosquito bites are my only harm.
On any given day or night, you will pass more pedestrians walking the highway than vehicles—a tremendous luxury. Even bicycles are few in number, and combined these are an example of the poverty level throughout rural Namibia. Children rush into the path of moving vehicles, sometimes not expectantly. This is a hazard on both the gravel roads, as well as on the tarred highways.
“Give me cap. Give me book,” one boy asked at the window, but for resale and not for himself.
“Sweets?” is commonly begged when turning down a child. Seldom is money asked, but that doesn’t mean you cannot have your windshield washed without notice and haggled for compensation. Negotiation is an art taught a young age through the sale of semi-precious stones to handmade trinkets.
“Do you ever feel bad or these kids?” I asked Christopher, a 12 year-old transplant from Germany as we washed our dishes inside the Omarunga campsite at Epupa Falls.
“No.”
“Even when they ask for things?”“Don’t give them any money,” he sternly stated. “They’re rich. Their family has many goats and cattle.”
“What about pens or sweets?”
“That’s okay.”
Pens can be hot bartering tools if you just don’t hand them away like I did. Although these families may be rich with livestock, school supplies are up to the families to supply their respective learners. Money that is brought in through the sale of items like livestock, donations, or a family member—usually one or both parents—working away from home. Thismoney is in the form of tens of U.S. dollars, not so much hundreds let alone thousands.

Peter and I would camp two nights on the banks of the crocodile infested Kunene River feeding the Epupa waterfalls. During dry seasons, the water is shallow with very few pools to swim, or at the very least dunk your head under. The overflow area is used by the locals to bath and wash laundry, as well as provides drinking water after boiling. The setting is very “African”, especially with 3pm sunlight refracting in the mist of the falls forming a near 180-degree rainbow on its side.

The Kunene River marks the international boundary between Angola and

Namibia. One gets a great view of the many tertiary falls from the Namibian side, but Angolans got the lion’s share for playing in the showers—a tourist attraction unexploited by the foreigner unfriendly country.
Angola has come along way in the last eight or so years politically. Civil unrest is finished, although many parts of the country are ravaged by war, and land mines remain a problem in certain remote regions. Tourism is slowly making headway in this natural resource rich yet poverty stricken country, where a man can be a financial mogul one day and dirt poor the next.
Namibian nationals are free to cross the border legally, as many families transcend the borders. Even as a foreign national, I can cross into Angola with a purchased visa, but unlike in Namibia where English is the national language (like just recently in the States), Portuguese is native tongue and little effort is made to accommodate outsiders, after all tourism is an unnecessary industry when the land is loaded with diamonds, gold and oil, among other things.

Namibia - “Oh my two goats!” (Reader's Discretion Advised)

2007-08-21T16:32:00.001-07:00

Eilene annunciated each word with a soft deliberate emphasis through her Namibian accent. “I know you will love it. You are a passionate person and this dance is very passionate.”
She put my right hand on her left hip, took my left hand into hers and closed the gap between us alternating leg space. One of two Busters at the lodge, Eileen is one of the few women I’ve met with a flare for both city life and the outdoors. She surprises me some nights hosting in snappy sharp attire, but during the day could pass as a ranger.“In Angola this is very popular. It would be good for you to learn it.”
Our two bodies churned in sync with precession around a tight circle. The music’s pulsating beat reminded me of Latin dance woven into African R&B. She let go of my hand and took my side. I did the same.
Admittedly, I have a sense of rhythm in the edit room, but that sense does not translate well on the dance floor. As a result, I try to avoid the ritual like a certain day of the year, yet here I find myself dancing on my birthday—a birthday both Eileen and I share together.
The night was well into the wee hours of the morning. Many of the staff had retired to their rooms for an early work call. The few occupying the entertainment room of the staff village down their wine or beer with purpose. Wemba refilled a butter container with white wine and drank it like soup from a bowl. I sipped my Windhoek Lager from the bottle. Openers, like drinking glasses and cups, are scarce in the village; here we pop bottle caps with our teeth. I was still nursing my first, though. The combination of 80 proof hard liquor, red wine and beer (in that order) left a sour twist in my stomach, even though I had very little of each.
“I have the dance on DVD. We should practice it some more before you leave,” Eilene offered. “You will love Kizomba.”
We would dance it many more times along with a little “sak-ka, sak-ka, sak-ka”.

Sky transparency and seeing the next night at the observatory was some of the worst of my then three weeks at the lodge. Wind kicked fine dust and smoke from inland grass burnings had settled in the atmosphere above drastically reducing contrast. On a good day, mountains thirty kilometers away are clear as crystal, but today were near extinguished. At night, the stars and Milky Way disappeared more than 15 degrees above the horizon and the sky had a general murkiness whereas I could sometimes see the zodiacal light span 180 degrees (reflected sunlight from dust left after the creation of our solar system). Usually, atmosphere stability compensates with sharp star images, but tonight seeing was near absolute shit. I know most guests aren’t keen on the difference and just happy to look through a telescope, but I feel bad—like I can do something about it.

“Frank, Jaryd has two questions for you,” Anna, six year-old Jaryd’s mom asked me standing beside the telescope. Her demeanor and British accent reminded me of J.K.K. Rawling. I don’t know why, I never met the lady. Maybe it was partly because their family is the fifth group passing through the lodge showcasing the author’s final “Potter” installment.
“What are your questions, Jaryd?”
Jaryd smiled and hid behind his mom’s leg.
“Last night,” Anna began, “We were looking at the stars through the sky window and Jaryd wondered how old you were. I asked him what he thought, and he thought you were a teenager.”
“Well, sad to say, I turned 29.” I can’t believe I openly acknowledged my birthday. “What’s your second question, Jaryd?”
“Does God live on Jupiter?” Mom answered.
I knew religion would be brought up sometime.
“Well, Jaryd,” I said squatting down across from him. “Don’t you think God lives inside you?”
“No, Jesus lives in me.”
I bowed my head down in stupidity. “Yes, okay, but do you think God watches over everything?”
“Yes.”“So look up.” Everyone gazed up at the Milky Way bridging overhead. “Don’t you think God is in everything you see?”
“No, that’s too much space.”
I slapped my brow. Next object through the telescope before closing shop.

I shielded myself against the cold wind with a thick blanket from the seat behind me. The only vehicle available at the lodge was one of the two safari Land Cruisers. The open vehicle has two additional rows of seats on an incline to the rear of the truck and is used to transport guests on scenic and game drives. There is a small space behind and below the last row for refreshments, specifically gin and tonic.
The vehicles are surprisingly stable for passengers on rough 4x4 climbs and dune excursions and handle very well with power and maneuverability. I had driven one earlier that day with Bryan, Sossusvlei’s other general manager to pick-up a scared guest from a quad biking trip.
Automatic transmissions in southern Africa are about as common as stick shifts in the States. I learned this in Jo-burg the night before arriving in Namibia and setup driving lessons at the lodge before departing on my 2200+ kilometer self-drive.
The party had started well before Bryan and I could arrive—an encore event of greater magnitude in celebration of Eilene’s and my two birthdays and the visit of the lodge’s previous general manager, Peter. I was told they were planning to get goat and lamb for the party. Sounded like a big deal … okay.
Most of the staff conveniently congregated by the entertainment room’s entrance, which provided enough light to vaguely see faces through the HD camera. A mix of African R&B and dance (Kizomba) music blasted on repeat from a nearby boom box. I distinctly got the feeling parties like this do not occur often, but when they do it is a distraction to revisit in memory and with friends for weeks until the next.

“Sak-ka, sak-ka, sak-ka,” a dozen or so chanted in a circle to a performer in the middle (“Sak” = “Down”). He or she would squat as low as possible while still trying to dance. The lower down, the more cheers. Here is an example of how hockey has proved some personal benefit off the ice.
I made way to the kitchen. Brechnef, butler by day/village party chef by night, cut and snapped his way through lamb joints. He dropped the pieces into a large pot of boiling water.
“You’re going to have a traditional African meal,” he told me and the camera. “Simple: water, salt, and onions if you have it. That’s it. Very simple.”
The kitchen services the entire village and is no larger than a small bedroom. It is self serve with one stove, oven, sink and refrigerator. The area would never pass inspection in the States. Poorly insulated and open to the elements, everything has been worn well past warranty, and no one seems to care, unless someone inadvertently turns off the lights through a switch dangling from the wall.
I put the camera down and tore into a chunk of lamb from the pot. Brechnef laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“Nothing.” He walks a

way still laughing.
“Brechnaf, what is so damn funny?”
“You’re an American. You eat with a plate and fork, not with your hands.”
“Are there any plates or forks?”
“No,” he lied through his distinctive, broken tooth smile. In fact, there are a few.
“Then I eat it African style.” …And cleaned the bone to commented surprise.
I found other foreigner preconceptions, especially Americans, have lent way to a few inside jokes. Most commonly mocked and derived from game drives is the popular American saying, “Oh my gosh,” but exaggerated to sound like, “Oh … My … Goush.” This would soon evolve into another expression several days later.

“When you go to Peter’s village, I don’t know what expectations they may have for you—and you should ask Peter—but instead of giving money I suggest buying some groceries for the family,” Peter Dunning, former lodge GM recommended to me over managers’ lunch.
Gift giving for the sake of gift giving is difficult for me, in particular with money. Although one could make an argument to money’s versatility, it’s still hollow with meaning (depending on the circumstance, of course). Even before visiting Sossusvlei, I considered what I would bring the staff as a kind gesture. Previous resident astronomers handed out DVDs, clothes and candies to the staff; I on the other hand brought one movie, “Miracle”, and that was in conjunction with a hockey stick. No, I was sadly content to leave a sizable tip unless another option would present itself.
At the staff village that afternoon, the camera and I followed Belinda, Monica and Hilde as they decorated themselves in traditional tribal dress attire—a special gift for Peter before leaving to Tanzania. Several layers of underwear are worn to fill a colorful costume that can rival a wedding dress. The waist is built to blossom outward like a flower and flow with rhythm when in motion. The bust is also built into proportion. As Monica put it, “Making the dunes.”

I walked with Belinda across the village and past the braai (African for barbeque) where my attention was captured by four pairs of hooves and the heads of a lamb and goat.

“Oh my gosh! When you said you got goat and lamb for the party, I didn’t know you meant literally a goat and a lamb.” I also didn’t know why I was naively surprised. It’s not like one can drive to the corner supermarket and hit up the meat section for party delight here; after all the nearest convenient store is a Petrol station two hours away.

“What are you going to do with the heads?”
“Cook them.”
“Cook them?” Nothing goes to waste. “Everything? Brains, eyes and all?”
“Yup, eyes are really good in stew.”
I thought he was joking; but no, he wasn’t. At dinner I thought about what Peter said, my feelings on gift giving, and the following morning stated my intentions.
“Jafet,” I called to one of the party’s organizers. “I want to buy a goat and lamb.”

“Six hundred,” Vitalis, a ranger and Wemba’s older brother explained to me from the inside one of the many goat pens. We spent the better part of that Tuesday afternoon farm hopping and here was the only seller with available goats—the preferred meat. I would buy two and skip the lamb.
“Three hundred each. Is that a good deal?” I asked following Johannes, a young new hire at the lodge stalking a small pack through the camera viewfinder. At an exchange rate of 7:1, the total damage would amount to roughly $85 USD—the price of two high dollar plates at an upstanding restaurant back at home. Comparatively speaking, I was getting a good value to my dollar; although I got the impression this sale was a little high.
Vitalis stepped in from the fence, “I tried; he won’t go any lower.”
Johannes lunged for one goat, but missed. The evading pack rushed toward Vitalis who knowingly snatched the leg of an unsuspecting escapee; it cried in defeat. The charge kicked a plume of dust against the setting sun washing the setting’s picture with a copper-like luster creating the illusion of warmth on an otherwise chilly evening.
That night would in fact be one of the coldest of my five weeks at the lodge (-6 Celsius). A large number of us huddled around the fire, while the meat cooked on the braai and boiled in the kitchen. A large stainless steal bowl exchanged hands with the first cooked meats. I took my piece and finished it without thought.
“Frank, come here and drink this,” Belinda instructed.
“What’s this?” I asked swirling the brown broth in a plastic blue cup.
“Juice from the lung and liver.”
I gave back the cup. “That’s okay.”
“You must, this is Africa,” Belinda insisted. “You just ate it, so come now.” She lifted the cup to my mouth.
“You mean to say I just had the goat’s lung and liver. Oh, shit.”
She laughed and announced what I had just admitted to the crowd. More amusement and now everyone are eyeing me. “Now drink,” she persisted.
I sipped it.
Each tribe has a different take on the slaughter and preparation of goat, and what I was experiencing is the compromise of many cultural influences.
One method of slaughtering is simple suffocation by cutting into the throat. For the Herero, a knife is thrust into the jugular vein and the animal is left to bleed out. Skinning and gutting also have set rituals depending on whom you talk to.
As for the cooking portion, certain organs are cooked together, while others are cooked separately. What I couldn’t get answered is the liver’s significance. With some cultures, specific family members receive particular organs in order of importance—the liver being foremost. Which family member gets what depends on the situation or again whom you talk to.
“Dinner is served,” Brechnef announced.
I was asked to lead the line and selected my cuts of bone-in meat from different bowls. Texturally, boiled goat’s meat is softer and juicy, but braai goat’s meat taste is sharp with flavor. Both are good on their own merits.
I sat in front of the fire and peered inside a small black cauldron, “What’s in here?”
“Endesins,” Brechnef answered.
“I’m sorry, come again. Endesins?”
“Intestines,” someone clarified dumping a spoonful of fatty-looking narrow tubes into their plastic bin. The stomach, large and small intestines are thoroughly disemboweled, cleaned and boiled separately. Apparently, their respective digestive enzymes and acids alter the way meat and others organs tastes, but provide a distinctive flavor onto itself that is quite popular.
My stomach went sour. “Oh my goats … Oh my two goats,” I grimaced, and in unison, the dozen or so immediately in earshot repeated, “Oh my goats … Oh my two goats,” with hilarity.

Whereas, “Oh my gosh,” is an expression of surprise, “Oh my two goats,” has replaced the word, “shit,” as the evolved definitive expression of complete dismay, pathetic disappointment or utter shock. I have a sense of pride and accomplishment hearing those four words spoken with the sincerity of unconscious usage. Yes, I smile and nod with satisfaction at the gift I left Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge that transcends beyond the value of money or material possessions, albeit at the expense of two goats whose intestines are now digested irony.

Namibia - Nebuloso!

2007-08-04T14:59:00.001-07:00

My second night at SML was spent on a cot in the observatory staring at the Milky Way’s center overhead, the rising Small and Large Magellanic Clouds to the south, and Alpha and Beta Centauri riding the Southern Cross setting in the west; the three major astronomical reasons to visit the southern hemisphere. I never get tired looking at the night sky, but here below the equator, the grandeur of our galaxy and surrounding universe is striking, inspirational and above all, humbling.
The observatory is not in a common sense a white dome, but an enclosed round deck above the lodge and villas. The stone wall rises just high enough to shield stray light, but low enough for the telescope, a 12-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassagrain, to view most anything rising over the horizon. Attached to the observing deck is the resident astronomer’s office: a small room of basic observing books and atlases, posters and portraits, and telescope accessories.
I find guests’ reactions to the night sky both appreciative and saddening, especially when a number of them—more than I would expect—rank the experience near the top of their trip’s highlights. Appreciative in that I’m very happy to bestow the wonder on those unfamiliar with the heavens, but it’s that unfamiliarity that is saddening. For many, they have traveled thousands of miles to see something—southern hemisphere skies aside—that should be accessible any where in the world. But as population booms and cities expand, light pollution is endemic for everyone in those areas.
“What is that? Is that a cloud?” One lady asked pointing overhead.
“That is the Milky Way, and in fact that ‘cloud’ is actually made up of billions of stars.”
“Oh my God, I’ve never seen that before.”
One could laugh at her naivety, but it’s not her fault per se she’s lived her life sheltered under a light dome. Then fires a shooting star and the excitement rises.
“Oh, a shooting star. Make a wish.” Minutes later another one followed by another. “Wow, is this normal?”
“Typically from a dark location you should see anywhere from three to five meteors an hour,” I answer on a nightly basis, but let them wish a way, though. God only knows my wishes should have came true several thousands (yes, thousands) shooting stars ago.
I run each observing sessions with a lesson on stellar evolution, beginning with nebulae (clouds of mostly hydrogen gas), to open star clusters (the result of those nebulae), to binary stars, planets, then stellar death in the form of planetary nebulae and supernovae remnants, sporadically jumping into tangents.
After a couple weeks of doing the same “dog and pony show”, one would imagine I should be getting tired of it, but the truth is a number of the visitors take a keen interest, which only fuels my passion.

The Linke family is from San Francisco, and the first American family visiting the lodge during my stay. They arrived to the same warm welcome every guest receives. The staff and managers congregate at the entrance and shake the hands of each party’s member. They are ushered to the panoramic bar/lounge area overlooking the valley plains and nearby sand dunes where lemonade is served and lunch if desired.
Trey, 14, in his Abercrombie apparel and sporting aviator sunglasses struck me as the typical stuck-up kid. Tonight will be an easy night, I thought.
I arrive at the observatory about an hour past sunset, just as the sky turns to astronomical twilight, but just before Saturn and Venus set in the west. I uncover the telescope, target my two alignment stars and casually observe until guests arrive. Before completing the scope’s alignment, though, a flashlight reflects off the observatory’s entrance and Trey pops up from around the corner.
We exchange “hellos” and I ask where is the rest of his family.
“They’re not coming. I’m the only one who has interest in this.”
I should know better not to judge a book by its cover.
Trey and I spent an hour cruising through the sky before his Mom ordered him to come to dinner.
“He would stay here all night with you if I let him,” she would tell me after dinner. I laughed and the next night found myself at the eyepiece with Trey, his little cousin and family friend awake at three-in-the-morning on one of our coldest nights (just above freezing).
The moon was quickly approaching full and its reflected light severely hinders any decent observing with the exception of planets and bright star clusters, but at this phase sets in wee hours of the morning—motivation for early observing, and unlike other observing sessions, this wasn’t the same “dog and pony show”, but a real observing session complete with faint deep sky objects.
Not more than a couple nights later, I would have another surprise.

Although English is the predominant language of Namibia, not every guest speaks the language.
I had just arrived from a game drive late that afternoon and the sun had already set by the time we pulled up to the lodge. Brechnef, the day butler/bartender met me by the doors.
“Frank, you have guests going to the observatory. They are walking up right now.”
Shit. I scaled the mountain bypassing the path to meet an Italian family sitting patiently beside the telescope, except for young Camilla blazing her torch (flashlight) under her face. She stood at the entrance waiting for me and later would follow everywhere I went.
“Her Grandfather was here three years ago and he wants Camilla to see the stars,” the Mom explained to me in broken English. The Grandfather, for the most part, sat in the corner and watched his family at the eyepiece, occasionally sneaking a look for himself.
Everything from telescope operation to astrophysics was translated to the family through the Mother. I couldn’t understand exactly every word used, but just from the terminology, I knew my explanations were being translated near verbatim, even to six year-old Camilla. I would try to pick-up a few words and directly communicate with some success, but the view through the eyepiece was enough description.
The following night, only Camilla and her Grandfather joined me in the observatory.
“Jupiter and nebuloso,” Camilla politely requested, dragging with short strides the step stool to the telescope.
“Saturno and Venus?” I asked, lifting one end and helping.
“Yes … Saturno.”
I smiled, “What about star clusters?”
Camilla looked at her Grandfather. “Cluster luminoso.”
“Yes, cluster luminoso,” Camilla affirmed, but nebulae appealed greater.
I skipped a lot of the lecture and just jumped objects—the Swan, Lagoon, Trifid, Eta Carina, and then Centaurus A...
“Poco nebuloso,” she said of the small faint fuzzy.
“No. Galaxia.”
She gave me a blank expression. With the laser pointer, I outlined the Milky Way. “Grande galaxia.” Pointed to the telescope, “Poco galaxia.”
“Oh, se!” She explained it to her Grandfather, but I have no idea what came across in the comparison.
At dinner, Camilla’s mother thanked me and said Camilla must decide if she wants a horse or a telescope, but thinks she’s too young for a telescope yet.
“I was eight when I used my Dad’s old refractor, and ten when I joined an astronomy club. Camilla can have a telescope.”

Namibia - Black Chef/White Chef

2007-08-03T06:19:00.003-07:00

“Are you coming tonight?” Papa Wemba asks.
I look at the time and the crowd of guests finishing desert. “Not tonight. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night. But tomorrow.”
“Okay, that’s alright.”
Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge staffs a little more than thirty employees from on-site rangers to kitchen help. Most everyone lives a short mile’s walk around the mountain at a staff village, although seldom does anyone walk to it. The village is a humble, but well-off example of rural living not just here in Namibia, but throughout Africa. The staff and some of their spouses live out of small adjacent bedrooms with a community bathroom, kitchen and laundry services. The five rangers share a separate living structure, and the manager has his own house.
There is no nearby school, although the oldest child is Mark at 4 and is the managers Vernon and Esmerelda Swanepoel’s eldest child. The village is very much a small community, and its residents as much as by their parents bring up the children.
“What’s that?” Mark asked me referring to Windhoek’s best beer in my hand.
“A drink.” I answered, and with my finger underlined the word, lager. “La-ger.”
“La-ger.”
“Great. Esmerelda would be proud to know her son’s first word he could read is ‘lager,’” Vernon laughed.
Mark would be the proud and only owner of the hockey stick I brought to Namibia. He slept with it his first night I am told until Mom and Dad stored it out of reach in fear he would start slashing people with it. I would later teach him the basics a la Slap Shot style.
“This is a hook,” I would hook him. “And no, you do not do that. Very bad.” I held the stick above my head and motioned to beat him with it. “This is a high stick. No good, keep it down like this.”
Mark insisted to play the puck with the toe rather than the stick blade’s body, and after a while began to kick the puck like it were a soccer ball.
Most communities have a soccer field to call their own, usually made of dirt—not grass like we have in the States—with virtually anything to represent goal posts. And like recreation leagues back at home, games are fiercely contended like it were the World Cup and I am promised a game at some point during my visit. I am told, though, inline hockey is rather popular in Windhoek. I’ll have to check that out.
To pass time, team Dominoes is the staff’s game and is taken just as seriously as soccer, slamming the cards (a domino) onto the table and yelling at each other for smart or pathetic plays. After getting the jest, I joined in. My team won seven straight games, but that would be my only claim to fame. There will be other games and more lager.

Three meals are served a day, and both lunch and dinner consist of three courses. Typically a puréed soup, one of two main course selections and desert. I have yet to experience disappointment and have not ate this good consistently since living with my parents eight years ago.
Running the kitchen is Belinda, the head chef and whom I just recently met upon her return from holiday, Papa Wemba, a Zimbabwean who’s brother Vitalis is a ranger, and Shinkago (a.k.a. Black Chef). Additional hands include Ambrosh and Kabila. Everything entertaining at the lodge takes place in the kitchen and is my hang out destination when not on a drive or filming.
One relaxed night after dinner, Shinkago proudly displayed a tall white hat that he had sewn together. “I am Black Chef!” he proclaimed.
His previous adornment was a stapled paper cylinder, which fit snuggly on my head. Shinkago laughed.
“Frank. I am Black Chef and you… you are White Chef!”
“And I can whip together a mean dish too,” I explained to a curious Belinda and staff. “First I take two slices of bread,” I enacted all of this, “spread one with peanut butter and the other with jelly, then bring the two together. C’est magnefique.”
Smiles all around.
“But for you Belinda, I got something real special. I’ll add sliced banana,” I made a dicing motion with my hands, “and honey … Toasted—White Chef’s special!”
“Banana and honey? Hmm, that is different. You can make me this now.”
I elicited the help of the kitchen staff to gather the necessary ingredients and completed two sandwiches, one to Belinda and the second to both Esmerelda, who was fighting a cold, and Ilze, the new general manager.
“This is nice,” Belinda praised.

Although a few families live at the staff village, many employees are a parent working far from home to support their parents, spouse and children. The expense of travel, even across the country—not much larger than the state of Texas—is so great that many have not seen their kids in a couple years, leaving the grandparents and community to bring up the child.
Papa Wemba is thirty years old, passionate, loyal and caring. Wemba is also the comic relief, but has softer side. He is married with two kids, a 13 year-old son and a 3 year-old daughter, both living in Zimbabwe. Just shortly before I leave, his wife will move into the village and also work at the lodge. He has not seen his children in two years, although speaks to them every weekend over the phone.
One afternoon instead of hitching a ride with one of the employees, I hiked to the staff village. The mile long trail took me over the lodge’s mountain, past the water tanks and down a ragged dirt road to the encampment. For the first time here, I felt isolated in a different world. Walking on an empty road leading to seemingly nowhere have that effect.
Wemba showed me to his quarters; a single covered window and open door provide the only light. There are two beds, a night table and attached bathroom. He has two computer printed pictures on his wall, one of a soccer match, the other Wemba with a friend. I asked him a stupid question as he put on Mark’s soccer cleats, “Do you miss your kids.”
His eyes dropped and his body language softened. “Oh, yes. I miss them very much. I think about them every day.”
“Why don’t they live here with you?”
“No. They need to go to school.”
I sat on the only chair and tossed Mark the soccer ball out the front door, thinking about what Esmerelda and I talked about not much earlier. This is a fact of life for much of the rural working population. And rural is pretty much everywhere.
“Is your son a good student?”
“Yes. He’s very intelligent like his father,” Wemba laughed and paused, “Yeah, he is a good kid.”
“Does he know what he would like to do after school?”
“Nah … he’s too young to know such things. At school he’ll learn about all things and decide.”
I asked if he would like to see his son be a doctor, or something of that sort. He thought that would be nice, but I got the feeling that would be unrealistic.
Wemba went to shower and I played soccer with Mark. We kicked the ball back and forth over the rocks. Today was probably the most attention Mark had gotten during the day all week, especially since his best friend, Chinode, was away for a couple weeks. He cried after Wemba and I left.

After a good deal of peer pressure and the offer of a limited-time 0% interest American Express business card, I purchased Panasonic’s new HVX200 camera. Needless to say, the purchase of this camera was a great expense, especially without a definitive project in mind, but in short, it is the best high definition camera in its price class and robust enough to handle most anything.
I read an article a while ago online about the increasing fear in our society. Without going into specifics, the author made a point that struck me as very true. Generally, city people are afraid of rural areas, and the rural population is afraid of the city. Afraid of what exactly? Attacked by an animal, perhaps. Mugged by a criminal, maybe. More specifically it is fear of the unknown, and that fear is heightened by the movies we watch, the news we envelop, and the stories we read.
Now, there is truth in those stories. Bad things happen, the world is at war and elephants pin people with their foot and rip off their limbs (apparently this happened at the park I’m camping at for three nights). It’s not safe out there. But, where is it truly safe? The feeling of safety is in some part a function of comfort.
Before leaving, the jokes about how I would die painted an interesting picture of the beliefs of others and the continent I am to visit. Mauled by a lion. Shot at by rebels. Contract HIV. Getting injured in the middle of nowhere. All of which are possible, especially the latter. But it is interesting how the media has influenced our perception of people and locations, and to a substantial degree, our level of comfort and latitude for flexibility.
On the flip side to all that, many have a different perception of Africa. In the case of southern Africa: a vast savanna home to grazing giraffes, rhinos charging through the brush and lions chilling in the shade of a phantom tree. There is also a culture alien to what we experience in the States: bushman walking barefoot on sizzling hot sand stalking prey, or tribes dancing and singing to pounding drums at a giant campfire. These are true as well, but there is a middle area between the contrasting extremes, the story of everyday people providing for their family in a remote, yet exotic part of the world. How is their life different? Similar? And is there anything others can learn about their own life and what is important?

I’m sure to get plenty of stock HD wildlife footage, but I think the story here is about the people we never see in a land of contrast. A story that’s not sad, but inspiring.

Namibia - Missionaries, Bribery and a Party Truck

2007-08-03T06:14:00.001-07:00

I purposely kept awake the night before leaving for Namibia, hoping 24 hours of sleeplessness would make for an easier purported 29-hour transit to the southern Africa country. An uncooperative suitcase, flat tire on the 202 freeway, and a snail’s paced line through security brought me to the gate minutes before boarding closed.
For two-thirds of my stay, I will be the resident (amateur) astronomer at the Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge (SML) before trekking solo for two weeks through northern Namibia. Loneliness is a definite consideration, especially traveling through a foreign—African—country, and for sure I would enjoy the company of another, but since leaving Phoenix early Monday morning, I have been anything but alone. I shouldn’t be surprised, as almost every unaccompanied outing has introduced new friends. This transit was no different, and a little adversity helped.
The Delta itinerary to Windhoek, Namibia includes a plane transfer in Atlanta, Georgia, a re-fueling stop at Dakar, Senegal, and another transfer onto South African Airlines in Johannesburg, South Africa. I would manage some sleep, on the 19-hour flight to Johannesburg.
Seated beside me was Natalie, a cute university sophomore with her southern accent, tiny glasses, soft white skin and strawberry-blonde hair. Throughout the flight she would participate in song and banter with her fellow church-mates. Everyone I met was either a South African national or on a humanitarian mission of sorts. No vacationers, including myself I suppose.
Natalie and her twenty-plus member Botswana-bound group will provide aide to one of the many local AIDS orphanages. AIDS is of pandemic proportions throughout Africa and unfortunately, children are an unpremeditated victim of the disease most having been born with HIV. Many are orphaned early in their lives after family members pass or abandonment. Many organizations exist to support these children over the short course of their lives, providing food and care, but mostly hope.
I don’t quite understand the word “hope” in the circumstance of dealing with AIDS, but I do understand the necessity for love. Missionaries contribute everything from finances, manual labor, nursing and compassion. They originate from churches, charitable organizations or are simply righteous individuals. These people are a child’s only hope for survival, as local and national governments have decidedly chosen to ignore the problem due to economic or social woes—another rampant illness throughout the majority of African countries. Namibia is politically stable at this time, but like elsewhere on the continent much of the population is impoverished.
An hour’s cumulative delay in Atlanta and Dakar left three others and myself no time to meet our connecting flight to Windhoek (pronounced Vin-took) and were rebooked on a flight late morning the following day. This would mean missing my charter flight to the Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge and a night’s stay in Johannesburg. First things first, though; what about the checked baggage?
“There are a lot of bags. It would take a lot of time to locate and retag them,” the South African Airlines attendant informed the four of us—an older inter-racial couple from Colorado and Jeremy McLaughlin, a 23-year old wrestler from Oregon State University.
“How will they make our flight tomorrow morning if they are not retagged?” I asked.
“I will look and see what I can do,” she kindly offered, left her desk and returned an hour later empty handed. “I’m sorry, I did not find your bags.”
“What do you mean you did not find our bags? Did they arrive from Atlanta? Can you please look again?”
“There are so many bags. It’s a lot of work.”
No shit, really? I thought. What are you doing now aside for sitting at your desk and bitching to your associate about wanting to date a white boy? (Later in subsequent conversation I was asked, “Do you like chocolate?”)
“I know it’s a lot of work,” I acknowledged, “but would you please keep looking? Can I buy you a drink?”
A spark.
“Oh yes! A drink would be very nice. Yes, buy me a drink.”
After four cans of Coca-Cola (one to the girl and her cheeky male associate, and three to the X-ray security staff for tolerating my several passes through the checkpoint), she found one of each of our two checked bags. I would buy the attendant another Coke to find the rest of our luggage—each can costing $2 USD.
Finding a Delta agent for hotel and transportation would be another ordeal. Jeremy took charge on this, and after three hours—conveniently and coincidentally at the same time our bags were found—enter Colin, a young British airport liaison for the airlines specializing in handling passenger relations. Since arriving, he was aware of our situation and had already mobilized an effort to take care of our needs, a pleasant change in service, and an intriguing conversationalist on the current social state of South Africa.
Fifteen years ago marked the prison release of Nelson Mandela and a conclusion to apartheid, a political system in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s that separated the different peoples living there and gave particular privileges to those of European origin. Since then, a state of affirmative action is in place granting employment opportunities to those of race over skill or education. Colin, university educated in computer programming, explains he is where he is now due to the over-supply of computer programmers by unqualified technicians.
Delta would cover a night’s stay at a rather nice hotel, plus unlimited food expense and services—not that we had much time to take advantage of those accommodations. Jeremy and I would share a room, spending a great deal of time drawing comparisons to past travel experiences and future aspirations.
Involved in the church, Jeremy has traveled quite extensively since late in his teens, from two home-building projects in tsunami ravaged areas of Thailand to three months in Namibia working at an AIDS orphanage. Unlike past undertakings, he is traveling alone for a month to develop a wrestling program in north-central Namibia. (Kind of like me bringing ice hockey to a country with no ice, but I think he’ll have a better chance of success.)
Jeremy is quite different from other missionaries I’ve met. He is a self-driven leader with an intense worth ethic, uncanny flexibility and a fearless, savvy attitude. He has experienced cultures and places in this world few have explored or paid great money to witness. His only expense: good will and hard work. I question whether I could do the things he has accomplished; nevertheless he’s an inspiration for a higher standard of self.

I started to pace. Windhoek airport reminded me of Scottsdale airport, but with commercial jets. Jeremy had accumulated all three of his checked bags, and I with only one of my two. The same luggage on the stile had cycled through with no additions and our commuting plane was being be taxied to the runway with a new batch of passengers. I always hear of missing luggage stories, and never think it’ll happen to me. Well, why not this time? And why not happen in a foreign country? Fortunately, I had nothing of real value in the case, only all of my clothes, astronomy and camping gear, and my digital still camera (I carried-on the HD camera).
Jeremy left baggage claim to find his ride and notify the CC Africa driver of my present situation. Meanwhile, I met with Tuyiimo, a pleasant lady with little good news.
“There has to be a reason why your suitcase did not make this flight, but your other checked bag did,” Tuyiimo deduced. “What? You had a camera inside? That is why you did not get your bag. Jo-burg is very bad about taking possessions. You will get your luggage, but will be very lucky if nothing was taken.”
Great. Later that day, and as if I needed more good news, I would open my one received checked bag to find a shattered leg joint to my HD camera’s tripod. Fortunately, the hockey stick I stuffed with it survived. Whew.
“How are you doing?” the CC Africa driver asked after I bid farewell to Jeremy.
I laughed, “Just waiting for what’s next.”

CC Africa (Conservation Corporation Africa) is continent-wide company with many lodges throughout southern and eastern Africa. Namibia has three lodges, including the one at Sossusvlei—the only lodge with a visiting resident astronomer program. I was taken to the regional headquarters just outside Windhoek proper and greeted by organization administrator, Hazel, and associate, Corrina.
Namibia is everything the movies and wildlife documentaries have portrayed Africa to appear. Architecturally, African-modeled establishments are simple in floor plan with open spaces and many cylindrical walls. By contrast, the European influenced structures consist of long narrow hallways and square rooms. I equate the African design to a panoramic photograph, whereas the western-influenced model is as bland as 4:3 standard definition television. Light and dark browns accompanied by deep reds and olive greens accent sandy tans to mimic the desert’s color scheme. Of course, there’s also African-European hospitality: cordial, proper and prioritized. Service overall is very respectful, and although Africans do a great job separating business from personal among each other, they maintain professional distinction with foreigners and their European nationality managers, unless given an opportunity. Apparently, Namibia is a different story socially than South Africa, but there is still a lot to see and learn.
Windhoek, on the contrary, is like any other small city with its malls and supermarkets, offices and bars. Many people walk the streets named after prominent individuals like Nelson Mandela or Fidel Castro. There are also several small farmers’ markets along crowded areas where one can buy fresh produce or chew on freshly cooked Springbok (a mild tasting venison).
Since I missed the morning charter flight, the new plan was to truck me to Sossusvlei, a five-plus hour drive, over half of which is grated dirt road. The trip would in fact take almost eight hours with stops at the pharmacy, supermarket, KFC, gas station and roadside bushes. What McDonalds is to the US—sadly—KFC is to south African countries. When asked if they liked McDonalds, the answer was, “They have good chips.” (Fries.)
I rode with the SML staff. Nine employees spanning rangers and chefs to butlers and housekeeping, six of which sat with me in the belly of the box truck and the other two to the left of driver all aged somewhere between mid-twenties to early thirties and good friends. Conversation was guided by put-down after put-down, but no “mama” jokes. Ambrosh, a hefty kitchen worker, took the blunt of many jabs. He could of beat all of them down to a pulp, but instead rolled with the punches.
The talk constantly changed from English to Afrikaans, and perhaps some other tribal tongue, which there are many. Note: Swahili is not the only language utilizing clicking noises.
A single loud speaker blasted African folk music including, every now and then, a song from home—rock, like Phil Collins. Rural Africans in general take a lot of pride in their music and would appear to be a bonding element in a community, be it family, school or a live-together staff.
The arrival at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge would conclude almost 58 hours of passage. I was escorted to my villa by the night butler, a short walk along a flagstone path illuminated by red lights (to preserve eyesight dark adaptation) to the end of the lodge’s guest section. As if the southern night sky weren’t enough to excite me, the place where I would be sleeping for most of the next five weeks left me saying, “Wow.”