Happy New Year!

And on January 1, the dry hot season returned.  This is Brett, co-leader of this trip.  Our students are too busy, too tired or too dang hot to blog, so the duty is up to me today.  Since our location is pretty close to the equator (about 70 miles north), the seasons here are marked more by wet/dry than they are by dramatic temperature fluctuations.  October to December, give or take, is a wet season and therefor the temperatures are a bit more mild.  But those days are quickly giving way to the dry season from January through March, and that means hot. It’s not just the temperature; this close to the equator means more intensity, more ultra violet. So from about 12-3pm each day, we take it easy. We play cards, make beaded jewelry items under an acacia tree with our hosts from the women’s village, and make periodic trips to the spigot to dunk our heads under water.

Yesterday was primarily an orientation day to this place. We visited women’s villages, a local primary school, the town center, and about half of the group went on a wildlife drive (e.g., game drive) in Samburu National Reserve and saw elephants, zebras, giraffe, baboons, wart hogs, impalas, gazelles, dik diks (yes, that’s an actual name of an animal here!), and much more.  Overall, it was a day spent setting the stage for our experiences yet to come, to give everyone a chance to get their bearings – geographically and culturally. 

This is our sixth trip with students from CSU. During our preparation meetings in the six weeks leading up to the trip, I tell the group that our mornings will typically start by 7-7:30pm and any one of them will find it hard to stay awake after 10 or 11pm. Without fail, they didn’t believe it would be true. And without fail, last night on New Years Eve, the last of us went to bed at 10:30. We couldn’t fight it anymore. 

Today, New Years Day, started with another group going on a game drive. We bring kids from the local community with us on those drives. Most of these kids ironically never visit the national reserve that is literally across the river from their villages. It’s not a place that can be explored on foot (too many predators!), and very few people around here have vehicles. So, in exchange for bringing local kids with us – which helps lay the groundwork for future community support of the park’s management – they give us a really, really good deal on the entry fees.

We also scoped out our projects for later this week, which include finishing construction of a shade structure for the preschool up the road which gives the kids a place to eat lunch, and we also plan to paint some classrooms and just do some overall upkeep and cleaning up of the school and its grounds.

Our service is done in partnership with people from the community. I believe it’s important for our students and the community members that our visit is not perceived as us here to save any one; that model of the westerners swooping in to save the day can be more damaging than helpful in the long run. So, we have discussions with the community ahead of time about their priorities and desires, and how can they contribute to the work we are asked to do.  I was here in November for some other work, and was able to have those conversations to help set our service agenda.   We begin this service on Thursday in partnership with 32 youth who receive secondary school scholarships from a non-profit that we started a few years ago: the Samburu Youth Education Fund.  Long story short, secondary school is not free in Kenya, and the costs start around $400 annually and go up from there depending on the quality of the school. Well, for most of northern Kenya where the name of the game is subsistence, that cost is prohibitively high. People here work hard, but it’s a part of the world where hard work doesn’t translate into high income. For poverty to end its cycle, education is hugely important. This is a place that has been very good to me over the years, so SYEF was a way to pay it forward and do something to support our fellow humans.   

We’re eating just fine. In fact, we’re eating well. It’s high season for pineapple and mangoes in Kenya, so those are available in abundance in addition to bananas, passion fruit, oranges, papaya and more.  Our staples are typically rice and potatoes, and our protein is coming from lentils and eggs. 

That’s the news from Samburu on January 1. Happy new year to all of you!