Kenya Trip - Day 14 (evening)

Dated: August 17th, 2010 (evening)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

I was going to talk more about what happened with the woman and the buffalo but I think I just need more time to process it. Here's the summary though: Africa will never look like the United States. It's not coincidence that all of the most well-developed countries in the world are in the temperate climates; Africa is mankind's ideal range where human populations are kept in check by environmental factors while these temperate zones allow humans the ability to control and exploit natural resources most efficiently. Here in Africa, people are not so lucky; here the landscape controls them, not the other way around.

We were going to have one of K's mentors, a pastoralist specialist named Bilal Butt, lecture us but apparently a cyclist (carrying several crates of chickens on the back no doubt) swerved in front of Bilal's truck and lost control and Bilal hit him. The man was taken to the hospital by Bilal in Nanyuki but Bilal was unable to come and lecture (he had to deal with legal stuff (sometimes people want to sue in situations like this simply because they see someone is white)). Instead, a colleague of Lamine Sagna's named Jesse Njoka from the University of Nairobi lectured about a project of his concerning sustainable pastoralism.

It's been raining briefly every afternoon since last week but tonight it poured. A, Z, K, and L and the master's students got stuck in the mud next to a semi on the way back from Nanyuki and missed the lecture. My converter got fried so no more charge for my camera but I got to check email.


The hyenas were really bad--S, J, and I waited for an ascari for a while and then braved the darkness alone, even though we were sure we could hear the hyenas in the bushes around us. It was so scary.

Kenya Trip - Day 14 (pm)

Dated: August 17th, 2010 (pm)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

I kind of thought this trip would have gotten its act together already (by 2 weeks in) but this morning was yet another mad scramble to find vehicles and drivers to get us all where we needed to get to. We were about to take off with about 13 of us crammed in 1 Land Cruiser with C (a master's student) driving when Julius pulled up with our new driver Edward. Apparently he was a replacement for one of our old drivers, "No Problem" Ben (known for drinking and driving and had recently been fired for getting into a knife fight at a bar). Edward drove us to the Ranch house to meet with R.

We stopped on the way to see the hippo pool. We could see the hippos' heads and they were huge!


R met us at the Ranch House with wet hair. She spouted logistics for the week at us and then Mike, the ranch manager and a Kenyan-born white, told us the history of Mpala and the area surrounding it. It was very interesting to hear about all of this from someone whose family was originally instated in the country during colonizations. At one point, Mike got pulled away and R encouraged us to look through the old books in the library. The books were very cool because a lot of them had been written/chosen by colonialists and ranchers. The house used to be owned by a prince and princess of Austria (they installed the water turbine in the 30s back when the ranch was a dairy) so many of the materials in the library are very old.

A few students went with the master's students to look at the Ranch House's borehole and water system. They came back saying there was some kind of disturbance in the village (there's a village connected to the Ranch House just as there is one connected to the MRC). They heard that there was a woman who had gone up the hill behind the Ranch House and was screaming and wouldn't come down. R said it might be a snake bite--those are common around here apparently (even though we've yet to see even one snake). Mike came back in and said we were going to see his ranch house (which is called Clifford). We all piled in the car and waited for a bit and then R got word that Mike had been detained by the village woman situation so we went back to the library so R could give us a bit more of the current situation and structural details of Mpala. During our discussion, Mike re-entered and asked if anyone had seen his notebook. One student handed it to him and he moved to walk out the door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned back to us and said, "What has happened is a woman has been killed by a buffalo."

He left a silent, shocked room. No one spoke for what seemed like a whole minute. No one could believe it--while we had sat amongst the books in the library, trying to understand this land, a woman had been killed not 200 m from where we sat by a creature we would have halted our Land Cruiser to snap photographs of. I don't know that any other occurence could have made me so acutely aware of the place of people in the chain of life here. Humans do not dominate this landscape.