Africa: Reflections and Narrative Story (Part III)

We hurdled through several more towns in our multi-ton sardine tin. First Rongo, which marked the end of the highlands, then Awendo, and finally Migori, which was a well-populated town. It was here especially that having George with us would pay off.

Apparently some drivers will only take you a short distance and then ask for more cash, and some go to the wrong place entirely. We were pushed and pulled in various directions in a crowd vying for our business. Eventually, once we were inside the Matatu George had selected, the crowd subsided, and only much-less aggressive people selling pineapple or ice would come by the van.

Before departing for the border-town of Isibania, we picked up a few more passengers, including a man with dreds who smelled distinctly of fish and cigarettes. The hawker, who initially had told us we'd pay 50 kshs for each of us caught sight of the bills in the pocket of my notebook, and said "1000 each, for luggage." I knew that he knew he was bullshitting us because he erupted into a wide grin when he asked, despite himself. I asserted that we'd paid the price and wouldn't pay more, but we might have still been screwed if George hadn't chimed in. The man resumed his post at the door, visibly displeased.

Soon after we took off, we were flagged down for a police checkpoint, at which point I started sweating bullets. I wasn't sure whether to look placid and cooperative or assertive and confident. As he walked over to the side of the van and began to talk to the hawker, I think I settled on "confused and possibly insane," in trying not to betray my worry about the fact that the man I'd just spurned was laughing it up with a cop with a giant rifle. I definitely heard "mzungu" a few times, America was mentioned, and I'm almost positive the officer said, "they are very far from America." But it could have just been my nerves playing dirty tricks. Either way, to my relief we were soon allowed to pass.

The van continued to fill up, and, though it didn't seem quite as full as last time, since all the seats were occupied, the last fare to get in did so through the driver's door. The driver allowed him to situate himself, and then proceeded to jump in and essentially sit on his lap.

Arriving in a vehicle, we were required by law to stop in a particular area of Isibania, probably 1/4 mile from the border. Before we could even extricate ourselves from the van, our bags were already loaded onto bicycles, their owners urging us to let them deliver the bags. Like in Migori, there wasn't just one person who wanted our business, and they could get really aggressive - not afraid to put their hands on us. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly why we wouldn't just let one of them push the bike alongside us to the border, but I guess maybe people have taken off with the bags before. In any case, George was fighting them off like a horse swatting flies with his tail. I had to literally force my way through the crowd, having been virtually pinned against the hatch of the van, and sweeping my bag off the bike, the three of us took off in a fast-paced walk.

Our rowdy escorts naturally followed us along the road to the border. Occasionally a few would drop off, and two new men hop in. At one point a little boy showed up to our right, eating a potato like an apple. Every time I denied help from someone, he would appear just ahead of me and say, "Good thing, he was thief." I was so amused by him disappearing and reappearing whenever I looked away to respond to someone, that upon probably the fourth time he'd done so, I had to ask, "Well which one is not thief??" But he just grinned and disappeared again.

At the border, Ely and I were so grateful to George that we wanted to give him something for potentially preventing the derailment of our plans. We only had 1000 ksh bills, and obviously we weren't going to ask him for change, so as we said goodbye I slipped it in his hand. I was truly grateful and, after a short amount of protest, he was ecstatic. I was relieved because I thought he might be insulted.

At the immigration office, I was annoyed to find that the Tanzanian visa had been raised from 50 to 100 USD. But, what are you gonna do? I coughed it up.

We turned to see a giant Coca-Cola stand shaped like a bottle, like a great shining beacon, standing 20 feet tall at the other side of the road. Ely and I bought some cold(!) cokes, and sat on the curb to enjoy them, which we did to the fullest extent. Soon Josiah Kawira, one of the founders of the Shirati Health Education and Development organization (SHED), arrived in a nice grey Toyota crossover pickup, which I later found out had been donated by Dan Oerther and Village Life Outreach Project (VLOP).

After greetings had been exchanged, we set out on a wide dirt road he called the "superhighway," and I watched as the scenery became more and more green in comparison with the bleak vegetation of southeastern Kenya. Here any remnant of modern materials seemed to have disappeared, in favor of relatively consistent but widely dispersed mud and thatch homes. Many were built in a circular shape, which I had not seen in Kenya.

As we approached Shirati, where we would stay for the next three nights, we picked up some kids who were walking back from school, and they piled in the truck bed. It would have been quite a far walk, as we reached the town in probably 15 minutes, although maybe less. In town we picked up Sara Kawira, Josiah's daughter. She was around the same age as Ely and I, and had braided hair and an American accent. I introduced myself and the two girls talked, Ely having lived in Shirati for six months before.

Passing through the town, we finally reached some beautiful flat property with a sturdy, modern house on it. Getting out of the truck, I took a look around. The grass was relatively abundant and several big trees dotted the area. A little boy in a bright green cap enthusiastically pushed a tonka-style truck around the yard, making exceptionally loud engine noises. I soon learned his name was Asubuhi, Kiswahili for "morning." The cap on his head was apparently to protect the scar of a burn that had covered half his scalp when he was a baby in Nyambogo. The Kawiras had helped to send him to Cincinnati Shriners for treatment, and he had been living with them since, to my knowledge.

Sara picked up the keys to the SHED hostel from inside the home, and we walked across the lawn to where it stood. Like the rest of the buildings on the property, it was a sturdy one-story with a row of hedges below the windows and a "security light" on the corner. She opened a screen, then a metal grate, and unlocked the door behind it. Inside was a kitchen, living room, and a long hallway with bathrooms on one side and bedrooms on the other. At the end of the hall was a large master bedroom with it's own bathroom. Ely deliberately and insistently chose a room with two twin beds, because it was the room she had stayed in during her work with sand filters in the past. So, I dragged my stuff down the hall to the master bedroom.

The bathrooms were set up for showers, but the electricity had been knocked out and there was a shortage of water in the tank. So, I cut the top off our water bottles, and Sara retrieved some water in basins to dip our bottles into, and we took showers that way, which I had become accustomed to anyways. After dressing we gathered at the home with Josiah, Sara, and Asubuhi, where we had an excellent meal of rice, beans, and meat. As usual, Ely and I were exhausted after eating, and, after attempting to restore electricity to the hostel, we passed out.

I awoke as I usually did around 6 AM, and resumed my daily ritual of unsuccessfully trying to sleep for another 30 minutes. A group of people were singing somewhere in the distance, although not loud enough to have kept me from sleeping. Around 6:30, though, an unbelievably loud insect, which Sara later referred to as the "fire alarm" bug, arrived outside my window and sealed the deal on my continued rest. If you've ever heard one of the newer fire alarm systems with the flashing white lights and uninterrupted high-pitched buzz, you'll understand what I mean. I had to literally exit my room because it was so loud.

After a tasty breakfast, we prepared some cheese sandwiches for lunch and met the man who would act as our translator, Killian. We bought some water bottles in the town and continued on our way, soon turning off the "superhighway."

If the roads in Kenya were rough, the roads leading to Nyambogo were absolutely brutal. I never came across a paved road in Tanzania, but the path into the village became so narrow that we had to roll up the windows to avoid a slap in the face from the branches reaching out to us from either side. They scraped along the car like nails on a chalkboard, and the road beneath us had been ravaged my runoff in the rainy seasons, as well as offering some pretty sizable rocks for us to navigate between. It was more like whitewater rafting than driving.

Soon we arrived at the center of town, where, glad for the opportunity to be still and on my feet, we got out of the truck, and tried to lose my "sea-legs," if you will.



We were introduced to Veronika, a woman in a beautiful dress and matching head wrap, topped off with some knock-off Adidas Superstars. I can't recall her title, but she was an influential person in the village. We moved inside to her small office to begin the proceedings. It was a typically constructed room with the most questionably constructed benches I'd ever seen. I fought the urge to swat at the flies that buzzed regularly about the room. Three men joined us from outside - Nyambogo's water committee, who sported matching VLOP t-shirts. They informed us of their continued work with the sand filters Ely had helped to create, and we stated our intentions of interviewing families about water use. We would also be recording GPS points, to get an idea of the size and topography of the community.

We took a short walk uphill, where we stood on some rocks in order to get a view of the whole village. The water committee pointed out the edges, and then our translator related the details to us. This resulted in a lot of:

"You see that hill? The one behind it."
"Not those roofs, but those."

After a while we had a general picture, and suffice it to say that it is an extremely large and widely dispersed village of over 3,000 residents.



We continued to the first family we would be interviewing, which was preceded by a ritual mimicked at every successive visit - The family would set out chairs in the shade for everyone to sit in, and Killian would introduce us. The man of the house emerged and shook our hands. His clothes were torn to rags, and like most others out beyond the city center where our car was parked, his skin was cracked and extremely dry. We soon found that the procedure for the interviews would progress very slowly. Essentially, Ely would ask a question from our survey, Killian would relate it, the entire group would all talk in Kiswahili, and then the women, seated on the stoop outside their home, would answer the question. At least, it seemed that way to us.

We found that the trek to water was an hour both ways, there were hours of queuing up to fill up jerry cans, and at least ten minutes to fill one bucket at a time. At one of the later visits, we spoke to a woman who had already made the trip 4 times by 2:30 PM.

After our first interview, Ely asked if one of the committee members could draw a quick map of the village on a piece of paper in her notebook. This turned into an extremely long affair, as the men huddled around the notebook, pointing in various directions and intermittently sketching. I enjoyed the opportunity to drink in the surroundings. We sat in the shade of a big tree, and the hill that it's roots stretched into tapered off quickly, presenting a remarkable view of the landscape. We all sat still and silent, and Killian even dozed off, his head propped up with his arm slung over the back of the chair. Finally, it seemed the men were content with their map, so we continued on.

We met several more people before I began to think about the cheese sandwiches in the truck, which had to have been quite moist and hot in the ziploc bags...and not in a good way. Although we had a pretty well-defined agenda, Killian insisted we stop by a homestead where Asubuhi's grandfather lived and requested our presence. Apparently in his gratitude to Josiah, and probably to Ely as well, he had killed a chicken and cooked it up. As we took seats around a table in the shade, a girl of about thirteen placed it in the center. She then came back with some water for us to wash our hands, and afterwards Ely and I discreetly used some hand-sanitizer under the table. Along with the chicken was some brown ugali, made from cassava and millet, which had a crusty outside and chewy inside. It was meant to be dipped into the broth which we spooned into our bowls. I was advised against eating the broth, but seeing Josiah and Killian enjoying it, I tried it anyways. The combination didn't have much flavor, but the chicken was delicious. I even had the distinct pleasure of orange Fanta in a glass bottle to compliment the meal.

We visited several more families, eventually stopping among some banana trees, where an old woman sat on an "african chair" as Killian called it - a small, low stool. A bundle of millet was laid out to dry before her, and chickens pecked at it interestedly. A toddler with a swollen belly watched us take seats around the woman, and an older boy stood next to the adjacent house. A ragged looking dog emerged from the trees and began to sniff the millet, and the woman feebly swung a stick at it. The older boy took that as his cue and swatted the dog sharply with the stick and the dog yelped loudly, loping away with the boy chasing after it and swatting it. Killian told us that the woman had recently lost several family members - daughters, if I remember correctly.

By the next interview I was becoming a bit restless and distraught because I couldn't think of the questions I needed to ask, or my shame would not permit me to think of them. I came to rural Africa to look for what was missing - what needs the people had - the problem was that if everything is missing, where does one begin? At the same time I had to remind myself that pity and shortsightedness have resulted in so many failures in the past, so I had to keep my designer wits about me - immersion, but not submersion.

Anyways, to clear my head I excused myself from the meeting and walked towards one of the nearby committee members who had spoken to me before. He had picked a lime off a tree and was eating it.

"Could I try one of those?" I asked.
"You want to try? Do you know what it is?"
I looked closer, but, before I could respond, he said, "It is a lemon," and handed it to me at the exact moment he started digging in his nose. I peeled off a section and tried it - probably due to the fact that it was not yet ripe, it left a terribly persistent bitter taste in my mouth.

One of the pieces of advice that I gleaned from a book I read about designing for developing countries was not to make assumptions. Sometimes the questions that seem obvious can hide cultural differences or other insights, although it must take some practice, because our translator had a good laugh at my expense a couple of times. For example, I asked, "Why do you carry water on your heads?" (Because they can't carry it with their arms) "Why do you grow flowers?" (Because they look nice). You get the idea.

After quite a few interviews, we headed back to the village center. Upon reaching it, a little boy of about 4 or 5 ran up and grasped my hand from my side. At first I thought he wanted my attention for something, but I looked down to see him staring straight ahead. So, I walked with the group with the little boy in tow. They turned down an alleyway and into a house, and I said "OK, I have to go this way now," releasing his hand. I entered into the building and was told that we were now in the village chairman's house. Apparently he was sitting in front of the window, but I couldn't see his face because of the back-lighting. Ely told me that he had told her and another girl that they should marry him the last time they met. I wondered if he was serious or not. One of the committee members distributed cokes, and though I was full of sugar from the Fanta, I accepted. For the most part, the African men talked amongst themselves.

We navigated the bumpy road back, having discovered the cheese sandwiches predictably mushy, the bag condensating on the inside. The road caused us to crush them continually, until we got smart and put them between us on the floor.

Rice and beans was waiting for us when we arrived home. Josiah and I had an interesting conversation about the American media and recent middle-east conflict. It's always interesting to hear the opinions of people outside the states, especially with regard to our institutions. In our after-dinner comatose state, I seized on the opportunity to try some sweet chai tea, which was nice, but not really my style.

We took a shower, and, after having discussed seeking out some night-time activity and showering up, we snuck out of the hostel. We traveled down a dirt path to the superhighway, where we eventually approached a figure standing in the road. I was secretly apprehensive, but it turned out to be a friend of Sara's. The four of us came to a building with a sign on the front that read "The Green Villa." I'm not entirely sure why it was in english. We entered an alley on the side of the building and walked into the back. The building itself was small and resembled painted mud-bricks, but in the back there was a large outdoor patio kind of area. It was fenced in with what looked like split lengths of bamboo, and divided into big booths with thatched roofs, leaving an open middle area.

A waitress brought some plastic chairs to the back booth and we sat around a circular table while she took our orders, which Sara took the liberty of conducting. The waitress returned with four packets of Zed, a pineapple flavored liquor in a pouch, along with three sodas and glasses. The scissors that accompanied the pouches were broken and rusted, so I opened them with my knife, and we mixed the first round with Fanta. The bar had only a few people in it, the majority seated in the middle section facing toward a tiny TV, which looped a tape of Luo music videos.

We went through three rounds of the Zed cane spirits, the second of which I mixed with Coke, which tasted horrendous. Just as we were beginning to buzz, Sara's friend presented a gift that he had brought - a tub of roasted(?) termites. A drunk man who had been taking turns between lingering and dancing repeatedly asked me for handfuls of the insects, to which I obliged, interested that someone could enjoy them so much. At one point the girls left, leaving me with Sara's friend. It was my understanding that he didn't speak any english, so I was surprised as I was vibing to the music and heard him ask, "You like it?"

I turned to him, looking confused.
"The music."
I replied in the affirmative, and asked, "You know english?"
"Little," he said, making a gesture that indicated his response. I made some asinine comment, and he tried to understand, but eventually he threw up his hands and smiled.

When Sara returned, she passed along a message from him, which was: "Luo girls know how to shake it."

I walked outside to the "bathroom," which was just that: outside. I looked up at the sky, the upbeat tunes and voices drifting through the fence and imagined that the sky looked somehow different, so far away from anywhere I'd ever been before.

Finally, after switching to Tusker, an East African beer, I decided it was time to try the termites. Sara told me they taste a bit like potato chips. I went straight for three of them, thinking it was likely to taste better than one, and less obviously a termite. The tougher exterior gave way as I chewed, releasing the still-mushy inside, which is not one of my favorite sensations. The flavor, though, was not bad. The potato description was pretty apt, despite a kind of acrid aftertaste that you would expect from an insect.

Eventually we paid our bill and began the walk home. As we neared the SHED property, small lights were visible just below the horizon, dozens of them. I asked Sara what they were, and she said that they were boats on Lake Victoria. It was quite a spectacle.

Once we got inside, we were immediately confronted by a nasty cockroach in the middle of the hallway, about three inches long. I smashed it with a rock, which was a much more comfortable experience than smashing one with my bare foot, which I had done the day before.

The next day we awoke to some more eggs and chapatti, and jumped in the truck to go back to Nyambogo. We tried unsuccessfully to sleep in the back seat, until we arrived to conduct more interviews. One of the women we interviewed had just had a premature baby, and it was so tiny that its arms were practically no bigger than my finger. She bounced the baby on her lap with an enthusiasm that made me cringe - wondering if this frail baby should really be shook like that. It wore a permanent expression of bewilderment on its face.

We took a walk down to a couple of water sources, where we conducted some tests. The turbidity was so high that the water was totally opaque. A woman washed her clothes in the pond, laying them out on nearby bushes. It kind of made me wonder what the point was, when the water is this dirty. But then, it certainly didn't make sense to allow the cattle to drink from the same pond they retrieve drinking water from, either. If it's the only water available, it's the water you use for everything.

At the end of the day we met in one of the committee members' homes, where we were again served food. The man thanked Ely for the work she had done, particularly with the sand filters.

On the ride back, I finally fell asleep for a moment, but awoke to a loud sound and what sounded like swearing. I found out that we had hit a chicken. I don't think we killed it.

In Shirati we did some shopping for buckets to make sand filters, eventually settling on one vendor. Josiah opened up the SHED office and retrieved some kind of burner. We sat on the ground, heated up a bicycle spoke in the burner, and poked holes in the lids of the buckets. Someone fetched us some sand in a wheelbarrow, and Asubuhi immediately jumped on top of it and continued to jump until sand spilled off the side. I brought over a window screen in an attempt to divert his attention, which worked, and he helped us strain sand through it to get the filters started.

After dinner and another trip to the The Green Villa, we packed our things in preparation for the next day when we would travel to Burere, and then on to Isibania.

We woke a little late, but still had breakfast in Shirati before mounting up for the drive to Burere. In the truck on the way, we stopped because we spotted some monkeys on the rocks. I had previously stated that if I could see some monkeys in the wild, my trip would be complete, so obviously I was extremely excited. Killian corrected us, saying they were babboons. Just as good though. A man was stalking around the underbrush, and Josiah waved him over to the car to ask what he was doing. I saw he had a slingshot in his hand, and apparently he was going to try to kill the monkeys because they were tearing up his fields.

We pulled into Burere and parked at a newly constructed dispensory, which carries medicines, but cannot provide the treatment one would recieve from a doctor. We met with a round of gentlemen, including the chairman of the village, who Killian gave the front seat in deference to his title. We traveled along the dirt roads leading to the school where some of UC's architecture students focused a project around recently. Much like in Nyambogo, the roads became increasingly impassable, until at one point the branches extended too far into the road for us to pass through. The whole group got out of the truck and spent half an hour hacking away at the mess with a machete. Even after we could clearly pass through, they were still chopping away. While they wrestled with the foliage, a congregation of kids appeared at the car window, peering in. Seizing the opportunity, I pressed my face against the glass and blew on it. Most of the kids were sufficiently amused and ran off, but a couple stood by with a quizzical look, apparently not entertained by my performance.

Finally the men piled back into the truck and we continued to the school. Part of the building was made of large, pale bricks, while the other part was smaller, crumbling reddish brick. The point where the two met left an open gash down the middle, and cracks and scars traveled across various vertical lengths of the walls. A whole classroom on one side had collapsed and remained unrepaired. I walked around taking pictures, occasionally seeking out Killian with a question. An old broken truck wheel mounted on a pole was particularly puzzling to me, and I soon found out that it was the school bell, to be struck with a stick.



I walked up the hill a bit to look at the latrines - their walls seemed well in tact, but the roof on one was almost completely blown off despite a myriad of rocks and sticks piled atop. After we had scoped out all the classrooms, we got back to the car for our trip to the border.

Isibania seemed a flurry of activity compared with the destinations of the past few days. Josiah dropped us off after helping to arrange tickets for the night bus to Nairobi, and we were left with several hours to kill. Four, if I remember correctly. We sat in the station for a bit before confronting the sun again to walk up and down the sides of the street that ran through the town. On either side was an array of colorful storefronts selling a diverse selection of products. The ground was dry and dusty and it felt good to have the freedom and confidence to walk around a semi-urban place as two mzungu. We spotted two bars and decided to create a miniature bar crawl out of the time we needed to kill. Our first stop was the Paparazi Bar. I walked onto the porch that was surrounded by latticed wood and a big Tusker banner. Ducking inside through a sheet, I saw that there were a few people sitting at tables facing each other, and a shelf at the back which displayed several beverage choices. After awkwardly standing in the middle of the room and scanning around, I wasn't sure who to order from, so I just held up two fingers to the people who were already looking at me and asked for two Tuskers. A woman got out of her seat and returned with two warm bottles, and Ely and I went back out to the porch to sit in two chairs we had seen there.

We were soon faced with the inevitable: finding a bathroom. Since it didn't appear that there was one inside the bar, we returned to the bus stop, and asked for the key to the choo. The man behind the desk searched around for about five minutes before telling us he couldn't find one. He said something to one of the other employees, and came out from behind the desk, saying there was one across the street at the hotel. As he escorted us across the street I was impressed at the pains he was taking to deliver us to the bathrooms, which weren't terribly close. We walked into an alley, and then into a side alley, which opened up into a larger alley with a latrine at the end. It was an odd scene. The man said something to a woman standing outside with a young boy, and the boy walked into the side door of what looked like a house and emerged with a set of keys, which he handed to the man, who handed them to us. Then the boy went over and sat next to the latrine while we took turns using it, finally returning the key to the boy.

Continuing our bar crawl, and resolving not to trouble that many people the next time the need arose, we got another Tusker at a place with a name like Bakida Bar. Eventually we got a little nervous that we were going to miss the bus, and we finished our time-killing at the bus station. Around 7pm the bus arrived and we threw our bags underneath and climbed in. It was a lot like the "Easy Coach," although all the seats were filled this time. We found two near the back and sat down. The joints on the chairs were so loose that the man in front of me practically had his head in my lap, but I assumed I would be sleeping too, so it wasn't really an issue. Once we started moving, a teenage boy in front of Ely's seat turned around asked where we were going. He was returning to school in Uganda. He saw my headphones and asked us what type of music we liked. I told him I liked reggae, to which he was surprised, and quizzed me on some artists. He then proceeded to tell me he didn't like reggae at all, and began talking to Ely about hip hop, which was his their mutual preference.

Believe it or not, the bus ride into Nairobi trumped all of the preceding transportation in sheer discomfort. The road felt like it was made of giant gravel and the bus sailed through potholes, creaking and bouncing, and driving rain onto us from the leaking window. If we nodded off for a moment, we would awake the next to a 'BANG' and a the whole bus would shudder, finding another pothole. I would not have been the least bit surprised if all of the screws on the bus simultaneously popped off and the whole thing fell apart like in a cartoon.

At one point we stopped. Looking outside, I couldn't see any sign of civilization, so it wouldn't be one of the routine stops. People that apparently had heard what was going on were filing out of the bus, so Ely and I followed suit in our curiosity. We were in an area with some pretty dense vegetation, tall grasses and a forest on either side 100 feet ahead. By this time it was dark. We followed the procession up several cars ahead and arrived upon the scene of a crash between two cars. One was facing toward us on the side of the road, the front face smashed in, and the other was on its side across from it. A crowd of people had just pulled a woman from her car, who was bawling uncontrollably. There were no police or EMTs, and it didn't appear that we would wait for any. The crowd of people that had emerged from the cars behind the wreckage were clearing off all of the debris from the road. An entire windshield, bits of metal and glass, books and papers, all being swept aside by the milling crowd. After the road had been sufficiently cleared off, everyone got in their respective cars and we drove on as if nothing had happened.

When we arrived in Nairobi it was morning, but still dark out. We retrieved our bags and slumped into the bus stop, which was at least 50 times bigger than the one in Isibania, and completely packed. Finally we got the chance to fall asleep on our bags for a bit before Gabriel had to physically wake us up. We purchased a day room at the Mennonite Guest House, took a (hot!) shower, and napped for a bit.

We were fortunate enough to be in Nairobi for the 1-hour window of opportunity allotted for visitors to the Elephant Orphanage, so we had Gabriel pick us up and take us, arriving at around 11 o' clock. We entered the orphanage and continued to the back, where there was a large congregation of tourists and schoolchildren gathered around to see a group of baby elephants. The EWB group had time to pull off a mini-safari on their way back to Nairobi, so I was glad for the chance to see some native wildlife, even if in captivity. I was even more excited to have the chance to see something they hadn't: a baby rhino.

After cautioning the audience against spooking the rhino, they brought it out in what looked like a cape, which was amazing. It was a black rhino, of which there are only a few hundred in existence, but it was premature, and thus smaller than it should have been, and had been abandoned by its mother. Against the handlers' warnings, the younger members of the audience could not contain their admiration for the little guy. It was relieved of it's cape/blanket like a boxer entering the ring, and came over near where we were standing, where the British woman who was introducing all of the animals initiated a mud and dirt bath. The little rhino received it like a dog getting a belly rub - kicking its legs and rolling around with joy.

After the elephant orphanage, we had only one more thing to accomplish before our departure for the states: buying gifts at the "Zebra Market."

The scene was kind of like an indoor flea market, although everything but the wares was outside. The process was a lot of fun, and I had the chance to hone (read: christen) my haggling skills, as the initial prices quoted are always absurdly high, by any standards. It was, however, exhausting, because whenever we stepped into an alley, there were droves of merchants vying for our attention, and by the halfway point in our perusing, much of the objects were the same.

Finally, we picked up some parting samosas, and were dropped off the airport. I had a flight to Paris, a six hour layover, a flight to Chicago, and a flight to Covington to look forward to. The trip itself was an incredible adventure, and an invaluable learning experience. But I also discovered just how much I still have yet to learn, if it's possible to discover such a thing. Not that I necessarily wanted to end this with a quote from an '80's dancehall band, but in the words of UB40,

"Every hour of every day I'm learning more.
The more I learn the less I know about before."