Hi from a shopping mall in the northern outskirts of Mombasa, as we end our sojourn in Kenya and prepare to head to Tanzania where camping safari and other adventures await. I’ve left the girls by the pool at a luxury beach hotel and braved the mad traffic jam to find internet, a few supplies, and foreign exchange.
We have had very limited internet the last 10 days, and it’s interesting to see how my phone posts are going - it seems to work so-so, but at least it works. I’ll edit them now, and try to keep posting by phone this week in Tanzania when we will have zero internet in our tents.
To catch up, we finished our week in Takaungu village, with me squeezing in as many Kiswahili classes as possible in Mr Aziz’s living room with the other (longer-term) volunteers, Lyanda wandering the village happily, and Claire in school. I did some photography and video for the project including attending a growth monitoring session 30 minutes walk outside the village, where the East African Center’s community health aides were weighing local kids ages 0-5, as they do monthly, recording their growth, and giving them vitamin E supplements. (See photos)
Most looked pretty healthy and well fed, except for the one kid in the throes of malaria, who was dispatched to the clinic. Interesting to see them weigh the kids by hanging them from a mango tree full of ripe mangoes!
Friday afternoon we said our goodbyes in Takaungu village and taxi’d up 45 minutes to Watamu. Watamu is an amazing natural place, at the mouth of Mida Creek there is a vast mangrove estuary, rich with tidal life and birds, and six kinds of mangrove trees. Then, inland a bit, is the Arabuko-Sokoke forest, a 425 Kilometer-square forest reserve that preserves three types of forest that once stretched along this whole coast. Heavily threatened by wood and animal poachers, the forest is rich in birds and animals, including several endemic species. The most amazing of which (at least for non-birders) is the Golden-Rumped Elephant Shrew.
We stayed at the beachfront guesthouse and research station of A Rocha Kenya, a Christian conservation organization (with sites worldwide) working to preserve the forest and estuary and running several innovative ecotourism schemes which fund school scholarships and other tangible evidence to the community that ecotourism is of benefit.
Saturday we took a guide into the forest and had the most AMAZING, long, close, intimate view of the Golden-Rumped Elephant Shrew, such a great sighting that even our sweet, understated guide was a little flabbergasted. That thing is COOL! And also saw great birds, many many kinds of lizards, ants, butterflies, and even a nice little snake (hi Tauna!). Then we visited the estuary, and the historic, forest-covered ruins of the ancient medieval Swahili trading city of Gede. All in all a great day.

• CEF: Fave animals we’ve seen: Elephants, bushbabies, colobus monkeys, the awesome baby python, aaand… THE GOLDEN RUMPED ELEPHANT SHREW … #
• LY: Agree w/Claire, top birds so far: Silvery-cheeked hornbill, purple banded sunbird, Fischer’s touracao, to name just a few. #
• Tom: Elephant shrew sighting was pretty amazing; I am also a big fan of the sacred ibis. Getting psyched for safari next week- hoping for big cats!! #

• Tom: Great week in village, we all agreed could’ve stayed a month. Next time. Claire’s a great trav’lr, and my Swahili is really coming along after 12 hrs of classes. Getting psyched 4 Tanz & camping safari next week.
• Tom: Made it to A Rocha Kenya, a christian conservation org. in Watamu. Very nice guesthouse on beach.
• Tom: Getting up @ 5 & taking bird guide into Arabuko-Sokoke forest to see local rarities.

• Tom: Someone asked our coordinates. House is: Lat 3 deg 41. 063 min south by 39 deg 51.409 min east. #
• Tom: Center + clinic: 3 deg 41.642 s by 39 deg 50.707 east. Google sat photo is October 2003. #

• From Claire: I am going 2 school here this week. The school here is very different. #
• CEF: The school has blackboards not whiteboards, no glass in the windows just screens, and no electricity. #
• CEF: I like Holy Rosary better, but it is fun to go to school in a different place. #
• Here in the village we are having more fun than ever before!!! I miss everyone!!! #

Morning school meeting.

Originally uploaded by furtwangl

Lyanda: Hello dear friends! Our walk to Kilifi this morning was truly beautiful–a couple/few ultra-peaceful miles through the plantations to the road, then a matatu into the town, which Tom says reminds him of the old west. We walked through the rickety stalls and shops, and changed traveler’s checks in a bank that truly did seem like it could be robbed at any moment by Butch Cassidy, in slightly modified attire. This morning I was packing Claire’s lunch for school, and she said, “white bread and peanute butter for breakfast AND lunch again? We told her, “Mommy and Daddy are walking five miles to get you corn flakes and mangos, so you just better be grateful!” We’re like Pa Ingalls. Claire is doing so awesome–the more off the beaten path we get, the more she seems to love it, and just settles right in. Traveling with Tom is also a treat–he is so at-home and savvy about the sometimes-opaque logistics of east-african travel. Part of it is experience, of course, but part of it is a gift–a matter of heart, which I appreciate. We’ll pick up a few groceries here, then head back the path we came to Takaungu–I’ll pick up CLaire at school, while Tom does his video work. We are all tremendously well and happy. xo, L

Greetings from the little town of Kilifi. We are staying in Takaungu village, but today after dropping Claire at school in the village, Lyanda and I took the little village boat across the inlet, walked two and a half miles across a beautiful (if depressing from an ecological perspective) sisal plantation, down a long baobab tree-shaded lane, then caught a minibus into town in search of some internet, some cash, and some peanut butter from the store.
Life in Takaungu village this week is great. We are guests of the East African Center, a community development project founded by a Seattle woman, and now the site of multiple vibrant programs, and multiple American volunteers. I visited Takaungu village in 2002 when the program was just getting started, to make their first fundraising video. It’s great to be back, in many ways it’s just as I left it (slow pace, laid back village, simple poverty of most of the homesteads) and in many ways there have been big changes – The East African Center now runs a primary school, a clinic, and many other programs.

Claire really wanted to go to the school, and so she’s there (in “Standard Four”) today for a second day, sitting in the little tin-roof classroom with the other kids, enjoying the strict pattern of rote memorization and formality that is the hallmark of even progressive private Kenyan education. (Ask, “how are you, children?” and all the children jump to their feet and yell in unison “We are very fine teacher!”) The school is about half Muslim and half Christian, and the school girls were a little shy on Monday. As fascinated by Claire as she was by them, they were still hesitant to actually talk to her or engage her yesterday. But Claire was excited to go back today (even though the 45 minutes of incomprehensible daily Swahili class is “really boring”), and hopefully the girls are all warming up and finding things to giggle about.

Meanwhile Lyanda and I have mostly just wandered the village, soaking in the sights, greeting the folks we wander past, and jumping under leafy mango trees when the occasional torrential cloudburst threatens to soak us to the core. Mangos are in season here, big juicy ripe mangos practically dripping from every tree, and the corn is knee high, and the women seem to spend about half the day toting enormous jugs of water back and forth to their homes, balanced on top of their heads.

Today (after the 2.5 mile walk back) I’ll start helping the center with a little video project, and try to squeeze in a couple of Kiswahili classes with Mr Aziz the retired teacher they have engaged for the volunteers, but mostly it’s just a slow-paced week of village life. We don’t have e-mail in the village so I’m just posting text messages from my phone from there, but you can trust that we are comfortable and happy, and we’ll get back to the blog and upload more village pictures from Watamu this weekend.

Arrived Takaungu village safely. Limited internet but nice house + Claire’s excited to attend school here.

Galagos cocos endemic bushbaby

Originally uploaded by furtwangl

A quick note as we wind up our last evening at Colobus Trust. We heartily recommend this place as a volunteer site - they don’t normally accept families but they are very well set up for folks over 18 who are seeking a month or a few months of placement doing good work in local conservation. The setting, the staff, the food, the accommodations, and the local nature are all quite incredible.

We’ve had a lot happen in the last few days, too much to go over in detail, though you can get the idea by looking at our photos. Swahili lessons by the hotel pool, more monkey-watching, and a nice visit to the house and garden of Luciana, next door to the Trust, she is one of the trustees and a longtime resident, with a yard full of interesting rescued animals including a gigantic tortoise and a tame sunni antelope who wanders in and out of her living room. Splashing in the waves, and watching more monkeys, including surveying other troops in the area.

Under the full moon I had good success attracting bushbabies with juicy ripe mango and firing away at them with a Nikon, including getting some great shots of the very tiny, shy, and elusive local endemic species, galagos cocos. There is nothing quite like sitting in the dark waiting near some fruit you’ve put out, then hearing a squeaking call from the trees above you, shining your flashlight up there, and seeing two or three pairs of highly reflective eyes staring back down at you. If the creatures attached to the eyes weren’t so darned cuddly looking, it would be a creepy way to spend the night of the full moon, but instead I was entranced, and elated when the little fellas came down to sample the mango and let me snap their portrait, before being chased off by their bigger cousins. (Those are centimeters marked on the board)

Today we went on an outreach trip to the Mkokoni Primary School about half an hour from here. They have a great, active Wildlife Club and have planted literally thousands of trees on their school grounds; the leaders of the club took us on an extensive tour around the site to show both the indigenous and exotic trees they have planted, many of which provide some income from cashews, pine and eucalyptus timber, and from the fruits of the jatropha.

We’ve gotten interested in jatropha, a biofuels plant that grows well here. We read an article about it in the plane in-flight magazine, wrote down the name to research more, and then today here it was again, on the school grounds. With these wonderful young women in Muslim hijab spouting latin plant names and detailed facts about the efficiency of jatropha’s potential for oil production. Lyanda was quite taken with that story, and had me take photos to accompany something she might write up.

Then a lovely couple of hours with the kids, in an open-air classroom under the dappled shade of the trees they had planted.

Oops the bush babies are squawking, nobody has put out fruit for them tonight.

And this evening, to end our stay, a little party with the staff at the end of the afternoon, featuring a delicious banana cake, soda, chips, and well-wishes, and then a lovely Italian dinner out with the other volunteers, to celebrate our last evening. Tomorrow, our 11th wedding anniversary, we’ll tour Mombasa and then head to Takaungu village where we’ll be guests of the East African Center all next week.

Colobus mom and baby Tumaini

Photo on Flickr by furtwangl

(Tom here:) Dear friends, thank you for all of your comments, it has been nice to stay connected these first couple of weeks. The Colobus Trust has been really good to us, with friendly staff and volunteers, very comfortable accommodations, great food, and best of all, really amazing nature literally at your doorstep. Yesterday a school class came, and we helped Hamisi teach about the monkeys and the local ecosystem, which was good fun, followed by soccer on the beach. And Claire has been a big help around the vet clinic, cleaning the place up, collecting flowers and fruits for the Vervet monkeys they are preparing for release, and working with John on their care.

But by far my favorite activity is just to watch the monkeys. There is a troop of nine Colobus monkeys here, the house is smack in the center of their relatively small territory. Yesterday I watched them for much of the morning, and again today all three of us started watching them in the trees right outside our door, and over an hour or two, followed them gradually across the property to the beach road. Colobus all look really similar so we have been working hard to do an accurate census of the troop, confirming the sex of the eight mature monkeys (done by seeing if there is a small stripe under their tail), looking for any marks or features that will help tell them apart, and most especially, watching the baby.

Baby Tumaini (means “Hope”) was born in early April. Colobus babies are all white when they are born, but at two and a half months old, he’s growing up and changing color gradually. After a lot of observation we are pretty sure he is a he, but it is hard to tell because he spends most of his time in his mothers’ arms, peeking around. It’s quite a sight to see mom leap from branch to branch just above your head with her baby hanging onto her belly!

We’re making slow progress with the identification, we have noted a mole under the left eye of one subadult male which makes him somewhat easier to identify. We’re hoping to get in at least another day of watching them, if they are close by. The assistant manager here, Gwili, has been kind enough to lend me his Nikon so I can take better photos since all I have with me (unfortunately) is a (really nice) point and shoot.

And then there are the bushbabies. Last night I went with Helen up the road and we spent hours sitting in the forest, rich with night sounds, and illuminated by the full moon. Given the choice between going to a bar to watch a European soccer match, and going into the woods at night to sit quietly and wait for bushbabies, I have to confess it was not a difficult decision.

So there we sat, in the middle of the kilometer-wide strip of precious and fast-disappearing coral rag forest, between the coastal road and the sea. The sun set, you could hear the surf in the distance, twilight brought a little wind swishing through the canopy, the fruit bats came out and flitted in silhouette, and the insects chirped all around. A family of Hadada ibis settled for the night in a nearby tree with a giant cacophony of squawks and honks. Bushbabies made their weird call to each other, getting responses in the distance.

Sitting quietly, every so often we would scan the trees with flashlights, looking for the characteristic eye shine of the bushbabies who might be tempted down by the banana we had put out. They are VERY shy and elusive. Eventually we found one far above us, and watched him for a while by flashlight, tracking him as he sprang through the dark trees, until we lost him in the leaves. But we were unable to get a good photo, which is the focus of Helen’s research. Tonight we’ll try again, especially in search of the tiny little, very shy coastal species, which is about the size of a hamster, but an extremely shy tree hamster that, when you get it in your flashlight beam, suddenly springs through the dark to another branch, jumping with surprising strength, speed and accuracy, and is gone. In the moonlight, sometimes you can see its dark shadow scampering up the branch before it disappears. Wish us luck tonight, and I’ll post any photos we manage to snap of this rare and secretive creature!