Start with a cage containing five monkeys.

In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water.

After a while, another monkey will make an attempt with the same response - all of the monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Keep this up for several days.

Turn off the cold water.

If, later, another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it even though no water sprays them.

Now, remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.

The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Replace the third original monkey with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, all the monkeys which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs.

Why not?

“Because that’s the way it’s always been done around here.”

In a desperate attempt to defib my erstwhile blog back to some semblance of an animate entity, I uploaded a bunch of my photos taken with the blackberry, and they go back a long way (almost 2 years now). I present them in reverse chronological order, starting with this past weekend.


This is what trying to get a SIM card on a Saturday morning. In Addis Ababa.


This is what I'm hoping will be my next car. Not this exact one, but this model.


There is no happier day for the expat than that of the Care package. Especially when it has BACON!


Look what Brandon and Shannon hath wrought. Namely, Sienna, who has the bluest eyes of any baby of all time.


Pizza! In the DRC. I was just happy to have pizza there. Broke the monotony. Sometimes its kind of sad what you are resorting to for comfort in some of these places.


OK so this is from when I was back in the US, while I was up hanging out in MT with Care's family. Her sister and the younglings needed a ride to the Billings airport. Billings has a Cabela's, which is basically like a Wal-Mart sized hunting / fishing / camping store, which is basically awesome. The Billings one has a 25,000 gallon fish tank *inside the store* and this is that tank. It has all the local species of fish, and it is awesome.


My first proper meal back in the US - from an awesome Mexican joint in downtown SF. God bless Mexico.


Roadside snacks for sale in rural Malawi. They are mice, and you eat them whole. A delicacy!


This was at my hotel in Blantyre, Malawi. This guy was a solid 40 feet above the pavement, sawing off a limb on which he had the ladder leaned up against. With no rope or harness or anything. We had to leave for our meetings so I couldn't stay around to watch him die.


Kind of blurry but this is Sheila and Debbie, the latter of which has forsaken us Nairobite Americanos, and is missed.


Enough said.


OK so this one and the next one are from Accenture's ill-fated bid to bank all of their marketing on the media-elusive Tiger Woods, who I always ALWAYS knew had a dark secret waiting to burst onto the national media. Anyone that famous and that intensely private always does. Anyway, I was only able to capture a few of these in heaven-knows-which-airports when the whole scandal was blowing up, I'm sure by now Accenture's destroyed any evidence of them, but what I wouldn't pay to have one of these to hang in my garage when I some day have a garage...


Also, I think its kind of funny to play that game that people play with fortune cookies where you add the words "in bed" on the end of the Accenture tag line. Works much better post-revelation.


This one and the next two are from our massive (massive) warehouse in Harare, Zimbabwe. Used to be a tobacco warehouse. Now its a mainly food warehouse that we kind of vainly hope government officials won't show up to confiscate before we can distribute it to beneficiaries in the field.






Teton Gravity Research is one of my favorite extreme skiing video producing outfits, out of Wyoming, I believe. I saw this tire cover on the back of a car in Arusha, Tanzania. I am pretty sure I'm one of the few people in the world who's ever been to Arusha that even knows what TGR is. That group does not include the driver of this car.


Whilst in Arusha I found a nice backpackers type lodge that served a semi-American meal. It was nice to have what at least looked to be a "safe" salad. I eat a lot of "safe" salads. Its like salad roulette.


This is the motorcycle that clipped my front side panel when I was making a completely legal right turn (remember in TZ we are on the other side of the road, so that means across the oncoming lane, like a left turn in the US), with my blinker on, and this moron was buzzing down the median line taking his GF for a joyride. What ensued were accusations that he heard one of my colleagues tell me to hit him on purpose, which he apparently heard from his motorbike when all of our car windows were up. I moved my car out of the two lanes instead of leaving it blocking the busiest street in the entire town (also Arusha), which is what you're supposed to do legally while you wait for the cops to show up. I did this after photo-documenting that he moved his bike first, but to no avail - we would end up having to go to the police station, drive the cops back to the scene, be subject to endless lectures that I shouldn't have moved the car (the same one I had to bring them to the scene of the accident in), and then return the cops to the station and wait a couple of hours while they took statements for their report. I didn't insist on filing the report, they made me - I was willing to just leave with the scratch on my vehicle and pay for fixing it myself. The guy who hit me couldn't even afford proper shoe strings for his boots, and being that it was a work motorbike, he probably lost his job anyway.


Somewhere in TZ. "Mustle bound."


This was from Dagoretti School for Boys, which is outside of Nairobi. Jen and I were kind of investigating if it was "outside enough" that if we brought some of the street kids we were working with there, they might actually stay in the school instead of returning to the streets to sniff glue and beg. This is one of those glue bottles that the school kept on a shelf to remind the boys in the school where they had been, and encourage them to stay. I saw one of the boys that we were struggling to keep in a school back on the street the other day. I asked him if he'd let me take him back to the school, and he asked me for money.


This was right in front of my house in NBO. The dogs of war.


From a restaurant I had lunch at in Santo Domingo, D.R. when I got there for a weekend when I was working in Haiti. I took a lot of pictures of that weekend's explorations and have no idea where I put them. Maybe on a backup drive that caught a virus and ate all the data.


Pretty sure this is the airport in Port Au Prince.


This is the High Line Park in NYC, post-redevelopment. So in this case, I was exploring it legally, unlike the previous case. This must have been roughly August of last year when I was around for Dave's wedding.


Sometimes I look at you and wonder whether I miss friends and family more, or you. This makes me feel bad.


This was from right here in Addis, but from July-ish of last year when I was first here. The hotel we stayed in had a floor "-1." I never went to that floor for fear of ending up in a John Malkovich movie.


My first work trip after moving to Nairobi was to Uganda, where I met Ben, at a hotel restaurant where he was having lunch with some of the Save The Children folks he was working with. Why can't my organization work with Ben? Hmph.

Its now April and I am still finding less time than ever to blog. Right now, however, I am trapped in a car for the next 4 hours, and I have my blackberry. Not the most ideal way to type but it gets the job done.

We - my Congolese driver and I - are shooting along a ridge-line road, half an hour outside of Kigali on our way north to Ruhengeri, then from there west to Goma, a large border town on the easten edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo (more commonly referred to by its acronym DRC). No commercial international flights to Goma exist, hence the brief visit to Rwanda.

Kigali seems about the same - warm and safe and green and sad. The two things I noticed as we zipped through that I had not noted previously: there is slum dwelling literally across the street from the shiny US embassy, and a few miles down the same road there's yet another huge dark church on the side of a hill where death once held court.

Damas the driver doesn't speak a word of English but his French is fluent and his Congolese version of Kiswahili is conversant. He knows a few basic phrases of Kinyarwanda - the Rwandan mother tongue, and that's it. I of course speak enough French only to apologize for not speaking it at all, but I have been suerprised how well I can get on with swahili when in a bind. So far, I have been.able to:

- determine what languages he does and doesn't speak, and how well
- exchange names and other pleasantries
- ask about which roads we are taking and how good they are right now
- thankfully accept his offer to stop to pick up a bottle of water
- explain that I am from the USA (and California, and Sacramento upon further inquiries), but that I live in Nairobi and hence the swahili
- point out the hotel I stayed in when I was last here and explain how many times I have been here before
- ask how long the drive is going to take (I had been advised 3 but Damas doesn't share such optimism)

I am still not nearly conversant but I suppose I am at least a tiny bit past the basics by now.

Rural Rwanda hasn't changed a bit - green and densely populated - sustenance farms clinging onto impossibly steep hillsides, one butted up against the next. Kids walking down the side of the road with farming tools or empty water containers, mothers carrying bags and buckets and whatnot heavy on their heads. Young men sharing a bicycle, another one carrying an entire bedframe upside down on his head. Brown rivers carrying mud away to places unknown. Trucks (lorries) and buses belching black smoke as they struggle up the next hill, us breathing it in until the next opporunity to try and pass (overtake). And did I mention the endless farms? Every inch of this hill-covered country appears populated.

Ruhungeri is the town from whence travellers set out to track the gorillas - as such I passed through there one day this past January. I suppose that's one of the many things I have failed to blog about recently, but it was a very cool experience and I made some new friends out of it to boot - pity I won't get a chance to see them while passing through this time.

One thing I have never quite figured out here that seems unique to Rwanda is the massive groups of farm workers - long lines down the side of the road, as many as 200 long - all walking who knows where.

Rain clouds ahead, so much for driving with the windows down.

Life so far this year has been spent bouncing back from home and the office in LA to Nairobi, but already this year I have been spending much less time in Kenya on average than I did last year. Rwanda, Malawi, Tanzania, now DRC and probably Mali soon too.

The road gets progressively worse in quality with each kilometer we put between us and Kigali. Beyonce's song from the Charlie's Angels soundtrack has now replaced the local music. Life goes on. Maybe I will nap a bit.

Blogger tells me I haven't been on this thing since January 20th. Some start this year is off to.

I suppose in my last post I wrote my update up to the point of something that's a bit difficult to write about, in that I don't really feel I could do it justice.

My grandfather, Dr. J. Paul Schweinfurth, died January 7th, 2010. I'm posting the obit text here under the passing thought that perhaps my blog will survive online longer than the newspaper's archives:

Dr. J. Paul Schweinfurth of Nevada City died Thursday, January 7, in Grass Valley. He was 87.

A service will be at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 17, at Calvary Bible Church, Grass Valley.

He was born Dec. 17, 1922, in Sandusky, Ohio, to William and Hazel Schweinfurth.

He attended Wheaton College, Northwestern University Medical School and the Mayo Clinic. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

He married Marjorie “Marge” Brouwer on Sept. 25, 1947, in Chicago.

Dr. Schweinfurth was a neurologic surgeon in private practice in Loichita, Kansas and Santa Barbara. He was a certified board member of Neurologic Surgery, Harvey Cushing Society and the Mayo Clinic Alumni. He enjoyed reading, bird watching and cooking.

He is survived by his wife, Marge Schweinfurth of Nevada City; children, Susie Culkin of Reno, Nev., Annie Knowles of Sacramento, and Jim Schweinfurth of Portland, Ore., brother, Joe Schweinfurth of Portland, Or.; 10 grandchildren and one great-grandson.

Dr. Schweinfurth was preceded in death by his parents, William and Hazel Schweinfurth; and brother, Henry Schweinfurth.

I loved my grandfather very much, he was kind man, and when I recall my lifetime of experiences with him, I have not a bad memory that I can access in his regard. He was not a perfect man, but he was the best grandfather I could have ever asked for. He read his Bible complete every year, and read voraciously outside of that as well. He was a good man, the type that I can only hope to imitate some day. I am thankful for the days I was able to be with him before he left us here, behind.

We called him "Grandie."

Been over a month since I last wrote on this thing.

Since then, I've gone from Kigali to Nairobi to Dubai to London to Paris to Munich to Vienna to Geneva to Paris to London to Los Angeles to Sacramento to Los Angeles to Sacramento to Los Angeles to Sacramento to Los Angeles to London to Dubai and that is where I am right now. And if all goes well I will be home in Nairobi this afternoon for the first time in over a month. And then I'll go right back to Kigali.

Let's see if I can semi-recap.

Europe was a lot of fun, other than the parts where EuroStar shut down the trains between London and Paris and I spent a nightmare day (after flying from NBO and DXB overnight) trying to find another way to Paris. I made it there late that night, but my bag didn't, and I wouldn't see it again for a full 11 days. Air France graciously provides a whopping 150 Euro should they have lost your bags for your entire vacation. And Caroline unfortunately spent a night in the airport when we weren't able to meet up there.

But Munich was nice and we stayed with some GCC pals there who gave us all the insider tips - had a great time at the Christmas markets, saw Dachau - the model for all of the other concentration camps, and then on our last night we went back to the Christmas markets and almost made it there before I slammed my hand in the car door and sent us to the emergency room for the evening instead.

Then on to Salzburg and then Vienna, which were both nice and relatively uneventful (comparatively speaking), then Geneva, which I really enjoyed but was also stupid expensive. Thankfully, though, Anna was gracious enough to have us stay at her stupidly awesome waterfront apartment on the lake. I managed to get a day of skiing Chamonix in, so now I can finally say I've lived that dream, albeit briefly.

Then on to Paris for New Years. It was nice to explore but next time I'd like to see it at a non-holiday time. Also relatively uneventful. I liked Paris enough that I think I could live there - and that's saying something.

Then on to London and Los Angeles for my meetings. And now it strikes me that the next part really deserves its own post with a little more thought put into it. How's that for a hook?

Well. This year went fast.

I think I've worked in something like 15 or more countries this year. I've definitely traveled to at least that many, most for work. Many of them multiple times - Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania - certainly in and out of Kenya a countless number of times. At some point you start to lose track. Its like that opening scene from Fight Club, except the airports are all the African codes, not the US ones. Anyway.

I just got back from Rwanda this past weekend and will have to be back there in January. A few days of trying unsuccessfully to catch up with work and life here, and then tomorrow I am somehow, impossibly, on a flight thru Dubai for London. Cue 2 weeks in Europe - Paris, Munich, Vienna, Geneva, back to Paris for NYE (figures after a year like this, I would plan a vacation to go to 4-5 new countries). Then in early January, off to Los Angeles for meetings, then a few days with the fam in Nor Cal. Another flight I've forgotten to book as of yet.

Then back to Rwanda, then here, hopefully re-starting with a new team, and then we disperse across the diaspora to begin our futile attempt to implement 12 countries in the coming year.

I was supposed to implement 6 this year, and worked in 15 or so. Next year I am supposed to implement 12, and it is not possible for me to work in 30 countries in 1 year. At this point I don't think its possible that I remain standing should I have to be in 15 again.

I'm not complaining. I don't like complaining in others and I abhor it in myself. I'm just...reaching the end of me. I've never had so little gas in the tank. But at the same time I still believe in the work and know I am doing what it is I was made to do. I just wish it didn't feel so...drop-in-the-bucket.

Next year should go approximately twice as fast. I wonder how long I'll be able to hold on.

This past Saturday I went to see 2 of the genocide memorial sites about 25k outside of Kigali. I took Kaarli - one of my friends from Nairobi who's also here for work for a couple weeks, and Leonard - one of my colleagues from work here with me for this project. This post will not be easy to read.

The guide books gave some warning before hand but nothing could have really prepared me for the experience.

As we walked into the church compound, there was a father and son (mzungus) who were apparently just wrapping up their tour of the church. They were standing in a kind of awkward silence and soon took our arrival as their cue to leave.

After introductions, our guide, Mugabe Charles (he would later enthusiastically deny any relation to the man of the same name in Zim) began showing us around the small church.

Everything was pretty much exactly as it had been following the massacre in April of 1994, excepting that the bodies had been removed and most of what had to have been simply massive amounts of blood had been cleaned. The church benches remained, each of them covered with piles of the victims' clothes - the endless piles were a sobering reminder, everywhere you looked.

The ceilings, walls, and floors were all pocked where grenade shrapnel had hit them - apparently the amount of bodies was so staggering that at the time it had been hard to be sure that all were dead, so grenades were used to try to seal the bloody deal. The blood flew up to the ceiling, 25 feet above.

Some of the victims had been barricaded in a room, and when forced out were tortured in front of the others. They cut off their arms and then used the arms to "wave goodbye" to the other "cockroaches," before they were killed. The interhamwe had no guns, although the soldiers outside did, and those with money had the option to pay the soldiers to shoot them, giving them a quick death. Those who tried to escape met their end at the soldiers' bayonets. With no guns, the killers instead used crude tools and machetes. And hammers. So many of the skulls in the mass grave evidenced blunt trauma to the side of the head - the victims were pressed against a wall and then the hammer was used to the side of the skull.

Charles had been in the church those 2 evil days. He was 8 years old. His brother at one point had left him hiding in a corner, smeared with blood and covered with the bodies of others. He went looking for the father, but never returned, and Charles later found him, dead. His father was still alive after having his head hammered, and as he was dying he begged Charles to hide. Charles lost his composure but some other survivors were able to quiet him.

There had been pregnant women. One was a Hutu who had been married to a Tutsi man and carried his baby. The killers put her on the church alter (still to this day with the blood-stained covering on it), and cut out the child to "remove the sin," before killing her. They did this with a number of the pregnant Tutsi women as well. There was a lot of raping, and after raping, a typical means of execution was a spear through the genitals and out through the upper back. There had been one woman with her child on her back that was killed in this way, and the spear went through both her and the child. Her remains had been kept in this state in a viewing chamber below the floor of church, but after too much trauma for the viewers, it was put inside a coffin, that remains there to this day.

The same chamber included about 150 or so skulls and various bones on display, as well as some of the ID cards of the victims.

After this, Charles took us back behind the church to the mass grave there. We descended into a dark, dry hall that contained rows of shelves, 4-5 high, 15 feet above us, each 10 feet wide and deep. All covered with endless, countless skulls of the victims. The lower shelves were filled with other bones - mostly limbs from the look of it. The remains of thousands. It was there that Charles told us that some 6,800 people died in those 2 days at the church, another 4,000+ in the surrounding areas of the village. 7 survived, Charles being the youngest of them. 6,800 people, systematically, brutally dispatched - all in a church smaller than the house I grew up in. No wonder they couldn't find all the survivors among the mountains of the dead.

I have seen dead bodies in my life, in the typical medical and funeral settings, and even in the naked, bloody aftermath of rape and murder, but I have never been so utterly surrounded - engulfed - by the presence of death. And for me, it was 15 years later. Charles had been there on that day, and had been there every year since. The village was his home. His family's killers still lived there, those who had escaped conviction and justice, and who had threatened Charles in the aftermath to not speak out against them again.

It was little wonder that he still could not forgive.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us. And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best. Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789. President George Washington

The nice thing about the way our founding fathers wrote and spoke is that their words almost always seem as relevant to our modern era as they were to the era in which they lived. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind behind the sniper attacks that left 10 dead, was executed Tuesday.

On CNN both last night - before his execution, and this morning - after, the reporter told us both that he would, and then did, pay for the lives he took, with his own. She used almost the exact same words both times, in the future tense and then in the past. It struck me both times: how is that possible?

If he had taken one life, perhaps, and then been caught - perhaps one could argue that this was justice, that a full restitution had been made. But how can his one life pay the sum of ten other lives? How can his one death assuage the grief of 10 families? How can he pay for all ten, and the literally hundreds of lives he permanently damaged in the wake of the ones he took to the grave? Is it even possible?

Someone outside Washington has been shooting men and women without concern for race or age. The attacks have been both methodical and random….

We are always looking to make some sort of sense out of murder in order to keep it safely at bay: I don’t fit that description; I don’t live in that town; I would never have gone to that place, known that person. But what happens when we can’t say that—when there is no description, no place, nobody? Where do we go to get our peace of mind?....

The fact is, staving off our own death is one of our favorite national pastimes. Whether it is exercise, checking cholesterol, or having a mammogram—we are always trying to find out what the profile is—and then make sure we do not fit it. But a sniper taking a single clean shot, not into a crowd but through the sight, reminds us horribly of death itself. Despite our best intentions, it is still, for the most part, random. And it is absolutely coming. – Ann Patchett, New York Times Magazine

I'm in Korogwe, which is here.

I'm pretty sure I've found the only internet shack in this tiny no-stoplight town. We're about 4 hours east of Arusha, on our way to Dar Es Salaam in the morning. In Tanzania, for those keeping score. I drove my truck from Nairobi to Arusha for about 4 weeks of work with our National Office here, which is based in Arusha. After 2 weeks at the NO, we're now headed out for field visits, which started today here, continue on our way to Dar, a day in Dar, and then I'm likely flying to Kigoma - north western Tanz where our last remaining refugee camp is still running for refugees from the Congo (formerly refugees from Burundi, formerly refugees from Rwanda, etc.). After a day or two there its back to Arusha for hopefully a little less than a week, because I need time to get back to Nairobi and change bags before I'm off to Zimbabwe for a week. (Doesn't look like I'll end up getting to Zanzibar while I'm here, durn it.)

And then its either Rwanda or Malawi. I simply can't be in both at the same time, as much as some people might like that idea.

I've got a big blog about my trip to China in the works. All the pictures are on flickr but I'm having a hard time uploading them here, and I won't have any half-decent internet until I'm in Dar, at least. So maybe then.

I just wanted to get in a quick update before I went a whole nother shameful month without blogging once. Too busy to blog is becoming the story of my life.

My church has been working through a series on relationships lately, the past few weeks have been focused on things like attraction and dating, courtship and intimacy (missed that week when I was out at Naivasha), sex, and today they were due to move into marriage, but they threw a curveball.

When it came time for the sermon, the same pastor and wife who last week talked on sex (a talk in which, the pastor admitted to pre-marital sex - there's been a lot of people getting really brutally honest over the past few weeks), got up on stage but the worship band / singers stayed on stage.

After pointing out that the church was 70% young singles (it is), and reviewing the past topics that had been focused on the single people issues, he said that it would be callous to jump into marriage without pausing to come to grips with all that we had been talking about. And then he made the very important point that the church, the pastors and leaders are there, not with the answers, but to pray with us and point us to the One who does have the answers.

And then, instead of a sermon, all of the pastors and leaders came to the front and the worship band lead 20 or so minutes of songs to pray with whoever had been touched by the raw topics we had been talking about - those struggling with relationships, those struggling with sex outside of marriage, those struggling with whatever. 20 or so minutes moving between songs in english and songs in Swahili, and people getting about as real as it can get and being prayed over. It was pretty powerful.

But what I really liked was the way he closed the time - asking all of the single people to stand while he prayed for them. One part in particular struck me - he prayed for the healing of those who had been growing older while still single, and that God would forgive the church for any ways in which it had stigmatized singleness as a sin, for any ways in which it had repelled single people in that particular way. I'm paraphrasing and not getting it quite right, but it was damn nice to have the church praying for my singleness for just what it is, rather than turning it into something it isn't. I left encouraged.

Lazy Sunday afternoon for a change and I'm finally writing...also for a change. Only really 2 things...

1. A while back I wrote about Don Dawson, the guy who left his life in the US to go search for his brother who had gone missing in action in Vietnam. I turned up a good deal more than I originally thought I would, including having a commenter offer to send me an original copy of the actual Life magazine article from 1965 (!) that she and her husband had found whilst cleaning out their attic. She sent it to me in exchange for the cost of postage, and it was a cool thing to read when I was back home for a couple weeks in August. I didn't have time to transcribe the article, but was still planning to at some point in the future, until today, when I noticed yet another recent comment on the original post I made. Turns out Google Print now has back copies of Life online. Here's the one about Don Dawson. I love the internet.

2. Today I got the following email, from "Gmail Customer Care":

Gmail! Customer Care Satisfaction Survey

Dear Valued Member,

Due to the congestion in all Gmail users accounts, Gmail would be
shutting down all unused accounts. In order to avoid the deactivation of
your account, you will have to confirm your e-mail by filling out your
Login Info below by clicking the reply button. The personal information
requested are for the safety of your Gmail account. Please leave all
information requested.

Name: ............................................
User name: ............................................
Password: .............................................
Date Of Birth: ........................................
Country Of Residence: ...........................


After you must have followed the instructions in the sheet, your Gmail
account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thank you
for your usual co-operation. We apologize for any inconvinience.


Gmail Customer Care

Case number: 8941624
Property: Account Security
Contact date: 26-29-2009

Take the survey
Gmail Copyright © 2009 Gmail Inc. All rights reserved.

Kind of scary and evil that some people might fall for this stuff.

If the blog looks a bit different, that's because it is. Blogger made some overhauls to their user interface for blog formatting, which as far as I can tell adds significant levels of coding on the back end that make it less likely that I'm finally going to figure out all the HTML and CSS anytime in the near future. Which makes it less likely that I'm going to get around to getting my own site up finally. I need to just take like 6 months off at some point and learn to code, and maybe study French, and brush up on my Spanish.

Right now, though - I clearly don't even have time to blog. September's already half gone and this is the first thing I've sat to write, essentially.

Its been a good couple weeks back with the crowd in Nairobi - perhaps even too good, there's been a couple crazy weekend house parties (Brian and Anne's, then Debbie's), softball season has started up again - drama I should write about at some point, and ultimate continues. This weekend is a 3-day weekend because we get Monday off for Id-al-fitr or "Id" for short - the celebration of the end of Ramadan. A good reminder of how close to the ME we are here. Aaron, Kaarli, Alan, Sheila, Debbie, maybe Nat, and myself are off to Naivasha where we rented a house. Should be pretty chill, just hanging with the flamingos and whatnot.

For the first time since I moved here, I've been in the same place for 2 weeks and actually don't have any travel planned in the next 2 - fingers crossed. Well, international travel - I have a field visit next week up in Baringo or somewhere. I did the math while I was home on vacation. So far this year I'm pretty sure 1) I've worked in 13 countries, and traveled to more than that, and 2) I've not been in the same place for a period longer than 3 weeks at any one point - not even Kenya.

As the fireman said:
Don't book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.
As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won't shut.
These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you're climbing out of yourself.
If you're going to smash into the sky.


Many times I've gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking upward,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor:
small plants and swans bending
into their grave.
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
birds to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand:
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something —
some useful door —
somewhere —
up there.

- Anne Sexton (1975)

A friend writing about the Sabbath reminded me of this article today. I like the end of it in particular:

Whenever I dream of living in a society with a greater respect for its Sabbatarian past -- a fantasy I entertain only with anxiety, since Sabbatarians have a long history of going too far -- I think of something two rabbis said. Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, best known for his tales of the golem, pointed out that the story of Creation was written in such a way that each day, each new creation, is seen as a step toward a completion that occurred on the Sabbath. What was Creation's climactic culmination? The act of stopping. Why should God have considered it so important to stop? Rabbi Elijah of Vilna put it this way: God stopped to show us that what we create becomes meaningful to us only once we stop creating it and start to think about why we did so. The implication is clear. We could let the world wind us up and set us to marching, like mechanical dolls that go and go until they fall over, because they don't have a mechanism that allows them to pause. But that would make us less than human. We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember.

- Judith Shulevitz, Bring Back the Sabbath

Well, Haiti's going to be over before I finally get around to writing about it, so it's high time I get around to writing about it. I'm just going to go semi-chronological-probably-mostly-stream-of-consciousness on this one and see where we end up.

Flew here on a Sunday morning from NYC. Lunch in the hotel, and I realized I was once again eating salad in the third world again. Can't trust the water the lettuce has been washed in, but certainly can't trust unwashed lettuce anymore. Sigh.

I'm in the hotel everyone said to stay in - Hotel Montana - so that's nice. The room is clean and the bed is comfy and it feels pretty safe. Unlike most places I've worked in Africa, here in Haiti all of the hotels and office complexes and homes and apartment complexes have the gates and electric fencing and barb wire and whatnot - but here the guards have guns.

It reminds me a lot of Mozambique - the whole country seems to have that war-is-still-fresh-in-our-past kind of bombed-out feel to it. And it was poor before the violence too. Haiti's been a very up and down country in my lifetime, fortunately right now it *appears* to be an another up...the UN troops are here in full battle gear and riding around in their peace-keeping APC's and SUV's and whatnot - but hey, at least they are here. I don't fully believe that its them that are really keeping the peace, though.

The hotel has a couple fish ponds which I love and one in particular has a turtle in it I've named Steve. I always know its a good morning when I'm walking past on my way out of the hotel and I catch a glimpse of Steve out for his morning swim. Its become something of a superstition for me. I don't like leaving the hotel without seeing Steve.

They have a Domino's here but its the only western chain I've seen anywhere yet. Its kind of an odd bastion of bad-for-you food, and I'm more than happy to continue my eating trend of the last few weeks. I vacillate between the room-service cheeseburger and delivery pizza, and the occasional seafood dish.

People start checking out for the day at 4pm. Its not safe out after dark here - just like home in Nairobi - so I guess that's why. I stay later and I feel bad about it on behalf of my drivers, but they don't seem to mind. And I offered to drive, I already know my way around and it would be more convenient, but its probably better that I'm not anyway. If I did somehow get lost - I don't know enough French yet to find my way back to the hotel. Need to find a couple weeks to do an immersion course or something.

Speaking of French, I spent the last weekend on a last-minute whim in the Dominican Republic, less than 48 hours but still glad I jumped over. Explored Santo Domingo's downtown district - the ancient and lovely Zona Colonial - oldest church in the entire collection of the Americas is there. Still has cobble-stone streets and ancient architecture to explore, which I love. Sunday I had way too brief a time on the beach outside Santo Domingo, which is one of the worst and most crowded beaches in the country and was still insanely awesome - white fine sand and crystal clear water. Taxi drove me to the airport in my still-wet swim trunks and feet and ankles and calves still covered in sand. I drank a liter of beer on the way, which is the size beer should come in. Which put me in the mood for writing in the airport but I didn't have enough time there to finish what I was working for.

And then I was waking up on Monday morning and back at work this week. Tomorrow my team member and I are off to Plateau Central to see the field programs for a couple days. We're on a small 5-person charter plane and Veronica's a bit afraid of it but I can't justify a 4 hour drive over a 20-minute flight, plus we're driving back on Friday anyway, so its like splitting the difference. Since I'm still toying with the idea of getting my own prop plane, I'm kind of excited to be in one, since I haven't been in a while now. Well, minus the dual turbo-prop from here to SD and back on the weekend.

Saturday I'm finally starting the long trip home to Nairobi, with a 24 hour stay in NYC. I'll get to go to my church while I'm there!

The definition between the haves and the haves-not is not as visible in Nairobi as it is in South Africa, and particularly here in Port au Prince. Since the city begins to run up the hills that fence it in with the ocean on the other side, the rich mansions look down from lofty heights but not very far at all in actual distance from the cinder-block slums that stack up upon one another on the lower slopes, and down into the valley below, where they sprawl. There are big empty rock and trash-strewn riverbeds that cut through the neighborhoods - where the water runs down from the mountains when it rains. I can picture them full and raging when the hurricanes come. And I can picture the neighborhoods on the flat areas down near the shore underwater - but that I can picture because I've seen it before on TV - those are these neighborhoods that I'm driving through. These are the people that suffer and die when that happens. I look at the impoverished masses on the other side of my passenger window, and, like in Africa, they are the survivors here - the ones who made it. But here it seems more present somehow.

I'm glad I got to see Haiti. I'll probably be back here for more work - there's tons of need for it here and lots of opportunity for improvement in the organization. I wouldn't want to live here, but being in the DR and working on my Spanish a little bit made me realize I think I'd really enjoy living in a South / Latin American country for a change. I think I'd get finally fluent in my Spanish in a hurry, which would be awesome.

Time to leave. The nice thing about leaving the office so early (6 or 7) is that I actually have time for a proper workout - I've been biking for about 30 minutes and running 3-4 miles after. All in the hotel gym - I don't leave the hotel at night. Its been good. I watch the Little League World Series on ESPN while I work out. And I get to see the top 10 plays in the morning before my meeting with Steve on my way to the car.

Vacation blogging.

First off, there's a thing about my blogging. I fell behind in emails with more than a couple people recently, and as I've been trying to get around to telling them all - my blog has become something of a barometer of my free time / ability to have a personal life. Like, if I say, end up randomly working in 4 countries in as many weeks, and only have maybe 6 nights actually in my apartment in Nairobi, before flying halfway (literally) around the world for a few days at home before I have to be in NYC for a wedding and then I'm off to Haiti for work...and somehow in the midst of that a few things fall by the wayside - well, blogging is going to be one of them. So if you've been waiting on an email from me and haven't seen it, and I'm not blogging either - well safe money is that I'm out of pocket at the moment.

Of course if you check here and I am making regular time for blog posts, but haven't gotten back to me...well...errm. But when's the last time I actually had regular time for blog posts anyway, heh.

So there's a few things I need to write about. My first time in Ethiopia (all work), Brandon's bachelor party and particularly the street war (literally) that was going on outside my apartment complex when I got back that night. Then there were the wonderful travels home - I want to write a letter to BA so I'll post it here for blog fodder I suppose.

Before I bother getting to all of that - assuming I ever do - more importantly, the annual home-leave food update:

Evening one was depressingly homey with Mom's fresh cooked meatloaf and mashed potatoes, and a veggie mix (tomatoes and zucchini and stuff). It was awesomely delicious but way too healthy and next thing I was out on the couch by 8pm. Mom kept waking me up to try to get me to go to bed so they could have the couch for American Idol, which they ended up watching from the floor, hah.

Wednesday I woke up and stole some of the hash-brown and sausage breakfast mom was making for Joey, but not too much, because I knew lunch would be when I started The List.

The List is the veritable stable of fast food and other similar eat-out establishments that I consider any visit to California a loss without checking all or almost all off of. Without further ado:

Weinerschnitzel (check!) - 3 corn dogs and 2 chili cheese fries. A proper American lunch.

In-n-Out (check!) - A Double Double with onions. None of this ordering off the menu trendiness, I eat it the way God intended it.

Taco Bell (half-check) - 2 Crunchwrap Supremes (this only gets a half-check because a full meal from TB should really be more rounded out with things like chalupas and 7-layer burritos so I'll just have to make up for it with more late-night goodness tonight).

Carl's Jr. - the only serious competition to In-n-Out, I have yet to have my Famous Star with cheese.

Burger King - whilst the Whopper is an otherwise solid contender in the burger realm, it cannot hold a candle to NorCal's other dominant options (listed above). Thus, it must wait til I am in NYC, on trips where I have this option.

McDonald's - like BK, a 20-piece McNuggets and large fries is waiting for me in NYC.

Round Table Pizza - fit for the knights of King Arthur's circular dining furniture, I got a $5 coupon for a large at the baseball game last night, which I fully intend to use. Speaking of baseball games...

Oakland A's Coliseum (check!) - nothing beats a Wednesday night's game's Dollar Dogs - Mom, Jonny, Peter and I all went down to see them beat the rangers, and I ran off to catch the bottom of the 1st whilst I had Jonny bring me 3 of them. Also: peanuts, sunflower seeds, Peter flirting with the kettle corn girl but not actually buying anything, not one but 2 different streakers on the field, and nearly getting kicked out of the stadium along with half of our section right behind the Ranger's bull-pen for harassing Francisco, the thug who threw a chair at a woman here 2 years back. Good times.

Bel Air's take-out chinese - There's this thing that I've not ever seen anywhere outside NorCal in the US, and this thing is a really solid take-out chinese counter inside a grocery store. Both Raley's and Bel Air offer this here, and its a thing of greasy beauty that I will not board a plane without partaking in.

Those are pretty much the must-haves. There's also a salad from Fresh Choice, which would be nice but is not a deal breaker. Now that NYC has a California Pizza Kitchen and a Chevy's, I can have those there too. I have a completely separate and slightly healthier NYC list that includes things like Maoz, some streetcart lamb sandwich action, Jon and Tony's pizza (best in the city, and the apartment I'm sitting for while I'm there is RIGHT ABOVE IT), a club sandwich from Dish, and a City Bistro burger.

Man I miss the food here.

Early on in the (rather excellent) movie Fight Club, Edward Norton's character meets Brad Pitt's character (well, so to speak), and they have a brief exchange whilst sitting next to each other on the airplane they're on. Ed tells Brad about his "single-serving friend" idea - how he meets people on airplanes and considers them "single-serving friends" just like the single-serving of butter they give you, and the single-serving of salt, etc.. And its clever, because its accurate - the way you meet people in small doses when you travel for a living. Pitt goes on to tell him that its clever, and then asks him how being clever is working out for him.

I like to say I make fast friends (fast in the speed sense, not in the intensely close sense). I become friends with people perhaps more quickly than you would in other places / situations, and that's kind of easy particularly here in Africa. You bond with your fellow expats pretty quickly. Take Alan, for instance - I met him at frisbee on a Friday a few weeks ago, spent a night out or two with him and friends over the weekend, and by the middle of the next week had invited him to take over my spare room while he finished his apartment search. No biggie. That wouldn't happen in NYC.

The problem with fast friendships is that they tend to exist and then end that way too. I would say of the group I've bonded with here in Nairobi, approximately a 3rd of them are the longer-term expats - here for multiple years with not much of a looming horizon on when they might move on. The rest of us are faster. We come in with 6 months or maybe 8 or a year. But that's it, then they're off, back home, or somewhere else. Its not a bad thing per se, it just is what it is. But it is sometimes very sad.

Right now I'm not sure where I fall - I came here on a 2 year contract but who knows when work will take me elsewhere for longer periods. I just found out this morning that I'm not returning from my 2 weeks in the US that begin tomorrow directly, instead I'm off to Haiti for a couple weeks of work. I probably travel too much here to really be considered in the 33% of those who are long-termers. In the last month I've worked in 4 countries.

When I first started playing ultimate here in Nairobi, I met a really cool couple of dudes named Chad and Matt. They both worked for International Justice Mission, an organization I've been a big fan/supporter of for a long time. Chad was married to Jill, the sweetest girl you ever met. I saw them each week at frisbee but that was about it. Then Rosemary, a girl I work with, invited me to her church, Mamlaka Hill, which has since become my own church here, because it is awesome.

My first Sunday there, they ask the visitors to stand and then bring around a microphone so we could introduce ourselves. I didn't see Chad, Jill, and Matt in the crowd, but they were there and heard my introduction. That afternoon at disc, they asked me if that was me, and I said it was. I began running into them at church and giving them a ride back to their place, and we'd have brunch occasionally after.

I didn't spend nearly enough time with them while they were here and I regret that very much. I came to enjoy them immensely as friends and just really great people. Matt left for home in Alaska and then he's off to Cairo for more school, so I hope to see him again sometime soon. Chad and Jill left tonight, returning to Texas. I know we'll stay good friends but I have no idea when I'll see them again. I sure am glad to live in the age of the internet, though.

This happened a good deal in NYC as well, albeit on a more prolonged track of sorts. But it too is a transient place - people come and people go. Some day one of your best friends might just announce she's moving to London. Some day I might up and tell everyone I'm shipping off to Africa. And I guess I was that person - the one who left. Its just kind of the way things are, when your life involves travel. You sacrifice a lot of what-might-have-been with some really awesome people. Its just that way.

But it doesn't mean I have to like it.

A year in review.

365 days ago I turned 30, on my own, in Ghana.

Then in August, I climbed Kilimanjaro, also on my own (kinda). And then I met up with my church's youth group for our missions trip to an AIDS orphanage in Jinja, Uganda. Then I was back in NYC finding an apartment with Dave.

The fall was somewhat uneventful - I went back to Cali for Margy's wedding, and spent the rest of it mostly in the city, sometimes working, sometimes not so much. It was a time of limbo as WV and I were flirting with job offers and whatnot.

In November I voted, and I lost my friend Lexi. I sure do miss her.

In December I resigned from Accenture and accepted a job with World Vision. In January I moved to Nairobi.

In February, March, April, and May I worked a lot. In Uganda, Rwanda, Senegal, Malawi, and maybe somewhere else I can't remember just right now. I also plugged into a great church and expat community here in Nairobi and played a lot of ultimate.

In June, Jonny visited, which I still haven't found time to write about (although I did get the pictures online). Also I worked in South Africa for a bit and it was nice to be back, albeit briefly.

And that brings us full circle to July, in which I threw a 4th of July party complete with fireworks here in Kenya, finally got my car (which I also need to write about), and spent a little time working in Mozambique again, where it was also nice to be back to, briefly. And I'll be leaving for Ethiopia tomorrow night, for the first time.

And, for this birthday, I wasn't on my own, I was with great friends here in Nairobi and had a really good day. My 31st trip around the sun has been bittersweet, but more sweet than bitter.

(Oh, and I was only in a hospital twice this year - I think, which was on par with the last couple of years, but overall still low compared to most of my twenties. So that's good.)

Fourth party was off the hook, and despite our shenanigans I somehow didn't end up in jail. Fireworks are readily available in Nairobi because there's a large Indian population that has at least one holiday per year that they celebrate with fireworks (apparently there's another one where they throw paint at each other). So Saturday morning, after a quick brunch, Aaron and I hit up the fireworks shop in the local Indian market (Diamond Plaza), and it was like kids at Christmas, while Aaron's wife patiently waited.

We went pretty moderate - sparklers for everyone, some spinning cherry bomb type things, plenty of bottle rockets, some stationary rocket launchers, some small useless firecrackers that didn't hardly work, and the massive shower fountain thing, for our grand finale.

Of course, after the first bottle rocket, while it was still light out, the groundskeeper was warning me that the cops might come, etc.. So I hid the bottle rockets from Aaron for a while and we stuck to the occasional firework that didn't shoot loudly into the sky. Of course, 3 or 4 beers/hours later was a different story, the party was in full swing and we started lighting things up.

I had the brilliant idea to float fireworks out on paper plates into the middle of the pool - kind of a Cape Canaveral launch pad, if you will, and everyone enjoyed that effect. Pretty soon we were nearing the end of our stash, and we set up the grand finale - the massive shower fountain thing, and about 4 stationary rocket launchers on either side. Matt and Aaron and Brandon and I and a couple kids from the neighbor's apartments all got our lighters ready and did a fairly decent job of lighting everything at once, so all of a sudden the sky was ablaze with loud exploding rocket shells, and the massive shower fountain thing was flaming a good 15 feet into the air, in all its sparkly glory.

Which is when Matt had the awesome idea that someone should jump through it (it was sitting on the edge of the pool, thus jumping through it meant a necessary dive into the pool).

What followed was an extremely brief, heated debate about who was best qualified for this task, which turned out to be myself, given that it was my apartment and I could change clothes and whatnot. So I handed Matt my hat, emptied my pockets into the hat, and then without much thought ran and jumped through the flaming sparkly glory. The crowd was on the other side of the pool from us, so they pretty much didn't see anything until my body came flying head-first through the flames and into the (freezing cold) water.

Next year we're going to really have to up the ante. (Although, it later surfaced that Chad's boss lit off some fireworks - in particular the Osama Bin Laden rocket, which Aaron and I had been closely eyeing - at their own celebration, and had a couple dozen uniformed cops show up at their party, but no one was arrested in the end.)

(tomorrow: recap of Jonny's visit and our Mara self-drive. sans pictures, still haven't uploaded a single one this year)