Elephants

Elephant, Amboseli National Park, Kenya

You can’t live in Kenya without being outraged and shaken by the senseless massacre of elephants for ivory. Well, maybe you can. But I can’t. And I’m not alone.

Measures to ban the use and sale of ivory have been in effect for decades. But the illegal trade continues, bolstered by a growing demand in China mostly, and other parts of Asia. The demand is driven by conspicuous consumption, largely among a new upper class eager to show off its ability to buy something rare, precious, and unauthorized.  Poaching of elephants is on the rise again, after a drop in the 1990s and early 2000s. Last year, 25,000 African elephants were killed by poachers. It’s a staggering number.

Baby elephants are dependent on their mother's milk for 2 years

This is particularly heartbreaking when you consider how long it takes to make or replace an elephant. The gestation period is nearly two years. Baby elephants are dependent on their mother’s milk for another two years, and not totally ready to fend for themselves for several years more.

Elephants are incredible animals. They communicate with each other through sound waves we humans can’t hear. Some say they have telepathic sense, too. And they do have long memories, able to recognize a former friend or relative after an absence of many years. They clearly experience joys and trauma. They will greet each other by wrapping their trunks together and huddling close. And despite their enormous size, they walk quietly on padded feet, with a surprisingly graceful gait.

Elephants in the morning mist, Lumo Community Conservancy

Just outside of Nairobi, in the boundaries of the Nairobi National Park, is the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage. This remarkable place rescues baby elephants, some of them merely weeks old, and most of them orphaned due to poaching. The orphans show up traumatized, sick, and weak. About half of them cannot be saved and die in spite of heroic attempts and care on the part of the orphanage staff. 

The orphanage spends huge amounts of money and effort to care for the baby elephants, along with a handful of orphaned rhinos and other animals. The keepers actually live with the elephants to form a trusting bond, essential for their survival and ability to thrive. The elephants also form close ties with each other, naturally falling into matriarchal units, led by the older female orphans.

Elephant orphans come running for their mid-day meal, David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage

Each day, for one hour, the orphanage opens its doors to the public, and you can watch one of the several daily feedings. The baby elephants show up in two groups. The littlest ones first, followed by the slightly older ones. In both cases, they emerge from the brush running in anticipation of their giant baby bottles of milk (a special formula that took years to perfect), followed by a snack of leafy branches, and finished off with a good dust or mud bath.

It’s incredibly cute.

You can adopt an elephant for yourself or as a gift (I highly recommend it!) and support the orphanage in other ways. There’s more info here: http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/

You can adopt a baby elephant

Saving an elephant is a big undertaking. When the babies reach the age of two years and can be weaned from milk, they are transferred to a center in Tsavo National Park, where they slowly adapt to life in the wild, including mingling with the wild herds that live in or migrate through the area. Eventually, they join in with a wild herd or form their own family group. Even so, most of them return for visits with their former keepers and to meet the new orphans, showing off their own offspring and groups.

Left to their own devices, elephants can live for 70 or 80 years. But at current rates of poaching, the long-term survival of any African elephants in the wild is seriously threatened.

Tens of thousands of years ago, we humans helped wipe out the early relatives of today’s elephants: mastodons and mammoths. Sporting huge tusks and long fur, they cohabitated with early man, roaming across North and Central America, Asia, and Europe. 

Wooly mammoth cave painting, dated about 13,000 years ago, Rouffignac Cave, France

But a warming climate combined with overhunting on the part of humans, thanks to advances in stone tool technology and hunting techniques, led to their extinction.

Today, we are on the brink of doing it again.

Compared to the 1.3 million African elephants living in the wild 25 years ago, there are about 470,000 left today. If current rates of poaching continue, we can expect the whole population of African elephants living in the wild to be wiped out by 2025.

That’s only a dozen years from now.

Elephant tracks in the mud, a vanishing sight?

Ticks - Yuck!

The wooded and grassy areas around Nairobi are favorite tick habitats.

In the last few days, I’ve pulled two ticks off our dog. The first was huge, bloated with Bacchus’ blood to the size of a cranberry. It was disgusting. The second was a lot smaller, but no less revolting.

For all the time I’ve spent outside in grassy and wooded areas, I’ve had remarkably little interaction with ticks. But this recent experience sent me both to the internet, and to the vet.

If you know anything about ticks, you are probably aware that they are nasty parasites, whose only purpose in life seems to be to suck blood and transmit unpleasant diseases. They are arachnids, and like spiders have eight legs. Ticks like warm, humid climates, preferably with plenty of grass, woods, and deer – though other warm-blooded targets will do, too.

I tried to see if there were any redeeming features related to ticks – like being part of the food chain. But their only role seems to be as vectors for various diseases. And like the equally detestable cockroach, they are incredibly resilient. Ticks resist environmental stresses, regenerate lost body parts, and have few natural enemies. They’ve been around for millions of years (!) and have been found in ancient amber, among other places.

When they attach themselves to a person or animal, ticks use the barbs on two of their legs to create a small wound. Then they insert their mouth, spit out a substance to thin the blood (as do mosquitoes), and go to work engorging themselves. Yuck.

In the process, ticks spread any number of diseases. In the US, the tick-borne diseases you hear most about are Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, though there is a long list of others from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Europe also has Lyme disease. Here in Africa, the big risks from ticks are African spotted fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, relapsing fever, and a series of others – none of which sound pleasant.

In Kenya, ticks are the number one health risk for livestock – in a country of herders who depend desperately on their animals for food, income, and cultural status. Ticks cause millions of dollars of losses each year due to livestock illness, death, morbidity, and lost productivity. Worldwide, that figure runs into the tens of billions of dollars, annually.

Because the diseases they carry can mutate quickly, there is no vaccine. So the best prevention is DEET-based formulas (including a weekly rinse for the dog). Researchers are investigating alternatives, especially for livestock, due to the costs and health effects of pesticide treatments. They are looking into biological approaches, seeing if they can use natural tick enemies such as fungi, bacteria, protozoa, or nematodes.

“Go nematodes!” I say.

In the meantime, I’m not curtailing our outings or time spent outdoors. I’m just keeping a more watchful eye for ugly little freeloaders on the dog – or myself.

And I’ve developed a new appreciation for the expression “to be ticked off.”

My one consolation is that I am not alone in my revulsion for ticks. There are entire websites and facebook pages dedicated to people who hate them.

So, at least I’m in good company.

Baobabs

 
 

My first encounter with a baobab was in  The Little Prince, which I read for a class in high school. I thought it was an invention by the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The name baobab alone seemed too exotic to be real, not to mention the tree's odd shape and remarkable pace of growth. Sensing our skepticism, the teacher told us to look it up.

In those days that meant reaching for a dictionary, or better yet, grabbing the “B” volume of the maroon or navy blue-backed encyclopedia series (depending whether you favored World Book or Britannica).  Today, if you look up baobabs on line, you’ll find something like this (compiled from several sources):

Adansonia digitata L. - a deciduous, tropical tree, characterized by swollen trunks and branches used to store water. Fire and drought resistant. Grows in arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid tropical climates. Fast growing and long lived. Can reach heights of 25 meters and live for thousands of years.

In The Little Prince, the baobabs get a pretty bad rap. They symbolize something very evil and threatening, the spread of which can lead to catastrophe and destruction for the Little Prince’s world (or asteroid, to be more precise).

Saint-Exupery wrote The Little Prince in 1942, not long before joining the Free French Air Force in North Africa as a pilot. He was shot down and killed in 1944 during a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean. His plane and body were recovered only decades later.  The timing of his writing of The Little Prince leads some analysts to suggest that the baobabs in the book represent the spread of Nazism.

Here is a quote from the book:

“You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth.”

Sometimes," he added, "there is no harm in putting off a piece of work until another day. But when it is a matter of baobabs, that always means a catastrophe.”

The illustration is striking, and is evidently the one of all those in the book on which Saint-Exupery spent the most time.

Saint Exupery's illustration of what would happen to the Little Prince's asteroid if he did not pull up the baobabs as soon as they appear. From Chapter 5, The Little Prince

It’s been more than 70 years since Saint Exupery wrote the Little Prince. The war to which he gave his life is long past, though perhaps not all the threats of other wars and evil forces.

Though our world’s climate and landscapes have changed significantly since that time, and are doing so at an ever-escalating rate, the baobabs stand firm. Far from threatening to break up our planet, they stand out as a symbol of resilience and adaptability. They can grow in sparse environments. And because they only keep their leaves about three months of the year, baobabs can take on a skeletal appearance only to spring back to life when their leaves re-emerge

Britt and Valerie in front of a baobab

I love baobabs. I love the way the name bounces in your mouth. I love their odd shape and grandeur. I love the way they dot the rugged landscape of southern Kenya. I love the fact that according to legend the baobabs got their funny look because they were jealous of the other trees, so were plucked out of the ground and put back in upside-down. They aren’t beautiful, really, but are striking and compelling. Even when they look half dead, they stand out among the blue hills, red earth, golden savanna, or green brush that characterize the area between Tsavo East and West National Parks and the Kenyan coast, where you see lots of baobabs.

Because my career is currently taking me more in the direction of research on the importance and future of trees, forests, and agroforestry, I’ve recently learned that baobabs also are very useful – including just about every part of the tree. The fruits, sometimes called monkey bread, have up to 20 times the vitamin C of mango and 30 times the calcium. The bark is used to make cloth and rope. The leaves are nutritious and used for condiments and medicine. People sometimes live inside the enormous trunks, and animals live in the crown.

We ran into a leopard napping on the wide branch of a huge baobab in Tsavo West Park, making good use of its height and the cool shade of its leaves. We took photos of ourselves in front of one baobab standing alone on the savanna with Mt. Kilimanjaro just visible in the mist behind it. And we came across baobabs in the bend of the road, as we traversed the very bumpy but beautiful trail from Tsavo to Diani.

For people who have grown up with baobabs, their longevity and steadfastness can be a great comfort. For the rest of us that perspective can be a good lesson.

There is a lovely and touching film called “Baobab” that speaks to the pain of wars and separation in Sudan and South Sudan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRpEawpqXZs). In it, one of the characters says something like this:

“Bring your children to the baobab, my son. Tell them it has been living for thousands of years, never greedy with its shadow or water. Tell them it did not discriminate between people based on color or tribe. Teach your children to be similar to this tree…”

Bring your children to the baobab...

The Girls of Kibera Girls Centre

The girls of Kibera Girls Centre, trying to beat the odds

Being poor and female in a developing country is no picnic. And Kenya is no exception.  

The statistics on women in Kenya are sobering. Average life expectancy is only 50 years, and dropping due to high HIV/AIDS rates. For poor women, there is little or no access to health services, less chance of a secondary school education, and no chance of inheriting property. Forced child marriage, female genital mutilation, and exposure to violence or sexual abuse are all far higher than you want to know.  

For those living in the slums of Nairobi, the situation is even worse.

Main road on the edge of Kibera, littered with trash and flying toilets

Kibera is Nairobi’s largest slum, and said to be one of the biggest in Africa. It is densely populated (estimates from half to one million people) and jammed with small huts made of tin, wood, or anything else people can scrape together. Because it is not formally recognized by the government, there are no services: no water, sanitation, schools, electricity, health facilities, police, trash pickup, paved roads, etc.  Human sewage runs in ruts. There are huge piles of trash, including “flying toilets,” which is a term for plastic bags filled with feces and discarded.

Children make up a large proportion of Kibera's population, but face a deck stacked against them

According to the Kibera Law Centre, average life expectancy in Kibera is only 30 years. Violence is rampant, 66% of girls routinely trade sex for food (some starting as early as age 6), and only 8% of girls go to school.

It’s a grim picture.

Yet, when I visited the Kibera Girls Centre recently, I caught a glimpse of the strength of human resilience and ingenuity.

Note: I did not go into the vast network of dank alleys. I was with a group led by the Kenya Girl Guides Association (the Kenya Girl Scouts), which manages the Kibera Girls Centre. We were packed in one car and stuck to the bustling main roads on the edge of Kibera, which team with commerce and activity.

The Kibera Girls Centre is located on the edge of Kibera, on land lent to them by the national railroad. The only permanent structure is the latrine/showers building made of bricks. The rest of the buildings are made of metal sheeting and sort of resemble circus tents. They include a kitchen, storage house, classrooms, office, library, computer center, and sewing workshops. There is a small flower garden, named for one of the volunteers/benefactors of the school, and a vegetable patch, which was fairly barren the day we visited.

The small, green gardens, with flowering trees and bushes are a haven from the violence and filth of the slum

The purpose of the centre is to offer schooling and vocational training to girls from Kibera between the ages of 15 and 25 years. They have a program called “learn and earn” which helps the girls to pass school exams and pick up a vocational skill/job. The curriculum also addresses issues such as health, violence prevention, empowerment, and character development.

Learning and earning, by the end of their second year, these girls will have made enough to buy their sewing machines

In their first year of study, the girls are exposed to different vocational training possibilities, ranging from sewing to cooking, environmental studies, craftsmaking, and computer skills.  In their second year, they are pushed to engage in one of those vocations. The school has an on-site catering business and an on-site sewing business that makes, among other things, uniforms for the different ages of Girl Guides (daisies, brownies, juniors, seniors, etc.). Those who choose sewing are set up to purchase their machine by the end of the second year of training.

The funding for the school comes from a wide mix of sources – many attracted through different foreign embassy contacts, groups like the rotary club, and other NGOs. They also have many benefactors, who organize annual fundraisers.

On Saturdays, the centre opens its doors to the younger siblings of the girl students, offering them lunch and activities.

The Kibera Girls Centre is an inspiring place. It sits as a haven of peace and potential for girls living in what would seem to be a hopeless situation. But the most striking part of the visit is the girls themselves. They live in conditions and face challenges most of us cannot even imagine. Yet they are lively and lovely. They are shy but proud.

We were welcomed with songs and dancing, which brought out the life and smiles in this group of girls

We were offered home-baked goods and presented with a welcome dance performance. Accompanied only by a drum, the girls sang and moved, closing their eyes and flowing with the beat.  Clapping we moved with them and were moved by them. And somewhere, among the metal buildings and budding flowers there was something resembling hope – not for miracles, but for beating some of the odds and bettering some of the lives of the girls of Kibera Centre for Girls.

2012 Recap

As the clock struck 12 on New Years Eve to welcome in the year 2012, we were not, as had long been our tradition, surrounded by good friends and champagne. We were not rounding out an evening of excellent food and too much wine. We weren’t rolling up the dining room carpet and dancing on a floor sticky with spilled drinks. We weren’t even wearing funny hats.

Instead, we were on an airplane – all four of us, plus my mother.  We were looking out the windows, as the plane was just making its descent, scheduled to land mere seconds after the turn of the new year.  We were landing in Lima after spending Christmas in the States to start what would be our last (partial) year in Peru. 

And because it was Lima, where every festival or holiday is celebrated with enthusiasm, our landing aircraft offered us a bird’s-eye view of the hundreds of neighborhood fireworks going off all over the city. 

Only our younger son was disappointed – as he would have preferred to spend the evening  partying with his Peruvian friends. The rest of us thought it was a lovely display.

And either way, it was a fitting way to mark the start of an unusually eventful year in the Gwinner household – a year that included:

1 trip to the Galapagos Islands (amazing)

1 college graduation

1 high school graduation

Numerous visits from dear friends and family

Several work trips to Europe, Africa, and Asia

1 move out of our large, lovely, Lima apartment

1 long trek to Choquequirao, Machu Picchu, and other amazing parts of the Andean highlands, as our farewell-to-Peru trip

1 college drop off in the States

1 move into our wacky and enormous Nairobi house

1 change of jobs from head of housing finance for the Latin America Caribbean region to head of housing finance for the Sub-Saharan Africa region

1 switch from heading communications about potato and sweetpotato to freelance writing on all sorts of agricultural development and climate change topics

1 unexpected trip back to Lima to recover our dog – abandoned at the last minute by the company that was supposed to move him to Africa 

 Lots of encounters with wild animals in the bush, on the savanna, and in our yard

An exotic getaway to Zanzibar

Several safaris

Some snorkeling and diving on the southern coast of Kenya

2012 also brought us many goodbyes. We left behind dear new friends in Peru, and had all-too-brief reunions with old friends in DC, NYC, and other parts of the world. We said goodbye to our two sons, and started life as empty-nesters. We said goodbye to our jobs in Lima and many wonderful colleagues. 

We said hello to a new country, new continent, and promise of many new adventures.

Now, we say hello to 2013, to a new list of challenges, discoveries, and memorable moments.

Happy New Year.