My office

My office at ICRAF Nairobi. Seated beside me is the lovely Aileen, aka The Boss. Without her, I would be still stuck at the airport. Her and I will go to Meru, 2 hours from Nairobi on Thursday for another piece of our story.

African queens

Some of the talented women who run a widow's cooperative farm and tree nursery. They told us the streams have dried up and the reasons why they stopped planting eucalyptus trees in exchange for native ones.

Our Speech

We went by this school, so we were all asked to give an impromtu speech to encourage the village children to stay in school.

Play time

An unusual toy: a tetter-totter that also spins.

Kisii town

This is Maurice, the sweetest guy ever and the Kisii representative for the National Environmental Managment Authority. One thing I love about Kenya is most everyone I run into is either in environmental or health work.

Anyway, check out that background.

Filming

So our mission was to find out why the eucalyptus trees are being grown here (instead of native trees), which industries are involved, and the economic and environmental effects.

For the video to have context, we decided we wanted some establishing shots of the town, so everyone agreed I should sit on the luggage rack and we should drive slowly to get them best. The only other mzungu (whitey) wanted to come along with me for the adventure. All the Kenyans refused out of embarassment. I wish I could have taken a picture of people's faces, because considering there are near to no white people around and near to no people riding on roofs, we might as well have been a white rhino parade with the looks we got.

Arrived

After 22 hours on a plane, delays, flat tires, and 5am wake up times, I finally left my partner on this trip (Alex) in Kisumu, Kenya and left to go to Kisii. Kisii town is about a 2 hour drive from Kisumu in Western Kenya. I was only passing by this market place, on my way to interview some farmers who have been having water scarcity problems due to the large amount of eucalyptus being grown. With me are 4 other people on our investigative team ( a botanist scientist, a Kisii natural resource management official, and two friends from ICRAF ).

Leaving July 18th

This Sunday, 13 days after I was planning on leaving, I will be off with my sidekick Alex back to Kenya.

While there I will produce my first international short video! The purpose is to show how ICRAF is planting trees to help local people maintain ground water, especially as conditions get drier due to global climate change (aka global warming). The video will hopefully be done by early August to be shown in Stockholm for World Water Week.

Then after that I'll return to Kisumu, Kenya (near Lake Victoria) to continue my work from last year with SANA.

Pictures and more to come.

Kenya-dig-it?