Hi everyone! I can't believe I only have one month left in Kenya - this semester has gone by so quickly! So, this past week I moved from Nairobi to Mombasa (a city on the coast) for my month long independent study. This part of the semester is for the students to use all that they have learned so far to be able to live and work on their own in East Africa. Each student chooses an African organization to work with and they experience what it is like to have a job in Kenya and how the different organizations work. I am living in Mombasa with 2 other girls from the program, Laura and Jessie. We are living in the center of Old Town Mombasa - an area full of Muslim culture. Our apartment is in a house on the waterfront and right next to Fort Jesus, a famous historical tourist attraction. It is very cool being in Old Town and seeing a different side of Kenya. The architecture in our neighborhood is very old and traditional and we hear the Muslim prayer on loudspeaker many times each day. Our first morning there we were surprised to hear the prayer echoing through our apartment at 4:50am! I am working with KESCOM, a Sea Turtle conservation organization in Mombasa. I have to commute on my own to work everyday. I take matatus, which are the cheap and most common travel option in the city. They are 10 passenger vans that fly around the city and pick people up almost anywhere. They cram people in and it can be very uncomfortable - basically anything goes as long as they can keep making money and picking up more people. The drivers are also crazy and drive so fast - you always think your matatu will crash but somehow it doesn't. The KESCOM office is located in an apartment complex on Bomburi beach. It is a tease that I am so close to the ocea each day as I sit and do work, but the scenery is amazing! This past week I got to know the people in the office and worked on compiling data on a large spreadsheet for a big project KESCOM is doing on all the sea turtle nesting sites along the coast. Hopefully this coming week I will go into the field and do less office work. Although at this point I am not crazy about the office work I am doing at KESCOM - being on the coast for this month makes the work worth it!!
This weekend Jessie, Laura and I traveled about 45 minutes south to Diani Beach and stayed at the Galu Sea Lodge for 2 nights. This is the same place we stayed at for our mid-semester break - but this time there were 3 of us in 1 house instead of 17 in 2. I called the owner mid-way through the week and he was so happy to hear from SLU students again - he gave me a reduced price for our weekend stay. It was crazy - we had a beach front house to ourselves and I don't think anyone was staying in the other 4 houses next to us - we had the place to oursleves. It was really nice to get out of muggy Mombasa - it is so hot all day - you can't escape the heat!! We met up with our friend Chelsea, another SLU student, who is doing her work on Diani Beach with the Colobus Trust, a monkey preservation organization. All weekend she was caring for a 2 week old monkey that she had helped save during the week. I got to hold it, it was so tiny and it fit in my hand and was so human like! Friday night we went with Chelsea and her co-workers and other friends from the beach community to a local bar / club right on the beach called Forty Thieves. It was fun to meet other people our age and from all over the world. There were 2 girls studying abroad from Norway and a guy from Switzerland who just got of the army and is traveling around the world for a year. Everyone was so nice and it was a lot of fun to also meet the locals who were also very nice to us. Saturday we spent the day on the beach and by the pool and Chelsea took us to a local swimming place that toursits don't know about. We went to where the ocean meets the river. You can jump in at the mouth of the river and the current takes you right down into the river as you float. That night we went to an amazing Italian restuarant with a bunch of the people we met the night before and then went back to Forty Theives. Today we relaxed by the pool and in the evening we will catch a taxi back to the city for another work week. We are already thinking of coming back here next weekend!
I have 3 more weeks of work in Mombasa and then all the students meet back in Nairobi for our last week together. We get back to the compound on a Saturday night and then most of us leave Sunday morning for our trip to climb Mt. Kenya. We get back from the hike on Wednesday and leave Kenya that Saturday, December 13! I have a busy few weeks ahead!!
Here are some pictures I have on my computer - I have a few more I want to put up, but they are on my camera and I don't have my camera cord this weekend. The 1st is from Halloween. I was a Fanta bottle - Fanta is super popular in Kenya, along with Blueband, a brand of butter that my friend Meg dressed as. The next is of me holding a chameleon I found on a late night walk we went on earlier in the semester at the campsite we stayed at in the Rift Valley after our rural homestays - can you remember back that far? It seems like such a long time ago - my friend just gave me that picutre. The others are from our first trip to Galu Sea Lodge. There is one of myself and my friend Wendy riding a camel on the beach, the tiny plane we took to Mombasa - we were the only ones on it, a few from our snorkeling trip, and the rest are of Galu. I stayed in the house that you can see right behind the pool, and the pictures of the ocean is the view I could see from my house.
