Greetings from Wednesday

 Greetings all!

Marianna here. . .wrapping up another full day on the worksite. The pace has certainly changed, however, since we finished building the actual structure of the library. Today was spent mostly in the shade, cutting steel cables into long strips and wrapping them into neat squares in order to prepare the inner structure for the lintel we’re beginning tomorrow. Lots of sitting in the dirt bent over stiff and sharp objects, twisting and working the cables into position. A dozen or so older students from Oloika who were hanging around the school during the afternoon came over to help us. We partnered up with them after a quick name game and finished the lintel cables ahead of schedule! My partner’s name was Rama, a fifteen-year-old eighth grader who actually attends school with her brother and sister in nearby Magadi. She lives in Oloika, though, and has been home while the public school teachers have been on strike.

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On that note, we go some very happy news from Shani tonight at check-in! Apparently the leader of the teacher’s union and the Kenyan government have arrived at some sort of agreement, and the teachers will begin teaching their classes again within a couple of days! Of course, with Oloika being fairly isolated, a couple of days could stretch into sometime a bit longer, but I’m sure we’ll see some serious changes in the classrooms long before we leave for home.

As we did yesterday, we ended the afternoon session with a very humbling game of soccer. I honestly can’t even begin to explain how vast and open the landscape is, stretching for miles and miles around each side of the dirt field, across this valley to the mountains beyond. My team lost. . .again. . .but the fact that these extremely agile young boys, some not even wearing shoes, would honor us by passing the ball our way once or twice during the game was enough to make it all worth it! My hiking boots were definitely not constructed for this kind of activity. They’re well broken in by now, Mom!!!!

I guess I forgot to mention the fact that it was only yesterday morning when Thea, Jessie and I got back from our homestay. I hope one of them gets to blog soon, because I think it’s only fair for some of the parents, who probably are experiencing Kenya for the first time through a child who is also experiencing Kenya for the first time, to hear it from their own unique perspective. I’ve been lucky enough to have now been on three homestays, totaling to nearly a week in a Masai boma. Zhamoyani did get a couple of things right though: jump rope, flying kites, coloring books, and plenty of snooze time in the heat of the day. I will also add that we took a stroll after evening tea, around 6 pm, that can only be described as spectacular. The light, the landscape, everything! How can a place on a map that is so small be so big in reality?!?!?!? Mind blown.

I have also continued my obsession with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and hogged a considerable portion of check-in reading the author’s introduction. I encourage you all to look this book up. . .there is a lot to think about in it that is extremely relevant to Oloika. Overpopulation, climate change, the difference between preservation and “improvement,” desert landscapes, and that genus of tourist, Slobivius americanus, restricted to vehicular types of travel and without the patience or cardiac health to remove themselves from a car. Being back here has also got me fantasizing about one of my favorite places on earth: the Carl Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. Carl Akeley, besides being a fascinating scientist and explorer who revolutionized museum taxidermy and display practices (taking a moment to geek out, here), also recognized a simple fact that was years ahead of his time. Some of his motivation in replicating the landscape, flora, and fauna of the African wilderness so accurately (please please please check out the dioramas in this hall online because they truly are unmatched in the world) lay in the truth that the Africa he knew, even in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was rapidly disappearing. Victim to development and restructuring after the calamity that was “the Scramble for Africa.” Even then, he knew and he understood that he was preserving an idea that was almost already gone. 

From the Author’s Introduction to Desert Solitaire:

Finally a word of caution: Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but a elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot—throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?

Just food for thought…

Xoxo

Marianna

Quote of the day: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead