Kenya Series - Mt. Longonot

A fantastic slide show, complete with funny captions, follows this post.

Our team from The 1010 Project spent a few days visiting with a partner in Western Province, then headed to Lake Naivasha in the Central Highlands of Kenya. Naivasha is big and beautiful - it's in the bottom of the Great Rift Valley - and the entire area is covered by flower farms. Apparently Kenyan roses have a huge market in Europe. The lake has hippos and monkeys and storks and whatnot, but I wasn't all that interested in such beasts. My goal was to climb Mt. Longonot, an extinct volcano about 20 kilometers from the lake.

I recruited The 1010 Project's Development Coordinator Emily Ruppel and we planned the trip. Before long, word had spread that we were going to be awesome. Our team grew. Our buddy Josh came along, as did two people from Northside Christian Church in Houston, Texas. The Houston team was traveling with us for part of the journey, visiting our partners in Nairobi and Vihiga. Aldo and Pastor Dave would be joining us on the climb.

We started a bit late on Friday morning because we had some difficulty finding cheap transportation. By about 9:45 am, we were ready to start what by all estimates was a four-hour climb. It's actually only 630 meters (2000+ feet) from the base to the top of the crater, so we weren't entirely certain what to expect; I had (unlike most other outdoor things) done scant research on our climb. As it turns out, that 630 meters is fairly strenuous because it's NEARLY ENTIRELY VERTICAL. There is only one path up the side of this monster volcano, and it is S-T-E-E-P, let me tell you. Further complicating our climb was the omnipresent dust. It's all super-old volcanic ash and such, so the minute you put your fit in it, you sink two inches. It was like climbing in sand - my legs were getting beaten up.

Pastor Dave, a young man in our minds, was still about a decade and a half older than the oldest of us, and as we climbed, he grew increasingly short of breath. After one particularly grueling section, we took a break and he mused that he would likely not be able to reach the summit with us. At that point, we were close enough to where the rim of the crater was within another two or three strong drives. We told Dave that he could definitely make it, and that we weren't that far from the top. It was like a motivational speech or something.

Well, Dave cowboyed up and as we crested the top and stared down into the crater of a MASSIVE EXTINCT VOLCANO IN THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY IN KENYA, Dave collapsed to his knees and let out an "Oh my..." The view was amazing - on the one side we were looking back over the Rift Valley and its endless expansiveness. On the other side, we were looking into a giant crater full of forest. It was amazing. The photos following this post cannot do it justice.

Dave thanked us for inspiring him to go those last few hundred feet and we walked around the rim for an hour before heading down. If the climb was tough, the descent was pure awesome. We ran down large sections, kicking up massive dustclouds as we went. In fact, the powder was so fine that we were even able to "dirt ski," as it were:

Yes folks. That is Kenyan dirt skiing.

By the time we reached bottom, the sun had really started to heat up. We sat in the shade and waited for a ride. I had to shower with my clothes on and it still took two more washings to get all the dust out. We had conquered a volcano in Africa and had a great time of it. We found out later that day that where we were on the rim stood at about 8,000 feet above sea level. This would explain why Pastor Dave, a man who is easily active in Houston, might have had a rough time of it. He laughed when we told him. All in all a great day. Here are some shots to back up the post:

the 1010 project, mountain, climbing, africa, kenya, mt. longonot, longonot

JAMBO - Kenya Living

Hello all. I feel strange for not being able to blog this excursion up, but my connections have been a bit slow. Oh well. It's nice to be able to touch base here.

I'm sure I'll tweet this when we hit the road again, but if I had two words to describe the Kenyan countryside, they would be: "carelessly verdant." Seriously, everything is either a strange mass of strange trees or a field of plants. Lots of farmers around here. We drove out to Western Kenya last week, almost to Lake Victoria, and slept under bed nets in an orphanage where one of our partners works.

In case you don't know, I'm here with The 1010 Project, a Denver-based humanitarian organization that partners with social entrepreneurs in the developing world to break the cycle of poverty. Aside from two organizations that are based in the rural west, we have a number scattered across the slums of Nairobi. I'll be heading to Korogocho and Kibera and Kayole and Matopeni in the coming days.

It's amazing here, it really is, and I'm super-glad to be with The 1010 Project. I'm our Fundraising Coordinator, and part of our trip involves me implementing a grant that I wrote a few months back. Our partners are VERY happy to work with us on some specific income-generating projects.

Some highlights: Helped a 4 year old Luhya girl carry a 20-liter jerrycan of water through a cornfield to her home. She smiled. I addressed a crowd of what looked to be 40,000 street children in Matopeni, singing songs and dancing and telling stories. I thanked a baboon for laying the groundwork for the internet and Twitter. Got bit by a mosquito, which means a LOT more here than it does in America (check out previous posts, which I can't link to now, about my work with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation).

I'm likely to spend the first week of July writing a bunch of impassioned posts about these and other things and putting them up, but for now, I just wanted to check in and thank you all for following along with my work. You folks are a big part of the work I do - I see it in the congratulatory tweets as much as I see it in the smiling faces of orphans and entrepreneurs that we work with in Kenya. See you all soon.

In the Grand Scheme of Things

"The chronicles of Jerusalem are a gigantic quarry from which each side has mined stones for the construction of its myths and for throwing at each other." 

The above quote comes from Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem. It reminded me a bit of an exchange that I had with a former professor when I informed them about an upcoming trip to Turkey. It went a bit like this:

ME: Yeah, I'm going to be hanging around Istanbul and we'll go down along the coast then inland through Konya and then finish up outside Ankara. It's gonna be sweet!
PROFESSOR: Isn't Turkey full of Muslims? Aren't they a bit violent? I heard they have a lot of terrorism issues there.
ME: Umm...no. It'll be fine. Seriously.

A year or so later, I was working with my boss to organize a student trip to Jerusalem and I ended up discussing the trip with the same professor:

ME: Yeah, I'm working to put together this student trip to Jerusalem. We'll tour through the Old City and see the Temple Mount and then go touring through Bethlehem and maybe even visit Ramallah in the West Bank. It's gonna be sweet!
PROFESSOR: Yes, it totally does sound sweet. I'm sure you'll have an awesome and inspiring time!
ME: Umm...yeah. You know that...oh forget it. Thanks.

I have a greater chance of being crushed to death by a vending machine than I have of being killed by a terrorist, anywhere. I fear heart disease, cancer, credit card debt, drunk drivers, and bad decisions by leaders.

The Long March (on wheels)

Driving from northern Illinois to Denver back in August was pretty tiring, even though I was never behind the wheel. I at least had my brother to talk to.

Took off from the farm at just shy of 8 a.m. this morning and headed West, young man. Nobody in the car with me. Silence most of the way. I don't know why I didn't turn on the radio.

Pulled into my neighborhood at 8:25 Mountain Time. Very tired now that I can take my eyes off the road. Now I've just got to find street parking.

Good to be "home."

Came to a Bridge

It looks as though I'm going to be staying in the States for the summer. Does this bug me? Sure, it does. I had really, really wanted to get back out there and at the very least do a bit of language training in Anatolia. The big target was, as usual, Central Asia.

So I shall stay in Denver. There is ample time to read and bike and drink tea. Perhaps I'll climb a mountain or two.

Sleeping In

The plan: Wake up at 3 a.m. MST. Get showered and finish packing the few things left outside my bags. Eat the rest of my bread, a banana, and some ricecakes. Spend 20 minutes worrying about what I'm leaving behind. Head out to the bus stop and catch the 15 - Billings at 4:28. Head to Billings and hop the AT to DIA at 5:23. Disembark and head to Airtran's counter, pick up my ticket, fly to Atlanta for a 4-hour layover, then continue on to Reagan International to land at 6 p.m. and hop the Metro to DC-NW.

The reality: Wake up at 3:54 a.m. MST. Scramble madly to get cleaned. Forgo the bread. Crumble the ricecakes and stuff them down the throat with banana. Scramble more madly. Pack everything in a rush and spend 3 minutes worrying about what I'm leaving behind. Catch the 4:28 bus. Catch the 5:23 bus. Try to retrieve my e-ticket. Nothing works. Just about to ask for help when I realize that I'm trying to check in at USAirways. Stomp down to Airtran and pick up my boarding pass and my transfer...to Dulles International. That's right, I bought a ticket to the wrong airport. Land in Atlanta, ask to fly standby and hop on the next one out, thus saving myself the layover in the tornado-prone capital of our peach-state and putting me on the Mall at 3:45 p.m., with enough time to visit the Hirshhorn Museum, grab some Indian food (way-overpriced), and still make it to Dupont Circle with many minutes to spare.

And so it is.

Distance

I recently received a text late one evening from a friend in Chicago. She mentioned a terrible headache and the fear that accompanied it. We talked about headaches, checklisting the various alternative therapies that could possibly relieve some of the pain. I made a passing remark about driving her to the hospital if she really needed it.

Note: We are 914 miles apart (I Google-mapped it) and I don't have a car out here in Denver.

It brought to mind other times when I've made such offers. When I lived in the suburbs, saying something like that was merely unreasonable. Now it's impossible. I feel strangely disconnected from all those people and places back in Illinois. The nature of my existence is such that I really only recognize the sheer physical distance between me and there, but it is still a very wide gulf. These people are a mere phone call away, and with Facebook and Myspace, I'm never really disconnected.

I talk to friends back at Aurora, and they recount the occasional banal details of college life. I know that people still climb the stairs in Eckhart Hall. I know that they still travel north (the term is "head up Randall") to shop. All of this occurs, as it did before, as it will in the future, without me there.

As Tony Prima would say, "Life goes on without me."

Keep going, life.