pictures?

I have no idea if this will work... here goes!

OMG IT'S WORKING! how exciting. I've attempted to upload pictures before, and it never works! So, anyway. Per my moms request. Here's me today on a boda boda. Let's see if I can do more!

YES! this is really working. Here is me feeding giraffes on our last day in Kenya! They are slobbery with long black tongues and are constantly drooling. They remind me a lot of my friend Alfonso!

So it turns out I grabbed Lisa's camera instead of mine, so I only have pics she took... we have identical cameras. NO JOKE. So these might be of only me. But we can do her tomorrow (that's what she said)!

This is this guy in Nairobi who we visited who makes wire toys! It was for a Ten Thousand Villages assignment. We visited at his home and took a ton of pictures! He had a tiny baby. Which I enjoyed.

Here's Lisa and I at Lake Nkuru (Kenya), where we saw a billion flamingos in one lake (it smelled exactly as you'd think it would)

This is what we rode around in for three days for our safari in Masai Mara! Sweet ride.

TOLD YOU. A BILLION.

Look at those hippos! Safaris are kind of boring. You just drive around and around looking for things that are really hard to see, and every once in a while you see them. Seeing them is cool, but driving around is really boooooooring. To pass the time I would try to imagine the animals singing pop songs. Ostriches singing Justin Timberlake's SexyBack is pretty amusing during an all day bus ride.

Paul on a boda boda today in Kampala!

OK, I'll post some movie pics, cos Lisa is our official still photographer, so she has a ton on her camera! We're off today, but tomorrow we meet with one of the basket weavers at her home, to get a sense of her space. Monday, we start a run of shooting that should last pretty much until we leave, with maybe a few days off here and there...

An example of the amazing baskets that Uganda Crafts sells.

Shooting on Friday, when the artisans come to sell their baskets to Betty (she's the one in the pink). I'm awesome at holding the reflector.

Here's Dorothy, who we're visiting tomorrow. We did this series of slightly slow motion portraits in front of the brick latrine. They look really awesome, if a bit "allergy commercial". The women were so excited about doing them though, which is an excellent sign of things to come!

Here's us shooting them.

This was our first interview with Betty. We shot it against a white wall... mistake? I hope not!

Here's Betty. She is really great. So smart, and funny and an amazing business woman. She made us the most amazing meal the day we interviewed her. It was EPIC. Like 15 different dishes.

I just think this is a cute picture. Paul and I are working really good together, so far. He is the yin to my yang.

Well. I am so glad that worked. I tried to do this once before, and it was such an epic fail I couldn't get back on the internet for a few days after. Because I was so FRUSTERATED! I hope when I hit "publish post" it actually works. Fingers crossed...

Kenya Burning

One of our first days in Kenya, Erin and I found a really great (and free!) photography exhibit called Kenya Burning that chronicles the violence that took place in Kenya during the 2007 elections. It was a real eye opener for me because although I had followed the post-election rioting in the news I don't think that it really sunk in just how widespread the violence was, and just how close Kenya came to the brink of disaster.

It was interesting to see how immediate the local media's response was to the crisis. The exhibit had a film of interviews with many of the local journalists and photographers who documented the violence and it was a huge reminder for me about the power that a free press has to really change the course of history. During the crisis, the Kenyan radio was constantly broadcasting messages throughout the country urging moderation and warning Kenyans how closely the situation resembled the early stages of Rwanda -- which is so different from the way that Rwandan radio messages were used to fuel the violence during the genocide there.

There is something surreal about seeing such graphic depictions of violence and then realizing that it happened so recently. On the one hand, I was impressed at how transparent the exhibit was -- it certainly didn't sugar coat anything and I think that in general it says a lot about the society's resiliency that it is already reflecting on and trying to come to terms with such a traumatic time. On the other hand, in talking to most Kenyans we've spoken to there is still a fair bit of pessimism and mistrust in the government. There also seems to be a general sense of fear that the worst may be yet to come with the next round of elections, as very little has changed to address people's concerns about corruption in the government.

And on a day-to-day basis people's lives continue to be impacted by the violence because of its impact on the local economy. Even for low season it seems incredible that in most of the cities we've gone to in Kenya we've only bumped into a handful of other tourists. For the local vendors, this means that they have fewer opportunities to make a buck -- for us tourists it means that every time we leave our hotel we are accosted by at least 10 people trying to hawk the same kitschy crafts.

Lamu & the Muslim Rasta

On the recommendation of my friend Laura, Lisa and I decided to splurge and spend some time in Shela, on the island of Lamu.

Lamu is a European beach destination on the northeast coast of Kenya, located in the middle of a pretty conservative Muslim community. This made for a very interesting dynamic. On one hand you had Europeans (and us) frolicking around in bikinis (and sometimes less), and on the other hand you had a conservative community going about their day to day.. donkeys abound, the women are clad (in very beach inappropriate) black niqabs (which can't be pulled up - very haram - and therefore get wet and sandy).

Lamu is also where we got our first introduction to the Kenyan beach boy. While these boys are all members (or former members?) of the surrounding community, they have shrugged off (as far as we could tell) their religion and have become wild haired, Bob Marley loving, (mostly) pot smoking, beer drinking rastafaris.

How does that work, you may ask? I'm not entirely sure. There is definitely some palatable tension between the rastas and the surrounding community, but it wasn't violent or extreme in anyway. At worst I think the community looks at the rasta beach boys as sort of a minor annoyance, and low level security threat (a few of them have been involved in the muggings of tourists in the past, and of pickpocketing and that sort of thing)... sort of an all around anomaly.

I also wondered how rastafarism took hold on the coastal areas of Kenya. Does pot smoking and hair dreading increase in direct ratio to your proximity to the beach? Does Bob Marley sound more convincing when listened to out in the hot sun, on a dhow (it's a kind of sailboat) while fishing? (I say YES to that one, having experienced it myself last week). Does weed enhance your enjoyment of all things nautical? I don't know, but maybe the answer is yes to all of them.

Needless to say, we interacted with the beach boys much more than we did with the surrounding community. They took us on snorkling and fishing trips, they cooked us lunches and dinners on the beach, they built us bonfires, they showed us the phosphoresence in the water (so freakin' cool) they took us out dancing (oh man, that could be a whole different post. the hottest dance ticket in town is what they referred to as "the boogie boogie" but was actually called The Police Comission's Social Club, which was ACTUALLY this open air cement floored verandah thing with a dj and a man that sold beer from inside a cage. full of beach boys, prostitutes and Lisa, me and the two American girls we've been traveling with for the past week. it was obviously a LOT of fun)... etc... they basically tried to take our money from us in any way they could. It worked. It worked for them, and it worked for us.

But I couldn't help but wonder what they went home to at the end of the night (or in the early morning). Do they live with their parents, and have to listen to a lecture about cleaning up their acts? Are they pretty much ostracized from the community, and ignored? Is it acceptable behavior?

I don't know! It's another mystery. I'll add it to my growing list...

Kenya is freakin' hot

So. News flash. Kenya is really hot.

Nairobi was not so bad, it was temperate even. Really cool with rainshowers that lasted like... 10 minutes but cooled everything down immensely. HOWEVER, immediately upon exiting our aircraft on the island of Lamu on the northeast coast of Kenya, my hair poofed out to Diana Ross proportions and my face broke out in rivulets - no RIVERS, of sweat. And my condition has not improved as we've traveled further south down the coast. Not even a little bit.

Lisa and I have started taking 2, 3, sometimes even 4 showers a day in order to stay just ahead of spontaneously combusting in the afternoon sun. We've also completely given up on make up (comes right off!) and have taken to wearing the same clothes every day (what's the point of getting everything so sweaty and digusting? NO POINT, so we don't bother). I want to know how Angelina glows when she comes to Africa, when the adjective that best describes Lisa and I from 10A to 5P is "DRIPPING".

Not only that, but some enterprising person needs to introduce waterproof sunscreen here. All the sunscreen you can buy (which comes, charmingly, either in spf 1.5 or spf 357) is labeled "water & sweat resistant," which seems ok at first... until you take your third "end of day shower" and realize you're bright red, and the owner of the restaurant you eat at that night calls you his little lobster and insists that you jump in his pot because you'd be good eating (yeah...). Water resistant in Africa actually means water soluble and sweat resistant is not enough to stand up to the aformentioned rivers that Lisa and I are outputting every day.

Luckily, we'll be back in Nairobi by next week, nursing our blistering skin, and washing all of our increasingly disgusting clothes.

Our Itinerary

Hello family & friends. This is a blog that you can read (or not read) about our upcoming goings on in the Middle East, Africa and the Philippines. I think this will be easier than sending out mass emails. Easier for us to write and upload pictures; easier for you to ignore if you so choose.

So. Lisa & I leave for Israel on March 13th sometime at night. We'll be there hanging out with my family, seeing where my dad was born, touring around, and eating hummus for about 10 days. Then we'll fly off to Egypt to meet up with Lisa's family to look at pyramids, and crocodiles, and get ogled for about 10 days.

Then Lisa & I strike out on our own. First Ethiopia, then Kenya (where I'll turn 26 on the 26th, and you'll send me emails or whatnot telling me how much you miss me), then to Uganda. We'll be in Kampala for about a month, which is when Paul will join us and we will begin our documentary film misadventure. More on that later. Then the three of us spend 2 blissful weeks in and around Capetown. There will be wine and there will be shark cage diving. Then Lisa goes home (inevitably totally sick of me) and Paul & I spend a month in a tiny town called Salay in the Philippines for more documenting. Then home at the end of July.

That's the itinerary! So you'll know where we are most of the time and where we're headed. Lisa & Paul will both be posting here too, so it won't just be me. You can get other opinions. And if I ever develop a cold and start snoring again, I'm sure they will have LOTS of opinions on me (just ask Faith). So check back here if you miss us to see what we're up to, otherwise we'll tell you all about it in July!

LAST CHANCE to see us stateside: Bourbon (2321 18th Street, NW), Wednesday, March 11th @ 7P.