Too busy to blog

It's been a pretty busy few months with packing, winding up Nairobi jobs, spending time with friends we have made in the last 2 years whilst trying to keep life as normal for the kids as possible. So we have had kids parties, sleep overs, sports fixtures, school trips, a school show to fit in too. And my blogging has slipped a bit.

All our kids have birthdays in the first few months of the year. Matthew's came twice a when his godmother's gift arrived a few weeks late - post is a bit random here.



Jamie and his friends celebrating being a pre teen with a massive game of football and a nerf gun war in the garden before heading out go karting and back for chocolate cake. The whole day was lots of fun and left a flock of happy boys and a huge windfall (or ballfall) of green mangos from our tree. Katie and I cooked up a vat of chutney and, with help from a friend, I found a great Thai green mango salad recipe which has featured at most of the meals we've hosted for friends and work colleagues as we start our goodbyes over the last few weeks.

Katie's birthday was at the start of the holidays and only a few days after we had a kids goodbye party so hers was a lower key affair with her two best friends coming for the day and then meeting up with more friends at the pool for a swim and cake. She'd asked for Black Forest gateau. She got a Kenyan version made from the remnants of our store cupboard. It had all the constituent parts but looked nothing like her vision of the perfect cake. I was eventually forgiven when she discovered that it tasted pretty good.

So with kids all "a year" older, the house pretty much packed and in various containers to sail and fly back to London, and our contracts pretty much over it was time to head to the beach for one final fling and some much needed battery charging. More on that in a bit......

Anne

Fire starting in Samburu

We are filling our last few weeks with trips and fun and spending time with friends whilst our gear slowly makes its way back to the UK via various routes. This weekend Tim and Jamie headed off to Rwanda and Uganda in search of gorillas and my mum and I took katie and Matthew to Samburu in Northern Kenya. Photos will follow just as soon as I'm reunited with the computer and smart card reader in London. But I thought I'd put the words down now.

Northern Kenya is pretty arid and the landscape was different from anywhere else we have yet been, with Mount Kenya looming in the distance. There are animals that you only find in this part of the world - the reticulated giraffe, Samburu Oryx, a blue breasted guinea fowl, a white bellied Zebra (Grevey's) and an antelope called a gerenuk that has a long neck and stands straight on its hind legs to reach the bits of bush that are too high for other antelope and too low for the giraffe. Plus loads of elephants. The rains are due properly any moment - the first and so far only rain fall came last Tuesday so there is some green around but the river is really low and there isn't much food about for the animals. So they are more clustered by the river and easier to find. And, with the help of our Samburu guides we found loads, particularly lions with some very cute cubs. We are all pleased that our careful tallies confirmed we had seen more lions (19) than ground squirrels (18).

We stayed at a lovely spot called elephant watch, linked to Save The ElephantsIt is right next to the river, with just 6 guest tents, great food (although my kids were not impressed by a liberal use of coriander) and lovely picnics out in the bush. We had an early evening walk up a hill to watch the sun go down with a cold beer/soda and Samburu warriors making fire with 2 sticks, a little sand (for friction) and elephant dung. My two fire starters tried their hand without success. But the Samburu experts soon had a large fire roaring as we sat and watched the stars (and our hostess and I chatted about the pros and cons of various schools and the challenges of finding a good work/life balance - some things are pretty universal whatever your job).

We were the last to stay before the camp closes for the rains so along with a couple of Americans we had it pretty much to ourselves, with a BBC film crew pitched just along the river. BBC2 viewers can learn all about the camp and the wildlife in a 12 part series later this year. Suspect their pics will be better than mine, even if the wait is longer.

We popped into the elephant research centre where they track elephants across Africa to spot and record poaching levels, elephant behaviour etc. we heard about how bees are being used to keep elephants away from crops and so reduce the levels of human/wildlife conflict. Matthew and I were both impressed by the google earth app that does the tracking and by the totally trashed safari truck giving a very clear example of the strength of elephants. Sadly, poachers across the river had killed an elephant the day before we arrived. They had been scared off before they could get their ivory haul and had not been tempted to return for it - had they done so they would have been caught. Poaching levels of both elephants and rhinos are still at crisis level here and unless demand can be curbed it is hard to see how the crisis will be resolved - the greatest current demand for horn is apparently as a hangover cure in Vietnam. Bonkers.

After a lovely few days and a slightly accelerated drive to the airstrip when we spotted our plane coming into land half an hour sooner than advertised (and confirmed that morning), we came back to Nairobi to compare wildlife notes with Tim and James. They had seen some of the world's 400 or so remaining mountain gorillas and had good dad and lad bonding time. All in all some pretty special final safaris for this African adventure.

Anne

Worlds apart, Facebook style

As part of getting ready to return to London I've accepted a Facebook friend request to join a local mum's group. I thought it might be a good way of reconnecting, finding out about nannies and life in the neighbourhood we are returning to. I joined a similar group here and whilst most of the posts have little relevance to me, it has been a useful source of information on events and the sort of things that pre-occupy mums here (and pretty much everywhere) like ill children, reliable childcare, where to get specific things, problems at school etc. All very familiar stuff. And most of the time it is easy to feel that our Nairobi world is pretty similar to our London world albeit with better weather, a different group of friends and much more wildlife - our cat brought us a snake the other day rather than a more traditional mouse offering!

But the other week I was really struck by 2 posts on these 2 sites and by some of the very real differences in our worlds. On my London net a mum of 3 was seeking advice about driving from London to Verbier to go skiing with her children. She had at least a dozen comments from people locally offering advice based on their experiences. In Nairobi on the same day a mum was asking whether she should be suspicious about a woman and her three kids that she had dragged out from the middle of the traffic apparently trying to kill themselves because life was so hopeless. She too had a dozen or so posts saying this was an established scam with agreed descriptions of the con woman. It may have been a con but the woman was still taking 3 kids into unpredictable and bonkers traffic in a country where annual road deaths are at least double that in the UK (for a smaller population and much lower rates of car ownership). It felt very different to the anxieties of driving across Europe for a skiing holiday. I will try and hold on to that when I'm inevitably struggling with aspects of our privileged London life in the coming months.


Anne