Gmail has gone really slow today, or I'd have sent some more personal emails today - here's extracts from some I did send recently:
It's lovely having Lani here - we've been having good conversations with her and Naomy about Naomy's plans for transforming the lives of disabled women in Africa (! a small job - I've been typing up her business plan in this internet joint) and Lani adds very good perspective to this. The lack of water is adding perspective to all of us westerners - we drove down to the water-getting place a couple of times and got up to 300 litres in containers in the car per journey, but Naomy has no spare resources to fix the car if anything really bad happens to it (like sliding off a very bumby and step dirt track while laden down with barrels of water ...), and it's absolutely crucial to her mobility, so that's stopped now.
This was not without some confusion and (temporary) bad feeling as we Westerners poured scorn on Naomy's suggestion that Rebecca, Paulo and Susan (who has with us before Xmas, and has just returned) should go and collect it on their heads in 20 litre jerry cans like everyone else has to. It took us quite a while to get into our thick heads that suggesting the car should be used to save us from either having not much water or else having to witness the amount of sheer hard work that goes on in the developing world was equivalent to insisting Lani let us use her wheelchair to transport building materials: we just saw Rebecca with sore shoulders and assumed we understood the situation well enough to try and bully Naomy into running her household "better" (by our assumptions). By the time we'd figured this out we'd already all done a pretty good job of demonstrating First Worlder arrogance - probably not for the first time, but more obviously (to us) than usual!
We've apologised, Naomy has forgiven us, and we're getting good at using the pit latrine (save Lani - she flushes with saved shower water), and 'showering' with a jug in about two litres of water each! No problem for hardy campers like us - but a swimming pool/bath/ocean will be greatly appreciated when we next get to one!
[Earlier:]It has been great to be mostly in one place over the last few weeks - and we have another two and a helf weeks here, staying in the Western Kenyan countryside, on the equator, but not too hot as we're 1500m above sea-level. Lani, our eldest just arrived, and I think we'll be spending some of the next fortnight assisting in planning the future of disability activism in two continents (Naomy, our host, is a disability development worker wanting to establish a new NGO and consultancy in Kenya - Lani's not long finished her Peace Studies degree and is wondering about getting more involved in disability politics and development, as she ponders her next career moves after four months internship at Oxfam) - so it's a bit like being back at work doing community development really, with better weather, shorter hours, but no pay...
We're slowly beginning to try and pin down our own direction/s for the next few years, also. Travelling certainly gives you a picture of how many, many ways people make their living and live their lives, and our travels have so far included at least three serious offers to go into one kind of international business or other (one probably not worth the risk, one possibly not ethically attractive, and one interesting but probably not particularly lucrative), a number of places we'd like to visit again and one or two we can imagine spending long periods of time in (Bangalore's my favourite so far - though anywhere with genuine Chinese food comes a close second). Certainly, if I could find work on my return that would pay for, or even include, a round-the-world ticket every couple of years, that would be very attractive, at this point.
There is also room to think more widely, and time to think more slowly than is usually the case at home: Heather and I have been telling each other our "impossible dreams" over the holiday period, and are beginning to try to figure out how to lose the "im" from them. At the moment we may need to find a way that a smallholding and H's puppy breeding will pay for my return ticket to Mars, as I'm not yet sure how I'm going to get my dream job as Chief Clown for the European Space Agency: but we have some months to try and put flesh on those bones yet ...
The girls have to pick their school options for years ten and eleven before we leave Kenya: this has led both to some good conversations with them about their future hopes and dreams and to them asking for more maths homework (!!)
So, that's a snapshot from Kenya: Thailand awaits in a couple of weeks, and it sounds like we may be able to combine some volunteering to help out somewhere with something tsunami-related (rebuilding something? cleaning something up?), with spending our tourist Baht in some beautiful places that don't face the Andaman Sea. Both of which will be further grist to the life-planning mill, no doubt.
We've a trip to Nakuru National Park, some more business-planning and some other trips planned before then - I hope all your January's are as interestingly busy (!)
Have a great 2005,
- Mark
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