Most people here don't have birth certificates and may also take some liberties with their age and their birthday. A friend told me about twins that she knows - on the official government ID of the brother, it says he was born 5 years earlier than his twin sister. Either people don't know, or don't really care about their exact age. This kind of disregard for facts reminds me of my primary pet peeve [bigger peeves, such as rampant corruption, are not included...] about Kenya - which is that people don't care about how things are spelled! People spell their names differently at different times, which I can accept as personal choice, but this trend also spills over into the set up of our lab database and other places where data matching is essential. It kind of makes me twitch.
In other news, this past weekend I traveled to Ruma National Park, "the last home of the Roan antelope [in Kenya]," which is an incredibly beautiful park south of here. To get there, we drove north around Winam Gulf and took the ferry across to Mbita. Somehow they manage to fit about 9 cars on a fairly small boat, along with a lot of people, bags of charcoal, motorbikes, wooden poles, and just about anything you can think of. Luckily the ride is only 45 minutes and there aren't too many hippos or crocodiles out in the center of the lake...
The ferry ride is awesome, though, and we got to see a different perspective of the lake. Kenya has about 6% of the whole of Lake Victoria, most of which is a gulf that is frequently clogged with water hyacinth and which is full of schistosomes.
Once on the other side, the lake opens out and looks more like an ocean, with little waves and a huge blueness that is a really nice contrast to the brown and green lake that I'm used to seeing.
Ruma is a cool park - although it rained heavily on us when we drove through the first time. We say an enormous group (tower) of giraffes standing out in the rain, probably 35 of them.
We stayed at the Kenya Wildlife Service banda which is a self-catering cottage, and we did a lot of self-catering...we brought enough food for several armies. But we had an excellent time sitting on the terrace and enjoying this view over the park:
We were inspired to go to Ruma because a friend from the UK was getting married to a Luo man out there in his rural home, which is so close to Tanzania that as kids they would just ride their bikes across the border. The wedding was really fun, although we had to run away from the reception early before a huge storm blew all the tents over, and we possibly severely insulted the hosts by not shoving food down our throats as we ran away. Oops. It was exciting to see a wedding with such a fun mix of Western and African traditions - although the bride wore a white dress, the groom, groomsmen and bridesmaid were all decked out in colorful Kenyan fabric.
This week there is another long weekend - Monday is off for May day or some bank holiday or something. Perhaps I will take another exciting trip! But with all the traveling (conference, etc.) I have planned for the month of May, it seems I only have 7 weekends left in Kisumu. The past 9.5 months have just flown by...
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