The long road

This weekend, I went white water rafting on the Nile River in Jinja, Uganda. We dropped in 7km from the source of the river, and rafted 30km down. It was great.

Friday night, I took a bus from Jinja into Kampala to stay with a good friend from UW working there. I stayed in Kampala the rest of the weekend, and am typing this entry on the 12 hour bus back to Nairobi.

This blog entry is going to be the first in a new direction for the blog-I really want to start posting more about what and how I think about my experiences here, rather than just a laundry list of what I've done.

It's a good transition-I have my last week of classes, and then I start my internship. I'm also coming home, from a place that feels different, looks different, and a hundred different ways. I've also started reflecting and processing my time here, instead of just experiencing.

The landscape in Uganda is more raw and lush than I've seen in Kenya so far. The earth more red, the foiliage so dense and so green. Passing through, it looks and feels like the very landscape is still rebelling against the Idi Amin years, and the decades of civil war that have ravaged the North. This country has seen its share of violence and hardship, and you can feel it. In Kenya, there is a charged and dangerous edge to the air-of violence and desperation buried, smoldering. In Uganda, that feeling doesn't exist, or at least isn't immediately noticeable the way it is in Kenya.

I'm reading a book called Kwani? Vol.5 Part 1- its a collection of writings and photography from Kenyans and others recounting their experiences and reactions to the post-election violence. It's brilliant. Its helping me understand and synthesize my observations about Kenya so far.

Being in Kenya without hearing reference to one's tribe is all but impossible. Before coming, I knew it was an important facet to understanding Kenya, and I thought I knew, at least at a very superficial level, what tribe affiliation meant. I really didn't. It was based a lot on my idea of the Western connotation of the word tribe, and less informed by the idea of tribe as a marker of ethnicity. I'm also coming to realize how much of Kenya's modern understanding of tribe is based on colonial imposition of imagined or barely existent divisions among groups of people. I have more to say, but will put this up and add more once I put up photos.