Hujambo!

Today was International Women’s Day and ILRI held a few events to honor women in science. In addition to listening to speeches and drinking coffee, seventy girls from local high schools came to tour the labs and talk to our female scientists. In the afternoon we watched a few videos, one of which, by writer and activist Isabel Allende, was very moving. The speech was given as a TED Talk in 2007.

If you want to see more inspiring videos, check out ILRI’s video archive on blip.tv or head over to the TED Talks website.

I took some time off work on Tuesday morning to get my electricity issues sorted out. I had planned on going all the way to Nairobi and waiting in a line for hours at the KPLC office. I decided to stop by Westlands to pay my rent and mentioned my problems with electricity to one of the guys there. Almost immediately he produced a large fuse (“Is that something behind your ear?”) and said it would do the trick. “Can you meet me at your house in 30 minutes?” Sawa sawa (ok)!

Because I had long-since paid said my bill, I showed him my electronic receipt to make sure we could both rest assured that what we were doing was semi-legitimate, but I’m not sure that counts. It all went down like he said it would, and I was back in action just like that! Six days without electricity and all I had to do was buy a $3 fuse? What the hell was I thinking? As long as you haven’t gravely offended KPLC (I merely forgot to pay my bill, and had my fuse removed as a consequence), just pay some fundi (handy man) a few hundred shillings (a few US dollars) to bring a fuse over and get you back into the 21st century.

Note: I am not a lawyer but that is my humble opinion.

And I always loved toast with peanut butter and honey. I forgot to pay my electricity bill on time and KPLC came and disconnected me. That was almost a week ago, and I am still trying to figure out how to get it turned back on. Surprisingly, my hot water heater was hot for about a day, and then luke warm for another day beyond that. Hot water is great for shaving, but lighting the bathroom with a candle really sucks.

I guess my internal “pay the bills” clock was off this month (probably because I was in Ethiopia for two weeks), but the system still totally sucks. I always wait a few days to pay an electricity bill after I get it, which would explain why I never quite know which month I’m paying for. I blame it on KPLC. I had the bill sitting under my door when I got home on February 19th, but my housing agency stamped that they received it on February 10th (who knows when it got to my apartment), and the “due date” was February 6th. It doesn’t make any sense, but I’ve still learned my lesson: don’t mess with KPLC bills because getting it reconnected is a pain in the ass.

Nevertheless, having no power for the past five days has been a hoot. I’ve gotten to know my neighbors (“Do you guys want this food from my fridge?”), I’ve been eating my favorite breakfast food for dinner (toast and peanut butter), and I’m a pro at taking cold showers, something I’ve always known I could do, but never had to (except that one time in Jaipur with Randi). Not to mention I feel like a volunteer again… haha.

What is really lame is that they don’t answer their phones during business hours, and I can’t go to their office because I have a day job. These people don’t make any sense at all. I’m going to take a bit a of time off work in the morning and try to go see if I can sort all this out. Wish me luck.

I’ve been in Addis Ababa since this morning. The taxi picked me up at my house at 5:30 and I was in the ILRI Addis office by 10. Not bad! I’ll be in Ethiopia for another ten days or so, mainly doing some capacity building of the ILRI Addis web development team on the Linux platform (they currently use Windows as a server platform but want to move some applications to Linux servers). I was in Ethiopia last year, but I didn’t take a bus this time so I am already off to a better start.

I’ve got a great room in the hostel here at the ILRI campus. The campus is much more beautiful than I’m used to (hard to believe if you’ve seen the Nairobi campus). For example, today I was sitting in my office just before dusk and I saw a dik-dik grazing in the grass just outside my window. The working environment here is much different too. After lunch we all went for coffee in the campus bar, then took a walk around the compound. I thought my counterparts just wanted to take a stroll, but looked behind me and saw another twenty people just walking and chatting. It felt like a walk to cure cancer or something, very leisurely and social. We don’t do that at ILRI Nairobi…
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The refugees on my street corner. I ain’t talking about the rap group, I’m talkin’ about real ones, from Somalia… just chillin’ on the corner of my street. I’m not sure if they sleep there, because they’re gone when I leave for work in the morning, but they do have blankets. I guess it makes sense, because the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (Somalia Mission) is just down the street. I’m not sure why I’ve never seen them until recently, because my new apartment is just a block from my old place. Lately I’ve even seen them cooking food on wood fires. It’s obviously very awkward for me when I walk by them because I usually have a big bag of groceries…

In addition to the UNHCR, there’s an International Organization of Migration office around the corner, which I’ve long assumed was the reason 50% of the people I see when walking to the bus stop in the morning are Somali women covered from head to toe in hijab (the men, however, are wearing the latest in trendy fashion). I wish I knew more about these organizations, like: what is the probability of repatriation for refugees? Are there any criteria, maybe something which could disqualify you? Which country do most of them go to?

On a related note, I just saw this irrefutable evidence in Somalia proving the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: http://www.venganza.org/2008/04/14/somalia/

Update, January 28th: I heard the people speaking Swahili today, which leads me to believe they’re from Congo or Rwanda… That’s not to say that Somalians can’t speak Swahili, but Somalian Swahili doesn’t sound like the one I heard! I still don’t have any insight as to why they are there.