caldpeffer

Weekend before last was justice cup. It's basically a soccer tournament with teams from every major law firm and civil society organization in Kenya. ICJ had a large team, and we were pretty good - we only lost once, out of 11 games. Unfortunately, the games were only 20 minutes, and the goals were very small, so we only won twice (the rest were ties). I played in several of the games. I only played soccer for a year, and that was when I was 9 or 10, so I really don't know how to kick the ball. But I'm physical enough and I've played enough basketball to play defense, so thats where they put me. A couple of the big firms brought in ringers - professional soccer players that they had hired as temps. These ... read more

I spent the weekend in the field doing survey work for a Danish NGO. We left Nairobi early Friday morning and had a fairly smooth trip to Kisumu, the capital of Nyanza province located on the shores of Lake Victoria. The trip was briefly delayed by an overturned beer truck that had attracted a large crowd of thirsty locals (see pictures) but we had a 4 x 4 truck and were able to take a cow path around the accident. We arrived in Kisumu on Friday afternoon and, after a short meal, headed out to the depths of Luoland (the area around Lake Victoria inhabited by the Luo tribe). This area has few paved roads and no running water, sanitation, or electrictiy. As we drove past large groups of school children, many of them stared at ... read more

In most Bantu languages, including Swahili, Muzungu is the standard, blanket term for white person. I’m a Muzungu. And self-consciously so - Nairobi is a city with very few whites, most of which are either “exotics” like myself, here working for NGO’s or Multinationals, or the rarer colonial descendants who spend the majority of their time in their sprawling countryside estates, only emerging for rugby games and cricket matches. Although there are a fair number of tourists, the locals rarely see them. Most tourists are here on package tours that are carefully designed to ensure that they never “touch the ground.” The tourists arrive from the States or Europe, check into hotels that are, in essence, separate little worlds, human terrariums that replicate virtually every aspect of American and European culture and comfort. They are ... read more

After work on Friday, a couple of co-workers and I took an overnight bus to Kampala, Uganda for a long weekend. The bus trip was long, and mostly uneventful, although I wasn't able to get much sleep due to the poor condition of the roads, our driver's terrible driving, and the constant stop-and-search police checkpoints (which seem to exist for no other purpose than extorting motorists). Crossing the border into Uganda at three A.M. was interesting, as we had to wait for over an hour for the customs officials to be woken up. At one point I was stopped and hassled by a soldier. He asked me for my Yellow Vaccination card, which is technically supposed to be carried by travellers at all times (but I assume rarely is). Unfortunatley for him, I had mine with ... read more

As promised, here are the rest of my shark diving pics. I'm also not sure if the shark diving video actually uploaded, so I'm putting that up again as well. ... read more