Adventures in Onionism

Not a big deal? Not a big deal?! I was given the impression by some people that this report for the Bank would not be a big deal. They were incorrect. So I woke up with final comments waiting for me from one of my bosses on the paper I was hoping to submit to the World Bank this morning. So I start working on it at home. Then the power goes out, so I pack up real quick and bike to the office and turn on the generator. After a couple hours, I finish. I save two copies of the paper, and go to attach it to an e-mail to the Bank. But when I open the file again, every single table in the paper has been corrupted and is now just a long list of numbers. I can't recover it, so I start over. Then the generator runs out of gas. Quick, my laptop has a thirty second battery life. There's no gas in the cans in the hallway. I'll go buy some. Shit, I have no money. I'll get some from the safe. Shit, I don't have the keys to get to the safe. So I sprint home, get mon...

It's Thursday the 21st, and I still haven't left town yet. I know it's crazy that I'm complaining that I'm not getting a month-plus Christmas vacation, but Cal has made me soft--if there's not enough time to walk to Oregon or try and snowshoe the entire John Muir Trail, it shouldn't even count as vacation. I am the only EC that hasn't left town yet, the office has been completely emptied (the research team broke up with the NGO we used to partner with, and the NGO moved out, long story), I just sent off another (hopefully the final) draft of my report on scholarship programs for the World Bank to the profs in the States, I've locked all the doors, and now I wait. Hopefully they'll get back to me in a few hours, say the report is marvelous and ready to submit, and I can leave tomorrow for ... for wherever I decide to go from now until the 29th when Marcus comes and we climb Kili. Writing this report has been pretty tough, so I'll likely just...

This weekend I expanded my garden--it's now got a 30 meter perimeter chicken-wire fence, I transplanted the lettuce, tomatoes, peas, and cucumbers that survived the murderous onslaught of my fertilizer, and I planted more tomatoes, peppers, corn, carrots, and watermelon. The termites came out of the wood-work (ha! that's the lamest pun ever) on Sunday, but hopefully my scary-to-handle-especially-having-read-most-of- Silent-Spring insecticide will work. On Sunday I finally did something other than eating a tall stack of french toast and readin g books all day (although I did that too). I was worried I wouldn't be in shape for Kili in a few weeks, so I decided I needed some exercise, and I finally walked all the way from my house to Lake Victoria. I discovered a new route in Uganda that's much shorter than any in Kenya, so I walked across the border (about 3 km from my house), then basically headed due south from there straight to the lake at the village o...

I spent the weekend working in the garden. Apparently the area I made two weeks ago was just a seedbed and I needed somewhere five or six times that big to transplant all the stuff to. That is, until my premature-fertilization-while-it-was-way-too-hot-and-dry kicked in and killed a ton of stuff. Oh well. I got a bunch more seeds, so if the rains keep going for another month like people think they will, I should be OK. Of course I'm not going to still be here to enjoy the vegetables of my labor, but that's OK. I finished Martin Meredith's "The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence" on Sunday. Perhaps I should describe what it's about in more detail, but I think we'll be OK if you just go back and read the title again. I think it accomplishes its goal of being readable (it's 688 pages long and I read it in a week and a half) but I'm not sure what I really think of it. At times I questioned the author's bias. Footnotes or more s...

Tuesday is Independence Day (actually Republic Day, which is different) so I feel like I should have left town and made it a four-day weekend. I haven't been to Naivasha or Nakuru yet, and they're between here and Nairobi so it's any easy straight shot on one bus and I could see flamingos and rhinos, I haven't been to Mt. Elgon, maybe there's something cool to do in Eldoret, and I haven't even been to Jinja or Kampala yet either. So I should totally go somewhere. But I don't want to. Ugggh. I hate this feeling. But maybe I shouldn't actually be going and seeing touristy stuff, and just working on my garden while chatting with our guard Hezborn and walking around in the shambas behind the house and playing Frisbee and hoop-and-stick with kids in the office parking lot is plenty. I sure think so. Anyways, I have a few questions. Should I go to the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January, or is it just going to be a bunch of annoying Dutch anarchists...

What have I been up to for the past week and half? Mostly eating turkey sandwiches. I finally let Jimmy the parking-lot dog finish it off on Saturday. After killing a turkey I decided to plant a vegetable garden. Here's Hezborn, one of the guards at our house, standing in front of the garden he helped me plant. So far ants have only destroyed 1/8 of the rows, and the fence is still keeping the chickens out, so we're doing OK. Here's my patheticly wussy hands after a couple hours with a hoe, and my feet after months of Chacos. Yes, most of that is clearly just dirt, but it's impressive even when I'm clean. After struggling through life without a toaster for a week (the old one tried to kill us so we threw it away) I went to Kisumu to get a new one. I also bought fun stuff like real Heinz ketchup (as opposed to the cocktail sauce-esque stuff they normally have here), fake Nutella, soy sauce, and some books. I am totally mad that I didn't look for powdered sugar...