Adventures in Onionism

The water project we're doing requires that we ask moms what their kids' poops look like. After weeks of searching an RA finally found this poster. If you're curious, I'm usually a 5 or 6, and I can't wait until I can once again enjoys 2's and 3's. Sorry, you probably weren't curious. Coming home from lunch yesterday I bought an interesting calendar. It always fascinates me what the rest of the world thinks about the US. A couple weeks ago when we bombed some alleged al-Qaeda targets in Somalia, the front page of the newspaper here said, in huge font, "US Warplanes Rain Death on Somalia." I really wished I'd picked up a copy.

The World Social Forum: not that cool. Yep, in three words, that's it. It started Saturday with a march from Kibera , one of Nairobi's worst slums, to Uhuru Park in downtown. There was a minute where it was me and a bunch of Kenyans, and we were all jamming to Bob and everybody was waving Palestinian flags where I thought "this is pretty cool," but the feeling didn't last very long, because the woman with the mic kept screeching "Another world is possible" over and over and over again. Starting Sunday I spent three days at Moi International Sports Stadium going to seminars and watching documentaries. There were at least 80 different seminars going on at any given time, and I always found numerous things that interested me. Discussions like "UN Peacekeeping: Force or Farce?" "The World Bank in Africa: What it's up to, why you should care, and what you can do about it," meetings on the future of the DRC , cattle rustling in Eastern...

A painting on cloth that I bought at the beach in Dar. This little guy started nosing around while Esther and I were doing a survey. How can you tell when cucumbers are ready to eat? This was this morning. There's also some good peas and lettuce going on. The tomato plants are big but no fruits yet, and corn, carrots, watermelon, pumpkins, and peppers are coming along slowly but surely.

Most of you probably won't care what I thought about a pulp spy novel like The Bourne Identity , but since I love Chuck Klosterman-esque intelligent analysis of stupid pop culture, you'll just have to suffer. After the last few serious books, I thought I'd read something dumb and fun, and since I think The Bourne Identity, The Matrix , and Kill Bill Vol. 2 are the best-directed American action movies of the last several years, I picked up Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity . I think Franka Potente ( Run Lola Run ) is really good, and Bourne Identity proved beyond a doubt that Ben Affleck/Matt Damon movies like Good Will Hunting and Dogma are good because of Damon and not Affleck, so I thought if the book was anywhere near as good as the movie it would rock. It was certainly enjoyable, but no masterpiece. (Is that a surprise? We are talking about a bestseller spy novel here.) But even in the realm of spy novels, I didn't think it was great. To start, Pot...

I just finished reading Tracy Kidder's book about Dr. Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains. I'd never heard of Farmer before reading it (apparently every pre-med everywhere, especially the Ivy League, worships the man) so at first I wasn't that impressed, but it was a pretty good read. He started an NGO Partners in Health that's built an awesome hospital in Haiti and he was instrumental in getting the world to take on drug resistant TB. But he seems to hate the notion of cost-effectiveness. Also, he's always right. For example, he went for a five-hour hike to visit one patient in Haiti and had this conversation with the author: "But some people would ask, 'How can you expect others to replicate what you're doing here?' What would be your answer to that?" He turned back and, smiling sweetly, said, "Fuck you." Then in a stentorian voice, he corrected himself: "No. I would say, 'The objective is to inculcate in the doctors ...

Here are some pictures from the day I spent at Kipepeo beach just south of Dar. In regular DIA fashion the 5-minute ferry ride across the river mouth stopped dead in the water for about 25 minutes, but the beach was pretty cool. I just got my bus ticket for the communist rally in Nairobi (World Social Forum) this weekend. I heard a rumor that Nelson Mandela is coming. I'll let you know how it goes. Some weird sea creature digs in the sand and pushes up spirals. I wasn't that impressed with the beach at first, but then I started toying with some fish that were in a tidal pool, and it turned into a pretty good day when they morphed into blowfish. I got a sea cucumber to jizz on Marcus' shoe. I thought it was funny. Starfish DIA dude, DIA.

A porter (no, not mine) on the way down Kili. Me, thoroughly tired and thoroughly sunburnt after Kili. A small part of the endless line of buses waiting to get towed across an incomplete bridge. One of the more photogenic pieces of trash at Coco beach north of Dar. The scariest piece of trash at the beach near Dar.

I'm back from vacation and getting settled back into the routine. Sort of. First of all, here's what I thought of the books I read recently. Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter was amazing. It's about a colonial officer in west Africa, but it could've been set anywhere; just a good story about a dude trying to be honest and/or happy. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart was nowhere near as cool as I was expecting ever since I put it on my list several years ago. Maybe it's an accurate portrayal of Nigerian tribal life, but it didn't really have a plot or storyline as such. Rory Stewart's The Places In Between , I'd seen on some NY Times best of 2006 list, which, after reading it, is a total shocker. It's a travel narrative by a dude that walked across Afghanistan six weeks after the Taliban fell. It's a pretty rad adventure, but the guy seems pretty cocky about his knowledge of the world, and he doesn't bother to explain wh...

Here's me at Gilman's Point. It's on the volcano rim about an hour or so from the actual summit. Behind me you'd normally notice a big crater, but it was all covered in snow when I was there, so you couldn't really tell. A big glacier and stuff. My altimeter watch at the summit. It's actually 5895 meters (19340.5 feet). Unfortunately Marcus sat on my watch a couple days later and erased all the stored values. Me at the summit, January 1, 2007. Happy New Year everyone.

A dhow seen from my snorkeling trip (I actually did get to snorkel after the storm ended, but not in the marine park, in kinda murky water in a bay of sorts. Since I've never done it before, it was still pretty cool.) A couple of Austrians (with hot girlfriends) are driving this converted fire truck around Africa. We thought they were jerks because they didn't talk to anybody else in the campsite, but apparently they threw an awesome New Year's bash after I left. Yes, their truck totally makes me want to do the overland trail. A car stuck in the mud on my drive down the coast from Mombasa towards Tanga in Tanzania. A 5 or 6 inch long snail crossing the road on my way to the campsite in the Usumbaras outside of Lushoto.

I spent Christmas on the Indian Ocean. I went snorkeling, cliff jumped, and swam a short underwater tunnel between tidal pools. I met a new Peace Corps guy that will live in Busia, an Ethiopian that's as American as you can get without ever having been there, an officer in the Indian army on a UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, a Pole that has ridden his motorcycle around the world seven times and supports himself with his photography, and a whole gang of cool people that we called the "Bizarro Christian versions of us" because they run a church-sponsored NGO similar to ours just across the border in Jinja, Uganda . I camped on the edge of a beautiful 4000-foot drop off in the Usambara mountains. I started climbing Kilimanjaro at noon on the 31st of December. I reached the lip of the summit crater 28 hours later. I convinced my guide that post-holing was not as difficult as he thought it would be, started breaking trail towards the real summit, and reached it one ho...

This is the first of two or three posts about my Christmas vacation. This version will contain only the horrible things that happened. Later posts will fill you in on how I rocked Kili hardcore alpine style. After the nightmare with the Bank report was over, I went and bought a bus ticket to Nairobi. The bus wouldn't start, so it was an hour or two late leaving. It wouldn't go faster than about 40 km per hour, so they switched us onto a new bus in Kisumu. Ten minutes outside of Kisumu there was flooding which caused a two hour delay. I got to Nairobi in the morning and was told by 4 or 5 bus companies that all the buses to Mombasa were sold out for several days. Finally I found a matatu that was going the whole way, and I made it to Mombasa that night. On the 24th I went from Mombasa to Twiga Lodge at Tiwi beach. I got out of the matatu and started walking the 3 km from the main road to the beach. About halfway I got a call from Willa: "Hey. Where are you?" ...