Adventures in Onionism

I'm home. By home I mean I'm back in Berkeley and since I don't have a place to live I'm crashing on Marcus' couch. I wasn't that happy to get home since I thought my phone had broken (it hadn't, it's back on now, same number as before) and it was way colder than I'd experienced in a looooong time, but I met comedian David Cross on the subway, so it was all good. I saw him waiting to leave the BART train I was on, and I said, "Are you David Cross, or do you just look a lot like him?" To which he shrugged his shoulders and said, "eh, both." I said, "Sweet. Have a good day." He said, "You too," and got off the train. And that was my conversation with comedian David Cross. As a final note, on my last full day in Nairobi I went to the Giraffe center where I had giraffes eat out of my hand (and kiss me by eating from my teeth), I went on safari at Nairobi National Park and saw giraffes, ostriches, baboons, a wa...

It's Saturday and I'm in Nairobi, flying out late Monday. Thursday the fuel-tanker line at the border was easily over a mile long so I again shot some video from the back of a boda. (Every drop of petroleum that Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi use gets driven right by my front door all the way from Mombasa, more details on that when I edit the video back home, set it to Bloc Party's "The Price of Gas," and post it on my website.) Friday I finished up in Busia and took my FO's out to dinner, where the team-member that's a part-time preacher amused us with his appreciation for chapatis after downing an entire plateload by saying, "It's Jesus first, then chapatis." I also got them happily discussing who's going to be the next President of Kenya. I think they all support ODM-K (the main opposition to Kibaki's ruling party, formed in opposition to the government-backed constitutional referendum that failed in '05. Voting for it was "b...

Supposedly you can post to your blog via e-mail, but that method has been really slow/not working of late, so if this shows up twice, it's because I'm impatient and also posted it directly. I had a great last weekend in Busia. I may have broken a window at the office with the frisbee Friday afternoon, but they're being replaced soon, so it's cool. To celebrate my and Eva's last weekend in Busia we went to New Check Inn, the local night club. The bass was so powerful my hair was standing on end and I thought my chest was going to cave in, but it was a lot of fun. Saturday I went to Roselyn's (the office mom/cleaning lady) and wowed her with my mad ugali-making skills (that's comparable to being complimented on being able to use chopsticks after living in Korea for two years) and she showed me how to make chapatis. Sunday I went to her church service to hear her lead the music. Before she got up to go to the front and take the mic, she said, "Garret...

Good news everyone, the quarter-inch long piece of sea urchin that's been stuck in my foot since Christmas came out. Also, I went white-water rafting on the Nile near Jinja, Uganda. I'd never been rafting before since I refused to go during sissy family reunion opportunities. I'd been jealous of a few river-rat acquaintances that spent summers guiding on the Colorado, but after finally going, all I have to say is "eh." Don't get me wrong, I had a ton of fun, but Lonely Planet calls this "one of the most spectacular white-water rafting destinations in the world," we did several class five rapids, and we flipped a bunch of times, but it was never even remotely scary. I'm not saying that I'm a total bad-ass and nothing scares me, because I get scared all the time crossing steep icy slopes above long drop-offs, being exposed during lightning storms, or getting extremely wet and cold in snowstorms, but I'm a pretty poor swimmer and yet this wa...

I just got back from a trip to Rwanda last night. I wasn't feeling too hot on Friday, so I left Saturday morning and took a matatu to Kampala. Sunday morning I took a bus to Kigali and had dinner with an Isreali lawyer that I met at my hotel, a Chinese toy packing designer, and a Rwandan staff member from the Genocide Memorial who had translated a session of the traditional gacaca court for the Israeli. Monday I visited the church in Nyamata where 10,000 people were killed and the Genocide Memorial in Kigali. Tuesday I took a bus all the way back to Busia. $80 in visa fees alone plus some long bus rides, but I'm glad I was able to go. I'll mostly just let the pictures of Rwanda speak for themselves. The work of cleaning the church is not yet finished. Looking out the window of the museum. Kigali.

Here's the cool part about having a garden. The maggots are the bad part. Drive-through fast food whether you want it or not. I know no one cares about the blue-balled monkeys as much as I do, but I just wanted to show you proof. This guy was actually pretty un-spectacular compared to others. Thoughts on what I've read lately: The End of Poverty by Jeff Sachs. Much to my surprise, I very much enjoyed this book. The foreword by Bono is worthless drivel (worse than the cheesiest How to Dismantle ... lyric) and the first four chapters are pedantic and worthless for anyone that already knows that sub-Saharan Africa is poor, thus it took me months to get through the first third, but after that, I really enjoyed it. Sachs doesn't seem nearly as responsible for the Russian economy meltdown as people like to think and (according to him) didn't advocate for "shock therapy" but debt relief, which he makes a good case for. He lays out a sensible plan to end extreme...