Game Driving

Traffic was not nearly as bad as I was expecting at the Mara this weekend.

The light traffic conditions began with our flight out of Wilson Airport, a smaller, lesser known airport than Kenyatta International, where anyone can check you in, you don't need ID, and your boarding pass is a laminated, color-coded slip of paper that the "gate attendant" (or the woman who checked you through security) recollects and reuses.

Fortunately, our 16-seat plane was nearly empty, as the space allotted to each person is quite tiny. The requisite safety and alimentary advisories came from the pilot who twisted around in his seat and leaned his head through the opening to the cockpit, which incidentally stays open for the entire 45-minute flight, before handing the closest passenger a tupperware full of mints and informing us that there was water in the back of the plane -- just ask the last passenger to pass some forward. There didn't seem to be any pressurization system, but apparently we didn't need one as we never got very far off the ground, offering great views of the changing landscape below.



Writers tend to describe Africa as vast and red, conjuring particular images of heat in an arid climate and triggering a primal emotional reaction. For this and other reasons, I expected the land passing below me to look different -- more like the deserts of Utah than the rolling hills of Nebraska. But it ended up being a mixture of the two. The topography was unlike anything I'd seen before, somehow flat and jagged all at once, with gentle hills suddenly rising into mini mountains that abruptly ended in table tops or falling into short, steep canyons, and just as frequently cut by a snaking river as a deep, dry crack in the earth.

But while the earth looks like clay with deep reddish undertones, the landscape itself is painted in gentle, calm shades of pale yellow and green. The Mara inspired feelings of peace and calm, not the suspenseful anticipation or danger of an animal planet documentary on the circle of life in the safari.

The plane made a few stops -- each safari/hotel operator has their own "landing strip," or patch of cleared dirt in the middle of the Mara frequently visited by game, as evidenced by the occasional zebra or piles of manure on the runway. And as we flew from resort to resort, you could see the tracks in the tall grass where safari operators had driven as well as various groups of game animals and cows.


Rather than waste precious daylight hours driving back to the camp and checking in, our driver suggested that we undertake our very first game drive straight off the plane. Almost immediately he saw a cheetah. Apparently all the other mzungus besides us could also see the cheetah, because their cars were parked in a neat semi-circle around a patch of grass. I was starting to feel concerned because I could not see anything at all. Our guide so desperately wanted me, one of only two in our group for whom it was a first safari, to see the cheetah he took painstaking care to describe her position. Which, in effect, I heard as, "See that blade of grass next to that other blade of grass in the 10,000 square kilometers of grass in front of you? She's right there."

what I saw

what, apparently, our guide saw

But while we waited patiently for the hidden picture to emerge from the grass, we saw an enormous bull elephant across the horizon. We zoomed off to see him (he was the biggest animal I've ever seen in my life, and graceful) and I think he changed our luck. When we went back to check on the cheetah, she decided to get up out of the grass and look around. Eventually she even sat up and moved. From then on our trip was a nonstop animal party.



The first game drive was only an hour or so given our late arrival to the Mara, and yet we saw the aforementioned cheetah and elephant as well as a serval, two lions, and a variety of birds and DLTs (deer-like-things) that no one seemed to consider worth a second look. And, an incredible sunset over the plains.


Our second day far exceeded the first. We were in the truck at 6:30AM with boxed breakfasts and no sooner had we started driving when we came across three female lions and six cubs, lazing about with full bellies after a zebra kill. Once a few other cars discovered us and our pride of lions, we decided it was time to move on. More elephants (this time a herd, complete with babies and adults), some wildebeests and zebras, a common waterbuck, and another cheetah -- all more or less in the same 100 square-foot area.

A bit more driving and we found hyenas and vultures finishing off a wildebeest kill. More zebras, more wildebeests, and two beautiful, big male lions lazing about under a shade tree, hippos, giraffes, and cape buffalo. We even saw a leopard, a treat because they are quite shy, and were able to watch her leave one tree, move through some tall grass where we heard her kill and eat a mongoose (so identified by the other mongoose that fled while bouncing away screeching), before she eventually slipped through the grass to perch in the branches of another tree.

But, Rafael, our loyal guide, came through for us again on the third day. As I mentioned in my last post, the great migration of wildebeest has begun. Unfortunately, we quickly learned that the majority of the wildebeest were still feasting on the tall grass in the Serengeti in Tanzania, with just some groups moving across the Mara. Nonetheless we requested to see a river crossing and a crocodile kill.

When we arrived at the river crossing, wildebeest had already begun to gather, and a crocodile was lurking by the bank. A lone wildebeest on the opposite bank (our bank) was bleating hoarsely, trying to call the herd over and attempting to reconnect with a lost child or other member of the family. A few zebras joined, and while those waiting on the banks paced up and down, moving to the water and back, a steady, seemingly endless line of wildebeest flowed from the horizon kicking up dust and adding to the masses gathered and waiting.

For more than an hour, nothing happened. A wildebeest or zebra would approach the water and drink. Or a group would even run to the banks only to turn and run back. Rafael explained that as soon as one crossed, thousands would follow, but it could be hours before or any animals crossed, if they crossed at all.

Finally, after two small excursions away from the crossing and our boxed breakfast, the crossing began. As Rafael predicted, all it took was one brave wildebeest to take the plunge and soon a solid line of wildebeest followed her in, swimming across the river in neat lines and running up the bank past the collection of safari vehicles bearing witness. The crossing took twenty minutes or more as thousands of wildebeest streamed past us.



Despite our excitement for the crossing, we worried about the two crocodiles we had seen, and likely more we hadn't seen, that were laying in wait just below the surface of the water. The first kill was excruciating. One wildebeest began wailing, short panicked cries as it appeared to get pulled downstream. This went on and on for what felt like minutes but could have only been seconds while the rest of the wildebeest continued to stream right past. Eventually the crocodile, who had been dragging the wildebeest downstream from underwater, surfaced opened its mouth and clamped down on the screaming wildebeest's muzzle before pulling its head under. And that was the kill. Crocodiles suffocate or drown their prey and then keep the meat under water, twisting the meat away from the carcass by spinning in opposite directions from a partner holding the other side of the kill.

As the flow of wildebeest slowed, more and more lone animals were returning to the crossing, calling out for lost mothers, brothers, or friends. They call once or twice standing facing the line of running animals, before eventually turning and going along with the crowd. Rafael told us that in the confusion and chaos of the crossing many families get separated, and it can take days for family members to reunite, if they do at all. All in all, it was a beautiful and interesting sight, but also mournful, as the wildebeest showed their humanity.

In three days, we covered four of the Big Five game animals (elephants, lions, buffalo, rhino, and leopard), saw a few kills at various stages, as well as babies and aged animals. Our last event of the weekend completed our tour of the circle of life -- hippo sex. No life without death, no pleasure without pain. Hakuna matata.

** Given that I took 2 gigabytes of photos this weekend and the fact that my internet connection is rather slow, more pictures will likely be appearing in this post in the next few days. Check back if you're interested, and look out for a link to the best of the Mara pictures in the photographs section of the blog**

On photographs

For those of you who have requested pictures, I finally have some to share. The occasional picture or two will still appear in posts, but if you are interested in more, I am choosing my favorites and sharing them on Flickr, in a set called “This is Kenya.”

Many of you know that this summer has been full of travel and I realize I have not yet shared photos or thoughts on those. You can also find my collection of travel photos on Flickr, but they come with a warning. The trips to Spain, Germany, and London happened in the weeks immediately preceding my trip to Kenya, so those albums are completely unprocessed. And I take a lot of pictures. My advice is to wait … I’m getting to these projects bit by bit.

Permanent links to both the collection of travel photos and the highlights from Kenya can also be found at the top right corner of this blog’s home page … or really any page of the blog.

The establishment of photo processes is quite important and timely, as this afternoon I am flying to the Maasai Mara to watch The Great Migration, or as I like to think of it, 1.5 million (!) wildebeasts stuck in traffic. I've never been so excited about traffic!

More to come on that next week …

Adventures in Cookie Baking

Recently I have found that I simply cannot stop thinking about chocolate chip cookies.

Perhaps The New York Times is to blame, or perhaps it is homesickness for something quintessentially American and comforting, but once the idea surfaced, I couldn't get rid of it without baking!

Fortunately, Catherine, having lived here for eight months already, had flour, vanilla extract, baking soda, salt, and sugar so all I had to buy were eggs, chocolate chips, and butter.

Except, there are no chocolate chips in Nairobi.

So I channeled my inner Ruth Wakefield and started chopping up chocolate bars.

Catherine’s apartment came furnished, so I poked around and found a mixing bowl, but soon discovered there were no measuring cups of any kind. This is problematic as I'm very loyal to Toll House's cookie recipe. Here's the revised recipe:

• 1.25 cups* flour
• .5 teaspoon** baking soda
• .5 teaspoon salt
• approximately 20-25% of the tub of margarine/butter substitute I bought
• sugar to a bit below the line in the "working glass"
• brown sugar to a bit above the line in the "working glass"
• .5 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 3 dark chocolate bars

Perfect. Mix all the ingredients more or less according to the Toll House instructions, except instead of electic beaters use a big spoon.

Just leaving baking and eating! Except that our kitchen also seems to lack:

• cookie sheets (the broiling pan that lives in the oven will do)
• any sort of calibration for the oven
• spatula (ornate metal salad tong/grabber thingies might work)

Eventually, after a few batches with burned bottoms or completely undercooked centers, I managed to produce some respectable cookies ... and were a big hit among my friends and colleagues.

Unfortunately, a few days later while moving around in the kitchen I hear a hissing noise. I checked the refrigerator to make sure that the door was firmly shut, poked around the oven, but couldn't find the the source of the sound. I was in a hurry, so left without investigating further.

That night, I could still hear the noise, and upon pulling the stove away from the wall saw that the hose connecting the gas source to the stove was leaking. And it smelled! I wasn't too concerned about safety ... I mean gas dissipates quickly in air, right? And our kitchen window was open ... But I was at least a little concerned, and quite concerned about the wastefulness of the gas leak.

Time to channel my inner MacGyver to fix the gas leak with the materials available in a furnished Kenyan apartment: one band aid from Catherine's 5 year-old first aid kit, two hand sized plastic bags from the green grocer. I thought about gum and duct tape, but a) did not have any, b) was worried about making a mess.

The band aid was a miserable failure (of course), but squeezing all of the air out of the plastic bags, wrapping them tightly around the hose, and then double knotting them worked surprisingly well!

I don't know if my cookie baking caused the leak (I certainly hope not) but I'm grateful that my cookie-baking adventure did not end in real disaster. And that our landlord came and fixed the gas leak.

*1 cup = the volume in Catherine's drinking glasses, which look like Crate & Barrell "Working Glasses," the 21 ounce size.

** 1 teaspoon = the size of a very small spoon in Catherine's drawer

Tea Farming Upcountry

As my first taxi driver informed me upon arriving in Kenya, most people in Nairobi don’t consider the city home. They have immigrated to the city for work and when they say home they mean the land their family owns outside of the city where they go for holidays, and where they plan to retire. This weekend, one of my colleagues was kind enough to take me upcountry to her home, an hour and a half northeast of Nairobi on the way to Mount Kenya, in a Kikuyu region near Murang’a, high in the mountains and incredibly beautiful.

The contrast to Nairobi was stark. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing 10-12 matatus a minute whiz by belching out black exhaust along side the buses and cars doing the same. Of course, the cars and buses are there for all the people, 1.5 - 3 million depending on where you define the city boundary, hawking fruit and jewelry or walking to or from work or the market.

But outside of Nairobi the road emptied, with no traffic to speak of and people concentrated in small clustered communities along the way up the hillside. As we put more and more distance between ourselves and the cars around us, the air became cleaner and clearer and urban development (from multiple story buildings or branded commercial activity to the small one-man kiosks that sell fruit, baked goods, and mobile phone credit) gave way to fewer, simpler structures (single story stores with a more permanent feel than the kiosks) and varied, lush green vegetation clinging to hillsides accented with brightly colored flowers against the backdrop of deep, red earth.

The further we drove the more beautiful the land became, but still I wasn’t prepared for the farm. Pictures don’t do it justice, but even in the cold, damp mountain mist the sight of acres and acres of tea rolling down the sides of a canyon took my breath away.

Mama David, so called because her eldest son is David, runs this farm more or less on her own in a region where it is still unusual to see a woman driving a car. She is a remarkable woman in her early 70s but looking and acting like a woman 20 years younger. (She inherited good genes from her mother, born circa 1896 who still lives on the farm with Mama David.) She built her house, a sprawling single story construction, in typical Kenyan fashion starting with a very basic set of rooms in the 1970s, and slowly, decade by decade adding more “when there is some extra money or some stone available.”

After snacks and warm drinks, Mama David took us out on the land. Farming in Kenya is labor intensive as basic technological aides are either not available or too expensive to be practical. All the labor on the land is done by hand, save a drip irrigation system. We passed a group of workers preparing some land to be planted and stopped to talk with three tea pickers.

Tea picking is especially labor intensive. Tea grows on waist-high plants that almost look like bushes, but the pickers seemed to move through them quite easily. The part to be harvested is at the very top of the plant – two leaves and shoot – and should be picked while the leaves are still light green and tender.

With hands moving like propellers, tea pickers quickly and precisely grab the tops of the tea plants and throw handfuls of tea backwards into large baskets strapped to their backs every ten seconds or so. When full, the baskets weigh about 30 kilograms, and a good picker can fill about three in a days work.

Full baskets are brought to the tea house where they are emptied onto long, flat stone benches for inspection and weighing. The tea is then bundled and shipped off to an auction, where tea manufacturers buy in bulk from any number of regional farms.

The tea pickers come to Mama David looking for work, and in exchange for their labor they get paid per volume of tea (Ksh 5 per kilogram) and are housed on the farm tea shacks, a single room per family. Mama David’s farm appeared to have about a dozen basic but well constructed units for the workers and their families.

Many children have school on Saturdays, but today a group of about a dozen children ages two to twelve were watching the mzungus with curiousity. Play stopped immediately once we were spotted and the children began cautiously following us. Some shy smiles emerged, but the group was very quiet. Mama David explained that some of the children were quite clever, telling them in Swahili, “There’s a doctor among you, you know … who will it be?”

The children don’t learn English until fifth standard, and the oldest among them was just in fifth standard now. So communication without Mama David was nearly impossible. But the children stood obediently for a picture, and melted into laughter and delight when they saw their faces on the screen display, poking and pointing and each other and the camera.

Our colleague explained on the way home the importance of encouraging the children to believe in the possibilities of their lives, because their circumstances are quite difficult. Besides the visible impacts of poverty - the tall, barefoot boy who seemed to be growing too fast for his clothes to keep up, living in a tea shack and sharing access to the water pump and common latrine - there may come pressure to leave school and help the family by illegally picking tea. There are strict laws against child labor, but children will sneak into the fields and help their families if necessary.

According to the World Bank, more than 40% of Africans live on less than $1/day.* A good tea picker is able to earn Ksh500 (or approximately $8) per day, which would put him solidly in the Kenyan middle class, except that his earnings must also support his family. Depending on the tea picking or other economic contributions of his wife and the size of their family, the tea picker navigates a thin line between poverty and extreme poverty, much of which is dependent on forces outside of their control, like weather and crop yield. It's therefore not surprising that children become a source of income security or insurance.

And it's not surprising the general disdain for the middleman** I encountered. The tea farmer's life is more secure than that of the pickers, but not easy or flush, with thinning margins in a cost and labor intensive business that some think is not sustainable in the long-term. It's hard to imagine a solution that would allow both farmers to maintain a viable business without also disrupting the source of income on which the tea pickers rely. So, for now, it all continues, with thin margins all around, and an uncertain future for all.

* World Bank, "Annual Report - Population Living Below $1 and $2 a Day," World Bank website, accessed July, 2008.
** I realize the figures in this article contradict that data we collected on the farm, but I do not know which is more accurate, and therefore am leaving them unreconciled.

Activity Based Costing

I had my very first meeting with an investee yesterday, an exciting experience despite the early hour (we met at 7:30AM, perhaps before many of my dear readers were even in bed on the east coast).

After spending days upon days buried in multiple iterations of the same business plan, pulling my hair out over technical medical terminology, and trying to reconcile various inconsistencies in projections and strategies, I was thrilled for the opportunity to ask my questions (a multiple-page, outline-bulleted list that somehow morphed into an animated powerpoint deck while I wasn’t paying attention) to a live human.

Walking through the facility and hearing from the entrepreneur the very same words I had read written, and even some of the same words that my portfolio associate had spoken, suddenly made all the difference. It was as if I had been in one of those community Halloween haunted houses for the very first time with cold spaghetti playing brains and peeled grapes posing as eyes -- and while you know that they aren’t actual eyes, you can’t quite work out what they are until someone flips on the lights.

I’m left wondering why seeing something for yourself and hearing a message directly from the source has so much more impact and coherence than when you read the words or hear a second-hand account. Especially because when you look back you realize that most of the information was actually there.

It is, of course, sensible. There’s a natural skepticism at other people’s assessments; what does someone else mean by such subjective standards as “high quality” or “affordable” … and if I had an idea of what it meant in America, what does it mean in Kenya? Visiting a site in-person changes fundamentally the information in my mind from an imprecise description "state-of-the-art" to a mental image of a white piece of medical equipment complete with context and knowledge of what it does, how it works, and where it is located.

The intangibles certainly matter as well. It was almost instantly clear that the potential entrepreneur possesses an incredibly sharp mind and has a knack for business. He certainly seemed to find various business concepts more intuitive than I did even after two years of an MBA. I did feel somewhat comforted at the hundreds of thousands of dollars of b-school debt I’ve amassed when he asked me this question:

“How can I account for direct cost of my service – the equipment is just there!”

Activity Based Costing.

Or more specficially, Time Driven Activity Based Costing.

Thank you Robert S. Kaplan for creating the concept. Thank you V.G. Narayanan and Francisco Asis Martinez-Jerez because apparently I actually internalized some of what you tried to teach me in accounting, even though it didn't feel like it at the time.

Imagine my surprise when I offered to build a costing model for him and felt quite excited at the prospect! (I mean, I've always known I was a bit of a nerd, but this seems a little over the top.) So, here I sit anxiously awaiting the price list for the equipment in question and imagining how I’ll account for the floor space.

Elephants and giraffes and kids - oh my!

Karibu! This weekend I finally ventured outside of Hurlingham, the neighborhood where I both live and work, to see a bit more of Nairobi and also get a flavor for what the rest of Kenya might be like.

My first guides in this adventure were the baby elephants orphaned through poaching or disease who are cared for at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Perhaps the cutest moment was when the elephants first came out and galloped towards the cluster of bottles awaiting them.

Dida, 2 months old

Each elephant has a specific keeper who feeds the baby, plays with it, and even sometimes sleeps with it! Elephants have enormous capacity for emotion, and become quite attached to their keepers, until the point where they realize that people are not as cool as elephants (in that they can't travel 100 km in a day, etc.) and so after a few years they start to make longer and longer excursions away from the nursery. Eventually, their keeper takes them out into the wild and makes sure that they connect with a new herd ... but even after years the elephants will return for a day, with their young, to say hello or kick around a soccer ball.


The elephants were aloof at first, far more concerned with milk and leaves, but before too long began to put on shows. From the baby, Dida, who never strayed more than a few feet from her keeper following him around and around the edge of the ring ignoring the pats, ooh, and aahs of the visitors he was leading her to, to the "cheeky" elephant who so likes people that he would flop onto his side next to the single strand of rope meant to separate humans from pachyderms and try to wriggle his way under by doing the elephant version of The Worm, to the pair of elephants that fell writhing for no apparent reason, except to elicit screams from the audience, on top of each other.


It was almost a toss-up as to who was cuter: the baby elephants or the school group of Kenyan children. Somehow, children are much more adorable in foreign countries than they are at home. After pondering this question for a few days, I've concluded it is not just that I will never see a group of playful elephant babies fascinated by a group of American school children trying to play and causing all the children to scream. I think it is actually that rarely do you see American children in large, uniformed packs. I mean, if one kid in a blue sweater and blue shorts is cute, two kids dressed alike are precious, and forty is almost too much to bear.


But after an hour we were forced to move on from the elephants and went to make friends with giraffes instead.


The cool thing about seeing animals in Kenya is that you get to feed them and touch them as much as you want. As we entered the giraffe center a worker poured handfuls of feed into our hands with instructions to feed the giraffes one pellet at a time ... which so often didn't happen!

Homelife

For the second Friday in a row, heavy rains have arrived just in time for the evening commute. This means trouble, as traffic in Nairobi is comparable to Los Angeles - an ever present reality that people are constantly managing. And, similar to Los Angeles, the normally very skilled, speed-loving drivers grind to a halt at the slightest dampening of the pavement!

I’ve been told several times that this kind of heavy rain is unusual for the time of year. And that it doesn’t rain often. But, today I am grateful for the rain, as I was last Friday, because it gives me a perfect excuse to curl up on the couch and read, write, or be still.

It has been, after all, a full week. I probably took for granted that I could arrive in a new country with new food, a different time zone, different norms and start a new job without skipping a beat. Unfortunately, I skipped a beat yesterday, feeling slightly fluish, rather jet-lagged, and possibly with tummy trouble. On the mend today, (after a long nap and a full night’s sleep), I imagine it’s advisable for me to take it easy.

While I’m grateful for the rain, my shoes may not be. And I do wish that I had brought an umbrella to Kenya. But realistically, it would not have made a difference. When I left the house this morning the sky looked gorgeous, although some distractingly beautiful grey rain clouds against a bright blue sky outside my office window probably should have warned me of the rain to come.

Now the storm seems to be passing, without the power outages that lasted most of the evening last week. (Fortunately Catherine has bought lots of candles at the Maasai Market).

For those who have been asking for photos, this is probably not what you meant. But with any luck there may be some better photo ops this weekend.

A Long Distance Dedication

This post is dedicated to my friends at HBS who got me through that whole mess. You know who you are.

Anyone who has spent more than a few hours with me in the last two years knows that my experience at HBS was a complicated and difficult one, one that I did not always (or often) enjoy. I was so focused on getting through it, that I may have dulled my capacity to actually feel or experience much of anything (positive or negative). And I can now admit that I probably let a lot of the positive of that place pass me by.

So thank you to all my friends and family who were able to look past the numb version of me, for I could not have been very fun to be around. But fortunately, I have found the alive and excited version of myself (completely forgotten about until now) in Nairobi!

It has only been three days, but I love working with Acumen. The days pass quickly with a variety of work to be done and endless conversations buzzing around the office. And even when I get home at night, I continue to slowly turn over the ideas from my work in my mind.

The work has captured my full attention and my passion because it is without answers and because it matters.

Acumen seeks to fundamentally change the living conditions in the developing world by investing in innovative, entrepreneurial, financially sustainable solutions to clean water, energy, health, and housing. While they are certainly not the first or only fund to try to harness the power of markets and local entrepreneurs, this is a field that is still being proven and is still in transition. The model, so simple and beautiful in theory, is incredibly difficult to make work in practice.

So Acumen spends much of its time identifying and evaluating potential investments, vetting them for their ability to produce significant social impact, to fund themselves with minimal charitable contributions, and to reach a million people within five years. Throughout the evaluation process and after investment, Acumen provides management support, helping refine or shape strategies and tactics, and linking the ventures with a variety of different resources.

It is exciting to be in such a crucible of ideas. However, while there are many people and organizations trying even more strategies to solve these basic challenges, few are ready to meet Acumen’s tough criteria.

This is largely what I’ve been working on the last three days: due diligence. Potential investees submit ideas and plans which portfolio staff at Acumen read and analyze. The due diligence process is involved and includes multiple rounds of questions back and forth and working sessions to help the entrepreneurs shape and shore up their plans. Some entrepreneurs make it all the way to being funded, while others only benefit from the feedback and input from the portfolio staff. Currently I’m helping with the due diligence on two potential investments in the health sector.

Doing due diligence is a lot like doing a case analysis at HBS. It could almost always be a BBOP or CCS case, or potentially a strategy, marketing, LEAD or TOM case. I find myself relying heavily on skills I didn’t realize I had acquired in FIN or FRC and am incredibly grateful to BAV for getting me over my irrational fear of financial statements. It was thrilling to realize just how much I had actually managed to learn at HBS and how fluent I had become in what once (not so long ago) was a completely foreign language.

I do find I miss the opportunity to debate the case in a classroom of peers, and am confronted with a new challenge of communicating my analysis without being able to rely on the short-cuts and acronyms that the shared experience at HBS provided.

But the biggest difference between my work and the case method is how much more invested I am. It is as challenging as anything I’ve studied and yet it is combined with a fundamental belief on my part that the substance of the work matters. This combination is intoxicating. My mind is working hard and yet my heart is not wandering off … or vice versa.

I am also working on business development (read fundraising) within East Africa. This work has also been exciting in its own way as it draws on one of my most established professional skills (fundraising) but in a context that is completely new and different. As the ranking expert on fundraising (the other staff do not have professional nonprofit backgrounds), I was terrified at first that Acumen was overvaluing my experience. But I am finding that much of what I take for granted as common knowledge depends entirely on how you define common … something I should have learned in Coro.

I’ve been so engaged in my work that I haven’t even had time to think about where I want to travel to while I’m here! So suggestions are welcome as are your emails …

First Day of ...

My day started at 6:40 by hitting the snooze (that’s just nearly midnight back home), but I managed to roll myself out of bed and onto a yoga mat for 20 minutes of sun salutations. Apparently they worked, as today ended up having the most beautiful weather I’ve seen in Kenya so far. The last few days have been overcast and a bit humid, with one big storm (we lost electricity for much of Friday night) and lots of scattered showers. Today was sunny, breezy, and blue skied, although of course I spent most of the day in an office.

As I dressed, I debated the decision to bring heels to Kenya. It’s only a five minute walk to work, but the roads are narrow, curvy, chock-full of fast-moving, chaotic traffic (there aren't really right of way rules here, but cars certainly trump people) and generally lack sidewalks. Imagining picking my way through the potholes and mud on the shoulder of the road while contending with NYC-esque walking crowds seemed ridiculous, but so would wearing flats and having my pants trail on the ground. Catherine kindly assured me that no one would think my heels were silly, and that one woman in the office might even get excited about them.

At 8:12 I quickly scurried down to the courtyard of our apartment building, not wanting to be late for my 8:15 pick-up as I had a veritable posse to walk me to my first day of work. There was Amy, already waiting for me at 8:14, my soon-to-be-roommate who I had met in New York briefly before we both started our journeys toward Africa. Of course, Jon would also be meeting me; he’s an Acumen Fund Fellow like Catherine and has been incredibly helpful on every count … first reaching out to me about the opportunity, arranging my housing, taking me out and about on my first day in Kenya (and his last day of vacation), and giving me both taxi numbers and appropriate fare quotes for a variety of distances. And Rohan, another consultant/intern sponsored by his company to do some development work. They range from a week’s experience to eight months, constitute nearly half of the Acumen talent at the moment, all live in my apartment complex, and all wanted to walk to work with me for my first day. With Catherine hugging me and wishing me good luck on my first day as I walked out the door and all the neighborhood kids gathered, it felt more like the first day of kindergarten than the first day of my post-MBA pre-BCG internship.

Have I mentioned how incredibly wonderful the people at Acumen are? It’s not just because they were all willing to walk with me the five minutes down the road. (There’s only one turn, and it’s into the driveway of the office.) The last few days have been such a pleasure chatting and eating out with an exceptionally bright and cheerful bunch that extends beyond my three escorts and beyond the Samra Court Crew. It’s almost like being back in college, with long philosophical conversations about the nature of truth and whether or not humans can ever know it followed by tales of the hippo and flamingo sightings from the most recent hiking trip up into a volcanic crater.

Once I arrived at the office things just started happening. A morning meeting, updates on investments, documents passed along to me, meetings about the nature of my work, lunch with the whole office - whole fish, no cutlery. It was just enough information to give me a real sense of what will come, ease my nerves, and get me really excited about working with such a worthwhile and dynamic organization. I almost didn’t have time to notice just how much faster the internet was at work compared to at home!

So tonight I am tired (possibly still a little jetlagged, I think), but feel truly lucky and looking forward to diving deeper tomorrow.

To a Better Blog

Okay, I may have said early on in this blog that your web judgment wouldn’t bother me. That was before.

Back when I wrote those words I imagined a blog to share travel stories and some of my favorite travel photos. However, thanks to fantastic hosts and wonderful company, I was too busy sightseeing, drinking wine and beer, and eating tapas and cheese to really care about updating my public during Brady’s and my trip to Spain and Germany.

Being prone towards guilt, and not wanting to disappoint my large and expectant population of readers, I thought I might go back in time and revisit some of those earlier travels and add some of the pictures. But, just as I was thinking about actually doing it, I read Matt’s blog.

Matt is a friend who, with his wife Julie, hosted Brady and me in their flat during our trip to Berlin. Matt has been blogging about his adventures, but until recently refused to share the url. I made it to his blog today and immediately felt the weight of the world’s web judgment.

It’s just that Matt’s blog is way better than mine. It’s written better and it’s far more entertaining. His blog is better even allowing for the fact that few of you know Matt and therefore may be unconcerned with his daily musings. Go see for yourself: http://berlinrudesheimerplatz.blogspot.com/

And while you’re there, the last entry in June (“The Password is Fidelio”) recounts the highlight of my trip to Berlin. All I will add to Matt’s account are a few photos that I stealthily grabbed without a flash so as to not attract any attention from the legitimate party-goers. Unfortunately I was too chicken to photograph the white suited opera singer.





Moving forward I will strive to be a better blogger but I suspect that Matt is simply a more talented writer and storyteller. In the meantime, feel free to return here for what passes for blogging and for an occasional insight on Kenya.

Exploring Nairobi

Left to my own devices today and with a Rough Guide in hand I set about trying to begin to understand the logic of Nairobi. I started my day at YaYa ("A mall that will make you feel like you're back in Jersey," according to an unnamed resident of Nairobi native to the Garden State) with a second breakfast and my guidebook to get my bearings and chart a course for the day. I was shocked at how much like Jersey it actually was ... but without the Jersey hair. There were, however, lots of white people.

The rest of my day was spent immersing myself slowly into Nairobi proper. The biggest adventures of the day included transportation. As someone who is always a little nervous before she knows where she's going, I was really grateful for Catherine's advice to start myself out on a bus rather than a matatu. The bus was easy and pleasant -- complete with receipts, a seat, and a lovely local woman for a seatmate who advised me on what nightclubs I must not miss. On the way home, however, after watching bus after bus pass me by without stopping or being beaten by a local for the last seat on one of the few buses that did stop, I decided that my one afternoon of walking Nairobi's streets I had prepared me for a matatu.

Matatus are basically shared taxis that run along the same routes as buses, but when they are crammed full of people they can be hard to enter/exit and in general the vans are in various states of repair (or disrepair). The whole process feels quite a bit more chaotic than the bus, but somehow I ended up on a matatu full of teenagers and children, and I think I may have underpaid ... but given the louder-than-imaginable music and our inability to understand each other, the fare collector gave up on me and let it go. I may, however, have paid for my discount fare with some mild hearing loss.

Nairobi isn't a strikingly beautiful place, but has a very strong pulse and vibrance. To avoid appearing too much like the green visitor that I am I did not even try to capture the chaos and energy photographically. But to break up all this text, here's a bit of what I saw while wandering around Uhuru Park, located on the edge of the main commercial district.

Day 1, or is it Day 3?

For those who tend towards worry in my life, after two red eye flights and days of travel I have landed safely in Nairobi and am blogging from my apartment building.

My trip started with a confused car service driver bringing me and Brady to the airport. Leaving hours early did not do much to allay the am-I-going-to-get-there-on-time stress, and I still arrived at exactly the moment I told the driver I needed to arrive by. (Despite all of our intentions and predictions of an early arrival.) Trip details smoothed out once Virgin Atlantic took over (I'm a fan) and before I knew it I was walking along the Thames on a perfectly gorgeous day.

First stop in London was Borough Market (think LA Farmer's Market or a cross between Chelsea Market and Union Square Green Market) except that it was tucked away under an overpass and between a collection of curving cobblestoned streets and old churches. There I found much needed coffee (apparently I take my coffee white) and non-airline food, including fresh juice (my favorite). Sated, I worked my way to the river and passed major landmarks left and right: the Tate Modern, St. Paul's (from a distance), the British Airways Eye, and finally Parliament. Parliament blew me away - it is both immense and intricate, an odd and inspiring combination. And London certainly has a lot of charm. I'd like to go back when I have more than a few hours.

Nairobi is completely different. I haven't seen much of the city yet (just the outside of the Acumen office and the roads between my apartment and the airport), but from sky to landscape to buildings and city plan, it could not feel more different from concentrated and gothic London. My one observation on Nairobi so far is that it feels like more people are walking on the streets, but I'm not sure if that is actually the case or the fact that without sidewalks to contain and separate the people from the cars (even unruly ones like New Yorkers), it feels like people are everywhere.

I'm so lucky to have my friend Catherine here to show me the ropes and introduce me around. Now off to nap so I can really start this adventure!