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!