An Equatorial Equinox

Alright, science nerds.  This post's for you.  Living on the equator is pretty cool for lots of reasons - some of which I hope we've elaborated thoroughly enough in previous posts.  But, I 'm pretty sure no one is as happy here as those who, more than anything, miss middle-school science labs.

You know who you are.  You still think that the coolest Birthday gifts are "kits" of some sort - chemistry sets, slides and microscopes for examining tree leaves, telescopes with star charts, spy tools that let you build motion sensors for your bedroom door.  My dad even got me a robotics kit once that required I use a soldering iron and a circuit board to build a "bug" that could follow a flashlight around a dark room.  (I may or may not have been in my mid-twenties for that one...)

What I Did on Christmas Vacation

For anyone who thinks all those things are super-cool and forewent cigarettes for Bunsen burners in high school - the best part of living on the equator are all the naturally-occurring scientific phenomenon that you can try to test out for yourself.

For example, you probably knew - or could have guessed - that at the equator we have the most equal days and nights of anywhere on the planet.  As your days shorten for Winter (leading to Seasonal Affective Disorder and other such medical maladies) and lengthen for Summer (causing the kids with parents strict on bedtimes, regardless of the amount of light outside, the greatest of jealous pangs) - ours plod on at just about dead even.  Twelve hours for the day and twelve for the night.

But even cooler - we have the shortest transitions between day and night.  It can actually get dark here in mere minutes, thus making shows like The Twilight Zone (or that crappy vampire book that I hate) a little tougher to translate since we hardly have a twilight at all.

But the best time of all - the equinox.  Get this - we all know that the sun doesn't rise perfectly in the East and set perfectly in the West.  As the year goes on, it moves further North or South.  Of course, from the US, we're looking at a teeny-tiny, highly skewed variation of this.  But, on the equator - the sun actually passes directly overhead twice a year - supposedly causing us to cast no shadow at all.

We tried it out.  It was a little disappointing as we still cast small shadows (we're 34 minutes or so north of zero) - but we did initiate Phase 2 of our little experiment - tracking an analemma, the figure 8 shaped path of the sun over the course of the year.  The equinox is a great time for the kick-off of this because we're right in the middle of the figure 8.

Bet you didn't know that thing on the globe was something you could measure yourself!

Being huge nerds, we're sacrificing a bit of what was to be our sports field to track the analemma this year.  You can too!  I'll be honest though, it probably won't be as cool as ours because, chances are, you're not living on (or very near to) the equator.

Pickles Isn't Racist

Pickles isn't racist.  I know all about racism.  I lived in the Deep South and worked for a Civil Rights based NGO for goodness sake.  And Pickles is not racist.

My colleague Seth has agreed that he might just be stupid. 

But, let me back up a little.  Pickles is my new puppy.

Cute, no?  I bought him at the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (the pound) in Nairobi.  He's a 3-month-old mutt with a little Doberman in the mix.  I named him 'Pickles' in honor of the pet name given to the title character in my all-time favorite zombie themed romantic comedy, Shaun of the Dead.  He also earned the moniker because I used to live in Mississippi, where Kool-Aid Pickles ("Koolickles") were a popular snack.

Presenting the Koolickle

On the compound where I live, we have a pretty regular stream of Pickles-Admirers.  My ex-pat colleagues have all been very lovely to him and so he's gotten used to their constant petting.  But, whenever one of our national staff comes by, Pickles, my usually sweet-tempered, occasionally whiny dog, actually barks.  As I write this, Wycliffe, one of our logistics managers, is receiving an onslaught of semi-ferocious growling.  Charles, our construction manager, had to deal with it earlier.  He peed on my foot when my Swahili teacher Edna came by the first time and he doesn't even like Ubu, our Country Director's African dog.

So, my neighbors have decided he's racist.

Back to the pound for a minute: I chose Pickles out of a whole group of adorable puppies because he was the only one eating a rock.  So, I don't think he's racist so much as he is straight stupid.  And, there's really no comparison point for him, since all the new people he's meeting are African.  (Believe it or not, Bungoma isn't really a center of racial diversity.)  Further in his defense, he really likes the four Kenyans who live on our compound.  So maybe he's not even stupid; maybe he's one of the few toddler-pups ever to recognize stranger danger.  But he's not racist!

PROMOTIONS, PROMOTIONS, PROMOTIONS!!!

If, by chance, you find yourself working for an NGO in Africa, trying to convince people to join your organization, you may be presented with the concept of the wonderful, the splendid, the ever dazzling and resplendent, MUSIC TRUCK!!!!!!

If you are not familiar with this so called music truck, it is an aptly named vehicle, or truck rather, that drives through the villages blaring popular music from speakers that are clearly too big for the truck, and appears only to be meant for warfare scenarios in which one desires to deafen their enemies. Nonetheless, this “music truck” moves through these areas much in the way of a magical pied piper. As it jostles about the rocky and degraded roads, it’s cacophony of notes entices people, somehow saying to them, “come one, come all, and merely listen to the people who have brought this magnificent phenomenon to your village.”

While I had not seen any Music Trucks in my adult life, in my childhood I became well aware of the concept and its magnetic results. Thus, when presented with the idea, how could I pass it up? Our goal was to get our farmers excited about the upcoming season and see if we could not get everyone in the surrounding areas to learn of our organization’s greatness, and that surely they would love nothing better than to join us and VUNA ZAIDI – harvest more!

The two directors in my district and myself set about making the arrangements to cause this brilliant idea to come to life. Surely all we would have to do was get the Music Truck and multitudes would flock to see what wonderful things might ensue. But then it struck us, what do we do with these people we've called forth from their quotidian lives and activities? What will we show them to make them excited? We were fresh out of bearded ladies and I don’t think my manager (president of his juggling club in college) would have volunteered to be the main attraction – although I can tell you white people (mzungu) are a draw enough, and a juggling mzungu could pretty much make people’s list for the craziest thing they’d seen that year.

We decided on the RAFFLE: a common form of entertainment for hordes of people that extends a tantalizing aura of excitement and anticipation to its spectators. Who will win the car? Will I win a trip to Asia? Those were the questions that immediately popped up in my mind – I was sorely mistaken. The prizes we landed on were not my first pick, but I was assured would be exciting. For third place, wait for it, a bar of soap. Not a special bar of soap, not a bar of soap that would last a year, but a regular bar of soap. Second place got a something bit more rousing; a chicken would be the prize of these lucky winners. And for our grand prize, our big finale, two goats would be bestowed upon two favored grand-prize winning farmers.

The weeks endeavors began in what could only be classified as a total and utter….failure. The music truck was late, there were no speakers ready to coax even a small rabble to the raffle, our employees were nowhere to be seen. Oh, how splendid an idea the Music Truck was. But, it was only 8am or, 2am Kenya time – I don’t mean from the different time zones, but time in Kenya starts at 6am, so 7am is actually 1 in the morning. Anyway, there was yet to be a thrilling day ahead of us…..

Last Tuesday

Tuesday, my morning shower arrived in a jerry-can. I hadn't washed my hair in a few days, so I was pretty excited, but not as excited as I was when the water turned out to be steaming hot.

My ride to work was by piki (motorcycle taxi), which started on a dirt road, but quickly diverged onto a thin footpath that ran up and down rocky hills. We passed farmers working in their fields and already sweating in the morning sun. Occasionally, at unclear forks in the road, we stopped to ask them for directions.

My first meeting was beneath a tin-roof, in a mud-walled church near a water pump. I struggled to understand the Field Manager - she was switching between the national and local language, the former I understand poorly, the latter not at all. But her energy was infectious and the farmers she was training were engaged. Some even took notes.

My mind was on my desk work throughout most of the morning. I needed to figure out how to solve the issue of Sikulu - why were their harvests so low? And my cattle profitability survey lay unfinished on my living room coffee table. These two projects ended up consuming most of my evening following our weekly collaborative meeting, which, in the past, has covered everything from maize storage techniques to reducing errors in data entry, and once even asked the question, how can we reach 1.1 million families by 2020?

I skipped sports.

My dinner was in a thatch-roofed hut at a long table. We talked about our days, our projects, our families, and about just how delicious our tacos tasted. (Dinner is always tacos on Tuesday nights - but where was the cheese this week?)

My bedtime came at 10:00. I crawled beneath my mosquito net with a book about Russian literature. I lit the space with my little solar lamp - the rainstorm during dinner had knocked out the electricity. Ten pages about Isaac Babel, a writer "disappeared" from the Soviet Union in 1939, and I was asleep.