Second post today....the first almost disappeared as always into the hot sunny biosphere shining steadily across Africa, the big rains haven't begun yet, but the little ones poured hard this year for the first time in memory - maize, sunflowers, potatoes, avocado, mango, oranges, tomatoes, bananas abundant in baskets, plastic pails, falling out of open trucks, freshly picked tea leaves packed tightly in big plasticky cloth-like bags - lined up along the roadside waiting transportation to Dar es Salaam and then on out to the world.

Where was I? with the orphans...Lindsey and I took a bus into Arusha last week to investigate foreign adoption, albeit with mixed emotions ...the concept of raising kids so far away in culture, language, climate, peoples, tribes, rituals. Is it fair? Yet everyone here said YES, a resounding positive yes, do it....give these kids a chance. But unlike Madonna with her Malowi adoption, in Tanzania you have to be a resident for two or three years. So that is and was, that.
Saying goodbye, to people in every village, every town.

Charles and Barie last week, four days of climbing the Korogue mountain range just south and east of Moshe,4000 feet up to 13 villages of mud and clay houses, red and dusty, with meetings with farmers to organize constitutions encouraging them to work together to form collectives with fixed prices, to protect them from being ripped off by big city conglamorates...and while i wait, I get out of the truck with my sketch book, sit on a patch of grass and begin to draw what i am seeing in front of me, a sort of grocery with piles of tomatoes atop each other pyramid style, a stick and mud hut with freshly washed laundry draped and drying on top of a bush. Peeking around each corner, the children in each village at first afraid, hanging back into clusters watching this new thing, some hiding behind their mother's skirts, and then creeping closer, closer, silently, to see what this white mzunga is up to. I pretend to ignore them as I draw in a giraffe, an elephant, a cat, along with a couple of kids in front of the drawing; the silence at first small and then erupting like a noisy volcano into exclamations, laughter, shouts, drawing every kid in the village, sometimes well over a hundred, pushing shoving to get closer until the circle closes and i can no longer see.

An elder with a little round embroidered hat snug on his head appears with a big stick and a need for power shoes them away in anger. He has been drinking. Home brew made from sugar cane. He is a jerk who i assure it is okay, i like this and stand up and contine to draw as they swarm once again around again. We play Swahili and English games, naming animals, noses, mouths, hair, do a bit of singing, i am telling them all about Canada, and what the kids do there in the snow while Charles translates; we have to go, we all shout Qua Hari...goodbye, goodluck! and joggle our way into the next village.

This is life in Africa, every day, everywhere we go.
Lindsey attracted a following of kids like the Pied Pyper, imitating her antics, laughing with her, vying to hold her hand everywhere she went. It's jut happens naturally, you just have to be open.

Saying goodbye to the Masai chief we became such good friends with, who waited patiently for two days in Mto Wa Mbu while i was out in the field, I offered to pay his hotel and food. Masai have thousands of acres and more thousands of goats and cattle, but little of what we call material comfort. Rather than selling a cow or two, they live sparcely with little, walking all night without money for transportation be they a chief, head of their tribe, or not.

Over our last lunch with the usual beans and rice with a tomatoey sauce and greens at a place called Mi Casa in the middle of a little banana plantation he proposed I buy a goat for $40 can. instead of paying for food and hotel. He would have my initials branded behind its ear. LC., a huge honour in the world of Masai. Then, over a few beers and much laughter we imagined its babies each having my three kid's initials branded behind their ears, then the grandchildren, and on and on, so someday when we returned to his expansive boma with stick and cow dung huts and prickly thorn fences perched high atop the Rift valley mountain range over looking the world, we would have our very own tribe of goats to visit. The idea kills me!

A last fairwell goodbye to ICA project coordinator and superb Toyota-driver-through-hill-and-dale Charles who works with boundless energy and enthusiasm and his co-worker Barie lugging my bags up and into the bottom of the big old bus - thank you for making my and Lindsey's time superb and memorable in Mto Wa Mbu..and on to Arusha for breakfast with Tanzanian ICA director Doris, what can i say about her, except that i have known her forever and will forever know her. She is the best.

Everyone in Africa has a cellphone but me - interupting every conversation, checking and rechecking, text messaging, fingers flying, heads lowered fixating on phones on laps, on tables. Even Masai warriors high on the plains with cows and goats carry a cell hidden underneath their red and purple sheets tied at the shoulder; Everyone has a phone. I should have bought one in Zimbabwe, but didn't and didn't in Tanzania. Should have. So for me keeping in touch is a nightmare, finding a phone and getting it to work, each county with different codes, numbers, phone cards, prices. The hardest part moving from country to country is logistics: money, exchange, buses, terminals, where to stay, what roads to take,how and when to get from here to there. And now, Nairobi. Nairobi is harder than most, a big polluted throbbing pusating city of about 8 million people, harbouring the world's biggest slum at the edge of town.

Big, mean and scary, after all these pastoral villages, I haven't looked forward to it.
But as usual, with most situations i brace myself for, I am proved wrong.

A great greeting with Canadian ICA Miriam Patterson and her co worker Saaya fresh off a very succesful four month HIV AIDS education and testing project with a series of Masai villages in a community called Ilingwesi, 3 hours out of Nairobi - very exciting and the first of its kind in Africa. I will go there this weekend with Saaya to interview peer educators and participants and meet his mother.

And this morning by chance, if there is any such thing, breakfast with the former Kenyan ambassador to the UN responsible for disarmament, anti apartheid and nuclear issues. Aged 75, astonishing and rare his stories, my emotions a little raw these days, bringing me to tears. Held up and arrested in the mid 70s, followed by a police car with lights blinking on his way home to his house in Scarsdale, New York, he made it into his property through the large security door the police in close tow. They jumped out, pinned him against his car his arms raised high, demanding to know what a black man was doing in this neighbourhood, on this property. Mean. Angry,they raided his body, stripping it of identification. With disbelief they discovered his cards stamped with UN protocol and signed by Cyrus Vance himself. As they let him go and got back into their car without a word of apology, he hit the down button on the gate which slammed shut, locking them into the compound. Out they got in a second surge of anger, demanding to be let go, but until they offered a proper apology he stood his own, refusing to raise the gate. Finally, they did apologize and hopefully damned shamed, they learned something that day, as they drove away.
I ran into him, again by change a few hours later, and invited him to breakfast tomorrow..
And so it goes.
It's 6:30...
I have been at this all afternoon...the first internet cafe with machines that don't stick and collapse, with electricity, ambiance and a fine restaurant downstairs called Java, serving sandwiches, hamburgers and salads - my first sampling in almost 4 months...I have lost weight, maybe15 pounds. My hair is coal black, the only colour you can get in rural Africa - I like it, the changes on the outside....but as with the orphans it is said that tears fall silently, and only on the inside. Leaving Africa, saying goodbye, leaving so much of a part of me here and taking so much of Africa home, it will take some time of looking back, to understand whatever this has meant to me.
Lindsey wrote to describe the babies: "HUGE now, their heads encased in big smiles, almost talking, almost crawling.....Sierra, I can hardly wait to tell her about the elephant running after our van of orphans, the giraffes gobbling thorn trees high above the trees and show her all my pictures of the orphans....and hello soon, to my kids, and to you....
I sign off with emotions raw and kind of huge.....xxme.