first week in Nairobi

The moment when I first got out the air plane in Jomo Nairobi Airport 4 am in the morning, I know this will be a comfortable summer -- never hot when you sleep and under the shade; only hot when you need to walk anyway at noon.

At times mild and at times intense, this is my impression garnered during the first week in Nairobi. Thanks to the proceeding of the Convention of Biological Diversity, there are many technical meetings, side events. On Saturday a big celebration of the International Day of Biodiversity, I participated in the whole day's events--hatched along in a way, given my "blue pass" status(~~~).

Agriculture has a huge impact on biodiversity. Modern farming practices have meddled around with the diversity of plant and animal species in many ways. Mono-culture for one thing has not only artificially created new species that are decided to provide the maximum yield but at the same time erased many other plant and animal species. In case of genetic modification, the other, forest clearing, for example. In the picture to the right, it is a group of people made up of regional farmer coordinators and farmers themselves. They were here to display the variety of grains, crops, vegetables people of Kenya have been growing for centuries and millennia. They also prepared dish to show people how you could make yummies out of the indigenous crops. Maizes, beans, peas of various sizes and colors, and sorghum, potatoes and sweet potatoes...and speaking of sweet potato, now you see why I was holding a bag of them in my hand -- they just gave that bag to me while I was expressing my affection of them and how it is considered a longevity food in China. They also gave me a bag of ground grains mix (maize, sorghum,etc) for breakfast porridge, and a bag of mung beans (Chinese favorite for summer drink and porridge). We agreed that next time the coordinator goes in town. She will bring stuff for me directly from the farmers.

With the splashing in of western food culture and imports, traditional dishes made of these various ingredients have almost disappeared from the streets of Nairobi. What came instead are numerous of fast food restaurants called "Chicken Inn" selling roasted/fried chicken, fish and chips and samosa too. Local dishes like Sumuku wiki (literally, "get-me-through-the-week" low budget kale/spinach), Ugali (made of ground maize flower), can only be home-made by your mum and dad. This is what I have always see as an almost unavoidable lack of appreciation of one's own cultural, ethical and endemic crystal in the face of western popular monoculture. Conventional wisdom in this case isn't some taboo to be dodged, but perhaps to be given more scientific study to be recognized of its true health, environmental and socio-cultural value.

Bon, something other than food~~~some brief stories about other aspects of Nairobi.

Corruption is national and continental headache. Every generation of governments and PMs have made pledge to combat corruption yet the results scatter. Thus the university has gone this far to put up the board in front of its gate to demonstrate its infallibility. I have also seen big and small boxes placed in various locations for citizens to report of corruption crimes. Don't know if they work at all.

Matatu, or Ma-3, THE public transport. Usually it takes 20 shilling for me to go to town from UNEP. Pretty wild services. prices depends on the time of the day. It could also be very personal the interior decoration -- some put up club lights all sorts of crazy stickers. But all, have very very loud loudspeakers inside them. It is a truly mobile home video treatment!

This is a picture taken on top of a bio-center built with the technical and financial support from Chinese Embassy in Kenya and two Chinese film stars. A biogast plant producing cooking natural gas is built along the public toilets on the first floor. The third floor is used as a commual meeting place. It is located at the heart of an urban slum on the very verge of Karura Forest. The forest was once completely deforested, until came the dedicated work of Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel Prize laureate for her influential environmental movement in African. She started the Green Belt movement.

Anyway, the guy in the picture, David, is a young man born and raised in the slum. He accompanied me while visiting the village. He speaks fairly good English but was currently unemployed. In fact he said only 25 percent of the whole population in the slum have work. The others just hang around, some collecting honey from the man-built behaves in the forests, keeping goats. David wanted to have a motocycle of his own so he could transport people to make money. He thinks people will trust him more because he can speak English. To quote one more thing from him, he told me, "don't give us food, give us knowledge instead. I have no more education. But I will have my children learn more than I do so can have a different life."

The visit was the last item of the celebration agenda. On the way back to the UN compound, an Australian delegate to the Convention on Biological Diversity sitting next to me commented on the lavish three-storey gated house just 20 meters way from the slum -- such sharp contrast of the inequality. I wasn't that surprised, to say the truth, we have looked through many pictures of drastic boundary line of the two extremes in the urban studies class. It is a classical struggle. It has accentuated and culminated in never-before-seen magnitude. Poverty, inequality and environment, a loop of interwoven issues, no one is sure where to start.