Colombia!

Hola from Villa de Leyva, Colombia!

Since returning from Kenya I had about 10 days home in Fort Collins and a few days in the Colorado mountains, including a powder day at Steamboat that I hadn’t experienced since the 20^th century. The powder was at near waist level and I skied through it like... I'm struggling here.... a wet warm knife through angel food cake (that metaphor is awkward but I’m going with it)? And then the terrain with the waist-deep powder flattened out and I floated through the powder like an anchor floats through the ocean.   

Villa de Leyva, Colombia. It’s a colonial town of just about 10,000 people located right smack dab in the middle of the country at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and surrounded by taller peaks on all sides.  That means a whole lot of water funnels into this place when it rains, such as 4:00pm every day in February, from what I can tell. The mornings start off with a light layer of Colombian fog that burns off to reveal a beautiful and hilly landscape. I’ve gone on a run on each of my mornings so far, and nothing teaches you about the terrain of a place like running in it. And nothing teaches you about a town’s wanderlust animals like running in it either.  In Lamu, Kenya, it’s donkeys.  In Podgorica, Montenegro I remember a lot of cats. And in Villa de Leyva, it’s lazy and uninterested dogs, dogs that are the anti-Kupar.  Kupar is my dog that I was manipulated into adopting in 2006 by my clever friends Nicole and Sarah, and he is to Colombian dogs what a living hummingbird is to dead hummingbirds: significantly more hyper.

Kupar is pronounced “Cooper” but his name was misspelled a few years ago by a Samburu woman who made him a dog collar with the name beaded on it, and I wanted Kupar to wear it but I didn’t want to confuse him, so I changed the spelling. He’s a great, affectionate, fence-jumping, marathon-running, mix of collie, lab and shepherd.

Kupar the wonder dog has hurdled our six foot fence numerous times, swam to the middle of lakes in pursuit of ducks, hates police officers, and in 2010 was placed on probation for one year by a Fort Collins municipal judge despite my lies that a section of the fence blew over in a recent wind storm and that’s how he got out.  When he was ticketed for dog off-leash and public nuisance, the animal control officer asked for name and weight and I was honestly unsure if he meant me or the dog, and I instinctively gave him my own information and that’s what he wrote on the citation which caused confusion later on with the municipal attorney with whom I met to plea bargain. That's right, plea bargain my dog's various infractions. Not a lot of crime in Fort Collins, and apparently I dont live in a medium-sized municipality as much as I do a gigantic home owner's association. On the citation the animal control office wrote that Kupar was “difficult to capture," and the attorney brought this up in a tone that suggested it would make my negotiation position more difficult.  I was entirely amused by this entire situation, and I wanted to offer the attorney a cigarette so he could blow the smoke directly in my face to express his position of power.  When this whole episode was all over, I left court feeling a new level of pride for Kupar. 

Kupar successfully completed probation and saved me $400.  However, he later cost me $510 when, in a fit of uncontrollable excitement, he jumped through a living room window after failing to realize it wasn’t open, which it often is in the summertime. Kupar doesn't keep track of seasons.

I’m here in central Colombia to participate in a forum about the skills and abilities that conservation leaders will need to address our environmental challenges in the future.  There are about 150 people here from mostly North and South America but there are some polite Brits and a few others representing other parts of the globe.

Of course, the wild card in all of this is trying to predict what the future environmental challenges will be.  Such as alien invasions.  Years ago I took a group of students to Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado, and we stopped at an alien-viewing platform along the way. The logic seemed to be that the additional 12 feet the platform provided above the ground would be the key to seeing spaceships. Sure, why not.  There must be some threshold at which our eye can or cannot see something, and this platform could conceivably sit at that very threshold. My Aunt Ferne once claimed she saw spaceships in her backyard. An alternate explanation of what she saw might be that her home was under the flight path to the nearby regional airport but I’m not going to question a woman who has played Bridge every week for six decades. Aunt Ferne also fell in a hole once, and my Grandma – Aunt Ferne’s sister – suggested we just shovel dirt over her and call it a funeral (Ferne survived the hole plunge just fine).  My point is that between an alien viewing platform, Aunt Ferne’s sighting, and the lesson I learned  from Sean Hannity to be fearful of anything that is non-white despite a lack of any  actual basis for that fear (I promise  I love you, my conservative friends), pollution to my water by  extra-terrestrial beings is a viable threat.  Could be real, people. Could be real. 

Overall, Colombia seems to be a very civil and beautiful place.  Up until now my paradigm of Colombia was based on the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone and the steady news of the 1980s about Colombian drug cartels.  But I have neither been kidnapped, nor had the opportunity to purchase snow-globes full of cocaine or experience an on-again/off-again romance with Michael Douglas. So my Colombian paradigm is under reconstruction.

Cue that torturous “It’s a Small World” song for this next section.  Here’s the story: It was Day 1 at this conference. I strike up a conversation with David, a fellow attendee who also enjoys sitting in the very back where we can escape the suffocation of being around too many people and also avoid pretending like we’re paying 100% attention to whomever is speaking about whatever it is they’re speaking about, like those suckers have to do in the main part of the room. 

We do the usual introductions and cover where we’re each from, our organizational affiliations, and generate some meaningless conversation about whether or not they’ll have snacks at the break between speakers. We break, I join the crowd around the break area to appear social, return to the back of the main room minutes later from social fatigue, and David returns shortly thereafter, with an odd sense of purpose to his stride.

“Did you climb Cotapaxi in 1999?” he asked loud enough for a few other people to turn around. It sounded more like an accusation than a question.

Cotapaxi is a 19,000 mountain in Ecuador. And I did climb it in 1999.

“We were in the same climbing group. Our guide was Gaspar. I was with two friends. You shared muffins.”

I wanted to ask "What kind of muffins?" just to throw a funny angle at the situation, but was caught up in being simultaneously astounded at David's memory and the fact that 14 years and a life stage later, here we were in a meeting hall in Ville de Leyva, Colombia.  When we spoke earlier and I mentioned I was from Colorado, he said it triggered the memory. Impressive.

He went on to tell me that a photo of us taken during that climb was used in a poster for a guiding company based in Cali, Colombia that according to David, was still on the wall the last time he was there.  He lived in Cali for a number of years as a teacher, and visits annually after marrying a Colombian to visit her family. He said the photo had an amazing sunrise in the background; I remember that sunrise clearly. It was, in fact, amazing. Our group stopped our climb to watch it in silence. I framed my own photo of that sunrise which is sitting in my basement but will be promoted to the main part of the house when I return.  

I had a similar small-world experience in December on my trip to Montenegro-Albania-Greece.  After a full day meeting, I had joined the facilitator, Jon, and some others for an after-meeting drink.  He definitely had something familiar about him, but then again he was British and maybe all British people seem the same to me because they all say “lovely” and “brilliant” a lot.  I hadn’t let on that he seemed familiar. And then I had a moment of clarity and I blurted:

“Were you on a safari to the Masai Mara (Kenya) in summer of 2002 with Adam Henson?”

Any toddler with experience in the game of Twenty Questions knows that an initial question with this much detail in a scenario with a lot of uncertainty is absurd.

“Possibly. I lived in Kenya at that time. It’s a lovely place.”

In the Summer of 2002, I took my first ever trip to Kenya to visit Adam, a former roommate from graduate school who moved there with his wife to work for the Africa Wildlife Foundation.  We did some of the usual touristy things, like a safari to one of the most wildlife-abundant regions of the world, the Masai Mara. Jon worked for another conservation group in Kenya and knew Adam from running around the same conservation circles in Nairobi. He joined us on the four day camping trip to Masai Mara, a trip that opened my eyes widely and piqued my interest hugely.  It was THE experience that led me to pursue my own opportunities to work in Kenya. It’s also the only time I’ve had three alcoholic drinks before 8am, following a free hot air balloon ride in which we saw lions and hovered over part of the wildebeest migration) Now to provide an excuse, the balloon company laid out a sprawling breakfast after the balloon landed, and it included mimosas and bloody mary's that the very hospitable Kenyan servers generously and frequently refilled.  If you were in the Masai Mara at dawn surrounded by widlife after an amazing balloon ride, you'd want to cap that off with a nice drink(s). Kids, that was very bad of me and if I could go back in time, I would eat more french toast in between those drinks. 

So in both of these small world scenarios, I knew exactly one person in a large professional meeting. When I overhear other conversations between people at these events who clearly knew each other beforehand, their dialogues go something like this:

“I haven’t seen you since you successfully bred the red-billed feathery bird back from near extinction.”

or

“We had so little time to talk at the Society for Amazing Conservation People meeting last month.”

Instead, as I have shown, my conversations at these events amount to the time I shared pastries in a sleeping dorm at 17,000+ feet shortly before puking from altitude sickness,  or how buzzed I was shortly after sunrise in one of the greatest ecosystems in the world. That’s all right though. I'm content with my mediocrity in the world of conservation because I think I’ve found my “achievement comfort zone” and it’s not necessarily among my professional peers but among 43 secondary school students in Samburu, Kenya.  If you don’t know about the Samburu Youth Education Fund, that previous sentence will seem like I have again been drinking a lot before breakfast.  

Two more days before heading home and unpacking Spring-like clothes suitable for Villa de Leyva and replacing the duffel bag with Winter mountain clothes (read: SKI GEAR) again.  Newly on the travel radar: today I was invited to Mauritius to contribute to discussions and planning for a new conservation leadership facility. Mauritius.  I had to google it.  I just might go….J

Returning home

It’s January 28, and I’ve been gone exactly one month and now en route home and started the process of more fully getting caught up on current events. Let me get this straight: a Heisman-nominated football player had a girlfriend that he didn’t know was fake, and she died (well, not really since she was fake) just before the national championship college football game in which he was playing?  My main reaction is this:  if we can make up our significant others,  this opens up all kinds of possibilities and in about 14 seconds, I’m not going to be single.

Currently I’m somewhere between Nairobi and Amsterdam in the darkness, wondering why KLM airlines prints the names of its destinations on its motion sickness bags. As someone is holding up the bag to their mouth for an impending vomit, this seems like an ineffective time to make the sales pitch for future air travel.  In my experience with vomiting, both as the vomiter and a vomit observer, is people just want to get it over with and not think about much else while in the actual act.  If in charge of vomit bag design, I’d help move the process along for the ill-fated traveller, maybe include pictures of head cheese (really Europe? Why?) or a transcript from a Rick Santorum speech (sorry to those I just offended).

Head cheese: When real vomit just isn't enough.

While waiting in the Nairobi airport, I was also faced with a puzzling advertising/sales scenario that I’ve wondered about in other airports, which is the sales of suitcases at an airport, specifically after the security checkpoint.  Again, in my experience, I have found that nearly 100% of the travelling public has arrived to the departure gate already with a suitcase, or isn't interested in purchasing an empty suitcase to lug with them during their travels.
 
Over the past week in Samburu, my colleague Siva and I started up a new project.  We learned that it would be funded about three weeks ago, so I extended my stay a little while to take advantage of already being here. The background of the project is this: a defining aspect of Samburu culture is its livestock and pastoralism. Herding cows, goats and sheep (and to a lesser extent, donkeys and camels) is not only one of the few ways to earn an income in this region, but the size of the herd is also a sign of stature and well-being.  When greeting someone in Samburu it is perfectly normal to ask “how are the cows?” and despite how perfectly I set someone up by asking that question, no one has ever responded with “udderly good.”

Historically, younger males look after the family’s herd.  Sunrise to sunset, they would be out in a landscape that is shared with Kenya’s wildlife. Over time, a young pastoralist gains a lot of environmental knowledge through direct observation while in the landscape, such as which wildlife species eat which grass species during different seasons of the year, and so on. 

But, this culture is changing, and it’s changing quickly.  For some Samburu parents, they prefer their children to be in school rather than tending to livestock (in the case of boys) or collecting water and wood (for girls), and this represents a significant shift. So a question arises about whether local knowledge about the environment is at risk of being lost within the next few generations as youth are in the classroom and not in the landscape with the herd. And if knowledge is at risk for being lost, how do Samburu people feel about it? So, this past week we tried out some different methods for how we might address this question. One involved a 7-8 kilometer tromp through the bush in which I was often reminded about Samburu’s difficulty with estimating distance, and that the words “just over there” when spoken by a Samburu often imply the exact opposite. I might say, for example, that Amsterdam is “just over there” from Nairobi. So we’re off and running with this project, which gives me another path back to Samburu later this year.

 

Taking a break from a walk through the bush!

 I usually end up having some periodic moments of reflection toward the end of these trips, but not in any real intentional sort of way. They just sort of happen, like a bowel movement.  Now, I’m not a terribly emotional sort of guy in my day to day life, and generally regard emotions as obstacles to what I need to get done, but Samburu is a place where I’m willing to acknowledge that I feel stuff sometimes.  Sometimes instead of emotions I prefer to use the word distractions, but for this entry I’ll use the emotion vernacular to avoid any confusion.

Samburu is a place where emotions collide. I love and I dislike this place simultaneously. I’ve met some of the best people of my life in this area, and some of the worst.  Some of the world’s greatest inequities and challenges are front and center. Children die of cholera. Women are threatened for wanting to own property.  Schools have more classrooms full of students than they have teachers to teach in those classrooms. But there’s encouraging and inspiring examples of what’s being done to deal with this stuff so it’s not an entirely depressing place. Look hard enough, and you can find hope.

The final days of my trips to Samburu become predictably difficult, partially because the price I pay for a mango will increase 1315% when I return to Colorado and I hate anticipating that with every bite of a mango I take during my final days here (I did the math. That is a correct percent).  

Supporting education, via the Samburu Youth Education Fund which has a website where we accept donations at www.samburuyouth.org (did you pick up on the subliminal message?), around here is fun and of course it’s wildly fulfilling. It’s helping provide a promising future to people who have unquestionably earned it. Hard work and education: those are long-held values of my own, and when some action so clearly expresses your values, it just feels good. But, the perception of this philanthropy by others – usually those that place less value on education – is the guy from U.S gives away stuff and that can lead to a sentiment of I need to get my share. 

“Why do you give that child schooling and to me you give nothing?”

That is a statement asked of  me the other day when I responded to a guy I barely know that I would not buy him a donkey. It provides sobering insight into the amount of work yet to be done to build awareness about the importance of education, or he might argue the amount of work to be done to build awareness about the importance of free donkeys.

Sometimes I have to chalk up these frustrating instances to just accepting it as Samburu culture.  Few people keep track of time, for example, but I’m able to appreciate and adjust to the fact that Samburu have a different relationship with time, or more specifically being on-time.  So when someone agrees to meet at 2pm, I know and accept that they might actually mean a week from Wednesday for morning tea.  Or in the case of my father, meeting at 2pm actually means between 1:00 and 1:30. My dad could get four flat tires, run out of gas, sit in gridlock, and still be on time because he accounted for those possibilities. He keeps “what if” time. I keep normal time. Samburu keep no time.  

But I can’t always easily dismiss some of these instances to “oh, that’s just being Samburu.”  Years ago I attended my second circumcision ceremony, the first one being my own which I believe did not involve much fanfare as it was overshadowed by the news of being born.  Those ceremonies occur in the early teen-aged years here. Long story short, the actual, er, snippage, was done poorly and the young man was in a fair amount of pain many days later when he should otherwise be able to at least walk around as though he were riding an invisible miniature horse.  So we took him to the doctor in our vehicle for the simple reason that we had a vehicle and could help out. The doctor had to correct the problem through a sort of on-the-spot second circumcision, to clean it up.  I felt awful because I gave the young man my uninformed perspective that he probably just needed some antibiotics and instead, out came the scalpel for Round 2. 

When I was 11 years old I injured my arm doing something that I was asked many times not to do, and to this day I'm unsure if either of my parents know the real story. The splint crafted out of a magazine and duct tape  -- courtesy of my brother's recent first-aid training in junior high health class -- failed to heal the arm after a few hours while we hid in my cousin's bedroom, and we just couldn't come up with a good enough cover to hide my injured arm for the unknown amount of time it needed to heal. I remember my brother suggesting I just wear a baggy shirt for awhile. My mom took me to the emergency room "probably to get a cast."  A few hours later I was in surgery and my arm fails to extend 180 degrees to this day.  So like this boy with the dangling foreskin, I too, have been caught off-guard by imminent medical care involving a knife.

After the procedure, the return trip to the boy's village involved 3-4 miles of a very rough dirt road. Very rough.  This kid just had his donner (how we referred to it in my house when we were kids. No explanation.) clipped again with no anesthesia or pain-killers, and was now being bounced around in the backseat.  Ouch.

During the initial botched circumcision, he did just as a Samburu boy is supposed to do in that ceremony:  he didn’t show pain or so much as wince and therefore he showed his readiness to become a man.  I would be in a fit of tears when the scalpel merely entered the air space of that region, let alone when it did any snipping in front of chanting spectators.  Following this encore circumcision and the bumpy ride home, he cried openly. And he was criticized for it aggressively by an elder as he was carried from the car to his hut. The boy wasn’t being a man, by Samburu definition. I wanted to punch that elder in the face, maybe even hold him down and botch a circumcision on him which would be difficult as his foreskin was removed decades ago, so I guess I would just snip the next layer. My point is, maybe there’s a fundamental human right to express pain.

And that’s my point. Spending time in Samburu has generated questions in my mind about how much latitude am I willing to give a culture to practice their traditions and at what point is it okay to judge a situation as inhumane, cruel or just poor form.  I have seen rampant jealousy, corruption and poor treatment of Samburu to each other. I have seen Samburu abuse and hurt one another for considerable personal gain.  Myself, I have been lied to often, stolen from, and if a 2007 rumor is true, had a curse placed on me. Development work can be incredibly hard, and Samburu has helped me understand why.

But this unpleasant stuff, this crap, is always over-shadowed and diminished by the goodness I have experienced in Samburu, and their inspiring resilience. I know many women in a few villages around here, women who experienced awfulness in their lives such as arranged marriages at an unfathomably young age (14!), female genital mutilation, violent abuse, and denials of rights such as owning property or going to school.  Despite these challenges, I have never been to a community with so much laughter, nor been the subject of so much good-natured ribbing and teasing. So many of us want laughter and happiness. And the women in these villages want it as well, and they make it happen. In abundance. They give the finger to the past and look ahead with laughter and goodness in volumes that I cannot entirely articulate.  

I know a young man whose father was killed by a machete in a bizarre love triangle that involved his mother and another man.  In the aftermath of this tragedy which left him orphaned, he asked if he could go to a boarding school to finish 8^th grade where he would have his needs met and could probably focus better on his studies. And he further asked how he could earn money to help pay the cost. He is one of the most humble and hard-working young people I have met in Samburu. It pained him to ask for help to support his education. He has no father and a mother who is on the run.  And now, he will graduate from secondary school in November where he is currently in the top 15% of his class and talks about his future desire to work in health care. When I see him, he shows unnecessary levels of gratitude and humility that speak to the strength of his character.

Again and again I have come to know people in Samburu who show incredible resilience and an unthinkable loyalty to hope.  I look around the Archer’s Post community where I home base when I come to this region, and I see the trash, the unemployment, the apathy and the substance abuse.  It’s not always an easy place in which to feel hopeful.  But I meet people who grew up in this reality and environment their entire lives– they don’t just visit it a few times a year! – and they believe life will be better. They really, really believe it. It’s baffling and illogical to me sometimes, but it is so damn inspiring.