thanks for the positive feedback, dianne and joneses, about the photos. there's more trickling in, but all the internet connections are real slow here.
but there'll be more, in no particular order. someday i'll even touch them up and make them look decent. the ones that look a bit dark or a bit light i should be able to fix when i have time, thanks to the wonders of the digital age. they probably got that way because photoshop has silly defaults for generating jpegs from raws anyway. but i'll get off my soapbox.

i'd really like to thank Whoever It Was That Donated The Ukes. i don't know your name, just that you're a nice person that donated them. so, thanks. they continue to be a big hit with the students we're working with - a few people in each group want to - or already can - play guitar, but don't have access to one. the ukes are especially entertaining for them. not to mention educational.
so, thanks. i hope you find this.

and thanks to the Goldsmiths for sending us to Naivasha. Fish Eagle Inn is a great place to stay, and it was really neat to tour the farm and talk to the nurses there. thank you.

also, people who donated money and equiptment, thank you. our kenyan friends love their shinny new cameras and laptops. they're mastering everything at the speed of light, and i think they'll continue to produce a lot.

thanks to felix masi, who just left us about an hour ago - he's a photojournalist. i think you can check him out at www.voicelesschildren.org
anyway, he's been helping our photography group. giving us tips. helping us communicate with people and find our way around. and entertaining us. so, thanks for all your time.

and stan and dennis from nakuru. they've also mentored and guided us, spending a lot of our precious time helping jump work.

and other youth leaders here, like fred. he's the guy here in nairobi, and he's obviously the guiding force of jump nairobi.

so, thanks everyone. we're off early tomorrow to go safari our brains out. cant't wait.

oh, and i think we're going to the carnivore tonight. it's supposed to be really famous - some kind of restaurant with big game animals as food, cooked hibachi (sic?) style (right in front of you, that is).
it sould be neat. i pity our vegetarian - hopefully they'll have some celery.

some of my photos will be up soon. the up speeds are very slow here, and i'm limited to 20 megs right now on the site that i'm using, but they can be found at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alecburney/

when they do finally go through.
also, keep in mind that these are not final pictures, they're previews i quickly made from the raw files...
i'm quite pleased with some of them.

nothing much to say. sorry or the infrequent correspondence, everyone, but internet connections here are painfully slow, and we're too busy to use them much anyway. we've gotten a lot done. we finished with the Nakuru group and went to the game park. the flamingo (sp?) are dropping like flies there. our guides said they'd never seen anything like it. lots of dead birds. they say the pollution in the lake is killing them off quickly.

then to Naivasha (thanks, Goldsmiths). we talked to a nice general manager-type there, Grant, about their health issues. talked with some nurses there. we toured the facilities and looked at pretty plants. not much to say about that.
we bounced back down the road to Nairobi, and now we're with another group. man, that road is awful.
tractors have '50 kph' stickers. three-wheeled taxis are '60 kph.'
saw a speed limit sign. it's somewhere between here and Nakuru, when the road turns to dirt.
Kibera is a depressing place to see.
how come i can't think of any 'white' or 'western' countries that suffer from poverty to this degree? is it a racism thing, the ammount-of-time-since-independence? or just a developing-country thing?

we went to the Nakuru dump yesterday (i think). it was amazing. mounds of garbage everywhere. people live there; they collect and sort the garbage and make things to sell. a bunch of us JUMPers bought bags made of braided shopping bags. they're amazingly strong. i really have nothing to say. i've got some good pictures, but none of these internet cafes have new enough versions of photoshop to read .NEF raws, so i have no way to make JPEGs still. i could use a JUMPER's computer, but i keep forgetting. the upload speeds here are too slow to post anything with a fine resolution anyway. but i really like at least one of them. i can't wait to share.
the street hustlers are more persistent than any 'bolex' (knock-off rolexes) vendors in new york. they'll follow you, remember your face from day-to-day. they all have identical merchendise, but they all claim to have made it by hand. they seem to all be fluent in spanish. it's weird.
the projects seem to be going ok. everyone's got a story to tell (as Jack White might say). a lot of them are very sad.
and the glue sniffers roaming the streets are terrifying. they stumble around (eyes glazed over, movements sloppy), bottles in hand, and extend their fists to you, hoping for cash.
"one hundred.... one hundred"
how can you give them money, even if it's less than a buck fifty? and how can you justify giving them none?
lots of beggars, lots of hustlers, trying to make a buck. "Won't you buy this beautiful postcard? I drew it myself! I'm trying to pay for university!"

so, we're here. nothing much to report - everyone's doing ok.
some observations about Kenya (at least the parts i've seen):
no speed limits? haven't seen a sign. speed limit might be determined by your vehicle type, not by your location (the road you're on). most vehicles have "80 KM/h" stickers on the back. i've seen some that say "120 km/h."
pedestrians everywhere. no one seems to have the right-of-way - the rule seems to be "don't hit anything" - people change lanes at will, usually without turn signals. i think i've seen a signal used once or twice. passing on the outside of the road (and sidewalk) seems to be acceptable. people will cut others off often, with little apparent ill-will. the roads can be pretty bad. and very dusty. public transportation seems common. 14-passenger busses roam the streets, wildly decorated with stickers and bright paint. larger (coach) busses seem less common. there seem to be few official "bus stops" - people stand on the sides of the road, or walk through traffic and hop on any bus that slows or stops (and has room).

Devie already got stopped by a conman of some sort. a guy in a suit offering to exchange money for him - Devie thought he was one of our JUMP Kenya leaders. it was a close call, i guess.
at the airport, one of the ... blue-shirted ... airport-guys made us pay him a hundred dollars to take out video equiptment into the country. he said a lot of stuff about permits - i guess he thought we were Hollywood.
i snapped a photo of him digging though one of our boxes (actually i was a second late, so he'd just stopped for a second and the photo is of him standing there next to our shredded box). that seemed to distress him some, and my jump buddies regarded it as a Generally Stupid Move. i guess it was. it certainly didn't scare him away as much as i expected.
we went to see the Nakuru Players' Magnet Theatre group do a street-improvisation show in what seemed to be a small slum in Nakuru here. the players stood in a group on a street in between little shacks rooved with corrougated (sp) steel. people from the neighboorhood made a large circle around the players. there was much singing and dancing. little children swarmed around. the children seemed to enjoy seeing themselves in the review screen of my camera. i took many pictures of them, and i expect one or two will turn out.
i didn't understand much of what the players said in the show (it was mostly ki-swahilli), but the audience seemed very involved. their message is HIV/AIDs prevention. their method involves the blending of the entertainers and the entertained. everyone sings, many people join the players' skits, improvising and such. the Magnet group told us later that they usually get a volunteer from the audience the describe how his life has been changed by their message.

i'd like to show some pictures, but these computers don't have a raw converter... so no JPEGs for me yet. and 10 meg files are too big for the 'net. no web browsers i know of display RAW anyway, so you'd have to download them... etc.
i'll borrow a JUMPer's computer and make some rough JPEGs sometime. no promises, though.
when i get home, i'll definitely make a large gallery of refined JPEGs for everyone's entertainment. i'll post the link on this blog.

we met with the Nakuru group yesterday, and today we're going to talk to their school (the whole thing, maybe!). they're a nice bunch of people, and they seem excited. they've already started shooting some video with their shiny new camera (thanks to everyone who donated money to us!).
i believe it was Willfred who really enjoyed it. he wasted no time getting into the filming.
hopefully soon we'll start on our projects. i can't wait to take some more photos On Location.
Kenya looks just like Kauai...