So over a month has come and gone and we are well and truly immersed in the life at Mwamba Field Study Centre, A Rocha Kenya (ARK). Time and space (and perhaps your attention span) will limit my ability to present a full picture of all we have experienced; all the various surprises, challenges and adventures that come from living in Africa, but I will aim to give you at least a taste.
ARK picked a beautiful location for their field study centre when they got set up here about 9 years ago. They can boast of being:
- 50 m from the Indian Ocean,
- neighbours to a turtle hospital (who regularly inform us when turtles are hatching on the beach or being re-released into the ocean after being caught in fishing nets).
And a short drive from:
- East Africa’s largest collection of snakes (and happily their anti-venom)
- Arabuko-Sokoke forest, home to some rare, endemic species including Africa’s smallest owl – the Arabuko-Sokoke Scops Owl (just 15cm tall), and
- Mangrove habitats home to storks, spoonbills, flamingos, sacred ibis’ and hippos
And all this set amongst a curious combination of upmarket tourist resorts and basic villages lacking the luxury of power and running water.
The people to be found here at the centre include tourists coming to the coast on holiday, centre staff involved in housekeeping, cooking and maintenance, program staff to run the education, research and community projects and volunteers like us.
Currently, ARK employs about 8 program staff, 5 centre staff, 2 young local people gaining work experience and 5 of us international volunteers staying from 3 – 6 months.
It hasn’t taken long for Lynton and me to find a myriad of projects we could get involved in. Lynton has been kept busy fixing computers, inputting research data, assisting in bird surveys (of the counting, catching and ringing varieties), and recently has been ‘promoted’ to the role of Director’s PA. Colin Jackson, the director here, has the enthusiasm, energy and workload of about 5 average people combined and Lynton has the memory and organisational skills needed to help keep that all together most of the time, so they make a good team.
I began work here by taking over a project that a previous volunteer started, creating some pictures of local wildlife to be made into a colouring book for educational purposes and perhaps to be sold in international A Rocha gift shops. Then a couple of weeks ago the Environmental Education Officer finished working here after 10 years at the job. Naturally, this has left a big hole in the team and one of my jobs has been, together with Colin’s wife Roni, to help fill that role while a replacement is being sought.
The first big project has been to help organise a teacher’s workshop to be held here in a few weeks, the purpose of which is to create an educational manual to be used in schools to promote conservation of local marine areas. Perhaps without this experience I would not fully come to appreciate how different everything is here. My assumptions are constantly being challenged, usually resulting in me realising things are more complicated than I expect. That could be
- sending an email (internet has been down for 3 weeks due to 700 metres of wire from down the road being stolen to sell for scrap. Estimated time to fix it is unknown. Thankfully slow internet is available at a nearby hotel.),
- sending an invitation letter; make sure all relevant partners and funders are appropriately mentioned to avoid offence, find someone to drive to all the different schools and deliver the letters (local postal system is too unreliable), text all the recipients of the letters to ensure it has been given to them, once vetted by the principal.
- or planning materials for the manual; what activities do you suggest to teachers, bearing in mind that there may be no photocopier, the only materials may be a chalkboard and notebooks, and the class may have 100 students ranging from say 8 yrs old to 20?
The opportunity in all of this is to learn humility when preconceived notions don’t apply here, patience when technology and infrastructure operate very differently (or don’t operate, as the case may be), and creativity to still achieve the goals, despite the aforementioned challenges. Our goal in spending 6 months volunteering here was to get to know a culture very different from our own, at a deeper level than one can gain passing through as a tourist. We are grateful (most of the time) to be experiencing just that.
A helpful aspect of getting to know the local people and their culture has been an attempt to learn some Swahili. Happily the pronunciation and grammar is fairly simple and there are plenty of patient people here to help us learn. Although most of the people here have a good understanding of English and can understand us most of the time, to each other, Swahili (or their mother tongue Giriama) is spoken. Being the nosy types we are, we like to know what everyone’s talking about, so it’s been fun to pick up some common phrases and vocab and try and follow along to what people are saying, as well as hesitantly trying to speak a few sentences ourselves. Lynton’s favourite sentence is still ‘Mimi ni kasa’ (‘I am a turtle’), complete with turtle-like actions.
Another bonus of learning Swahili is being able to dispel the common assumption around town that we are Italian. There is a sizeable Italian expat community here, and plenty of Italian tourists too, such that some of the Kenyans have learned to speak Italian. Children on the street will greet us with ‘Ciao!’ and a hopeful ‘Caramella?’ or ‘Pepperminto?’ Unfortunately, the Italians have not always earned for themselves a great reputation around here, so we are not particularly keen to be ‘ciao’d’.
We were grateful to arrive here 3 weeks before a Canadian couple, Ted and Mary, headed back home. It was great to hear the Canadian accent again, to head on safari with them for a night and day, and to get their help in getting orientated in the local scene. The striking resemblance that Ted and Lynton shared did make it very confusing for everyone here though, even their wives were known to mix them up. And when walking down the streets of Watamu, shopkeepers came out of their kiosk and yelled out to them, “You’re twins eh!” and no amount of denying it could change their mind.
And with that, I bid you all farewell and kwaheri till next time.
