The Cradle of Humanity

I've decided I'll begin posting daily happenings, then go back to review the weeks I missed.

Yesterday, we visited the National Museum of Kenya. It's about a fifty minute walk from our apartment, but we stopped for coffee at Sarit Centre on the way.

When we got there, we stopped for lunch at a lovely cafe, where I had coconut carrot ginger soup. The grounds of the museum are absolutely beautiful. We didn't get a chance to visit the garden, but I want to go again to see it.

(After the above experiment in photo uploading, which took absolutely forever, I think I'll try linking to blogspot or flickr for the rest.)
After visiting the Cairo Museum last summer, which made you want to cry it was in such disrepair, with some of the most important artifacts in human history unlabelled and unprotected, the National Museum of Kenya is delightfully well kempt.

The museum was divided into many sections, about tribal cultures, the environment, migration, politics, etc. However, the museum is famous for the most amazing section, the most important collection of early human fossils in the world, all found in Kenya, proving man's evolution from apes. Some were discovered by the Leakey's. It included the famous Turkana boy, the most complete early human skeleton ever found.

There are also a lot of disturbing preserved and stuffed animals, including an endless room of stuffed dead birds. That was especially disgusting: thousands of little dead things all collected in a single room.


Last night we went out to Gypsy's, the closest thing you get to a gay-friendly venue in Kenya. Lots of expats. We met up with Madison's two coworkers from Lea Toto, an approximately thirty-year-old couple from Spain, in Kenya for about 3 months. Lea Toto provides outreach services to abandoned and orphaned HIV+ children in Nairobi.

http://www.nyumbani.org/lea_need.htm

We enjoyed chatting with them for quite some time. We'd been talking pleasantly for about an hour when the man shared a disturbing experience they'd had about an hour before on their way to Gypsy's.

Right around the corner, he'd seen a man lying in the road. At first he thought the man must be drunk or crazy, but he went up to him and touched him and he was cold. It was clear he was very ill and dying. People around him said to leave the man. He told them someone should call an ambulance. They responded that the man was shot by the police.
He'd assumed the wetness on the man was water, but it had probably been blood. He went and talked to the guards at gypsy's, saying they should call an ambulance. They said the man was a thief, so the police shot him.

We were told at orientation to just let it go and let the person have our purse or wallet or necklace if it was grabbed from us. Most thieves aren't violent and have nothing again you, they just want the money. On the other hand, if you yell 'Thief!,' people may swarm and kill the person in a phenomenon called 'mob justice...' or, as I found last night, the police may kill him.

This was just about the most disturbing second-hand account I've heard so far in Nairobi. I've felt and feel safe here, but I'm constantly reminded, this is how the rest of the world, the majority of the world, lives. In they're daily lives, they're not safe. My experience here may be challenging at times, but it's nothing in comparison to what they are born into.