Kenya Reflections (1)

Yesterday I had the privelege of being able to spend the day with an amazing friend, one of my 2010 cohort of volunteers to Kenya and someone who I'd not seen for over 18months. Originally from Germany she's been over in the UK on an Erasmus study exchange for 6 months. Despite being only a few hundred miles apart since she arrived in January, life has got in the way of us catching up in person. (I am most to blame as I've been even more like a hermit than usual lately).

But anyway, we were able to talk about what's been going on since we left the country that had been home for 12 months (we even flew home on the same day/different planes on 29th Dec 2010). Friends and family quickly tire of kenya stories and photos of ragged but smiling children they can't tell the difference between,

only people who were there/been through similar experiences can really understand our need to talk about it, a lot. It's getting on for 8 months since I returned to the UK for the 2nd time and I certainly havent taken the time to process the year and a half of my life spent there. 


Today Kenya rose up in my mind, reverse culture shock is a crafty experience, I never know when it might strike or how I might get out of it. So this time I grabbed hold of it, to begin with realising just how much I still miss my life there and then drifting on to thinking how much I learnt/how drastically I've changed (or not) since this time 3 years ago when I was preparing to graduate from university.
If you'll bear with me I'd like to try and explore that a little bit here through a series of posts on the theme of "What Kenya taught me about life..."

- I say series because while pondering the subject I scribbled down a few things and the page ended up looking like this on both sides... -






(Pictures are a mixture of my own and google sourced, thanks to everyone involved!)
Kenya as a country taught me...
about vastness... 
until I stood on the edge of the savannah or on the precipice at the top of the Great Rift Valley I couldn't possibly grasp just how small I really am.

With the immense landscape stretching on way past the horizon and a sky so vast yet so full of stars I learnt that even though right now in this moment I might be struggling with a whole lot of things that are going on, there is a whole world out there, going on regardless... might seem strange but to recognise that put some perspective on things.

about the diversity of ecology and the natural world...
Kenya has everything,
From the jagged, snow topped peak of Mt Kenya,

To the ancient forest at Kakamega,

White sandy beaches on the Indian Ocean,

Perfect habitat for hippos at Lake Victoria,

Savannah teeming with wildlife at the Maasai Mara and other national parks,

The harsh desert landscape of the North East,

and the lush green tea fields where I lived in Kiptere.

If so much can be contained in just one country, how much natural diversity is out there in the world waiting to be explored and also to be respected.
When you get caught in a tropical thunderstorm or walk for hours with the desert communities just to find water...you learn just how important the natural world is for our survival.

In the next post I'll look at what I learnt from the people and culture of Kenya...