With elections over the centre can quit politicking and get back to work. The women have started their first small business through the purchase of three portable solar products (D.Light: www.dlightdesign.com) that are being marketed to rid the world of the kerosene lantern. A few Stanford grads invented the product and they now sell them in Nairobi. The Olkiramatian women’s group has become the local distributor for Olkiramatian and Shompole. Paul first learned about the company online and made the connection between the Nairobi company and the women. The meeting went well and the women bought the entire stock that the guys brought down that day to sell to the community. I practiced my Swahili at the end of the meeting and said: Tutanunua moja kwanza – We’ll buy the first one. During one of our bursary household visits Albert whipped out the brochure and started marketing the product and I teased him that he might need to discuss being compensated by the women for all of these sales pitches.
The last few weeks of research have been great. Lions killed an aardvark apparently just for fun. Nothing was consumed, but we saw their tracks and the death grip on its neck. We helped ourselves to the corpse to try and catch one of the lions from the third, uncollared pride. We call them the lodge lions because they usually sit beneath the $700 per person per night lodge down in Shompole, who could blame them. But since the rains all the lions have been shifting north, including these, and we saw four female and three cubs on one of our scouting missions. Another scouting mission led us to spend the night in the truck when we tried to drive through Swamp Cross and became more familiar with the swamp part of its name. We drove through 5-foot tall grasses to get there in a stretch that was barren the year prior. The whole place is wild, people have moved away from the west side of the river and the animals are filling in the void. We were following the signal of Mwanzo, who has 4 cubs now, and rounded a salvadora bush just as a huge bull elephant was doing the same from the other side. We met in the middle and he nonchalantly maintained his course, which suggested to us that we should divert from ours. You can add two more elephant, how do you dos, to that and one group of buffalo. Buffalo sound surprisingly like lions. They make a low-pitched growl which means - I don’t know what, but before they emerged from the trees this is what we thought they were. Through night vision goggles we watched 15 of them graze near the aardvark and then group together and chased a hyena away that came to check out the bait. They moved off a bit and we played a tape of a buffalo calf that’s known to bring in lions – science – and it did bring in the lions, but it also brought back the buffalo. Coming to rescue a calf that they didn’t seem to have with them in the first place – aggressive animals. They stopped when we stopped and we stopped long enough to let them be on their way. The lions came next, but didn’t seem that interested in the aardvark either. We followed a bit, but the presence of the cubs seemed to make them weary of us. The older cub seemed used to cars – another reason they are probably the lodge lions – when the lionesses left the road to walk parallel, but in the covered bush, he ignored that obstacle ridden decision and stayed on the road while we trailed him by about 40 yards.
Building has halted a bit with material delays, but we’ve brought the tree count to 71. I also planted 90 acacia tortillis seeds, but I haven’t been so diligent about watering them. Google told me to soak the seeds in sulfuric acid though so I think they’re probably used to being patient.
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