Tuesday September 23, 2008

First a couple explanatory notes from yesterday. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Okapi because it was my favorite animal throughout elementary school and I read every encyclopedia and book I could find that mentioned it. I think I mainly liked having a favorite animal that was all my own (e.g. rather than being one of seven kids in my 2nd grade class who wanted to write their report on wolves) and the arrogance of having a favorite animal most adults had never heard of. But I was obsessed.

Second I am really interested in hominid fossils because of their theological implications. I have no problem with most of the evolutionary narrative from a Francis Collins “BioLogos” sort of theologically superintended mechanism perspective. But I find the early human stuff tricky[1] and, therefore fascinating. Somewhere early on I became confident that my faith could bear the most rigorous scrutiny and began pressing into doubts rather than fleeing them. So I find the early hominids really interesting.

Today was our first day with students. We left for the University at 7:45 to get set up for an 8:30 start. At 8:30 we had 0 students. By 9 we had 8. At 9:30 we had 12 and got started. A few more trickled in as the day went on. This surprised no one including me.

The students are from 3 different organizations. About half of them are university students or professors (about equal representation of graduate students and professors/lecturers) from the departments of Geology, Meteorology, Geography and Civil Engineering. Most of the rest of the students are government engineers and hydrologists from the ministry of water and irrigation. Finally, there are two engineers from Somalia. Somalia and Yemen apparently had interest in participating in the program and but have been deemed too dangerous (which surprises me for a Navy program). So two Somali engineers came to Kenya for the class.

Today was full. 3 lectures and a workshop. I was responsible for the second lecture and the workshop at the end of the day. My first lecture went pretty well. I had their attention for most of it. Then at 11 we took a ‘tea’ break. This was a very pleasant surprise as we were each provided with a somosa and a doughnut. This was probably the best somosa I have ever had and the fried dough was not bad either. Since I only had a snack for breakfast it was very welcome. I think this will solve my breakfast dilemma.

I talked with the Somali engineer during break. Apparently he is Kenyan and lives in Nairobi. The Kenyans apparently take at least some of the management responsibilities for water in Somalia but he was saying that he often will not go for months at a time due to security concerns. We talked about a flooding problem on the Ethiopian border where all of the water comes from Ethiopia but the issues are in Somalia, disincentivizing the Ethiopians from mitigation. International water is always so much more complex. He was very excited about an algorithm I had lectured about that he expected would help with his analysis.

The students’ English was great and most of them picked up the model surprisingly quickly. A couple of them finished the workshop in an hour and all of them finished by the end of the day. They seem mostly very eager, particularly the professors who are already talking to us about projects they want to do. A couple of the students are going to bring data in so we can build some models of Kenyan watersheds next week. The applications they are interested in are extremely interesting and practical. It should be a very good class.

I crashed for an hour and a half when we got home at 5. The jet lag is catching up with me. Then I went down to the bar and had some dinner and a local beer while I prepared lectures for tomorrow. The local beer is called ‘Tusker.’ It was very good and I found the label entertaining and a little dark:

“Tusker lager has been brewed in East Africa since 1922. Named after the elephant that killed one of the brewers founders, Tuskers claims that the special heritage of being one of the first beers in East Africa.”

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[1] One of the problems is with my dualist philosophy of mind. If God used progressive evolution to create humans, at what point did he give them a soul. Or if he used a Genesis type special creation for humans (say, a historical Adam, the position I prefer exegetically) was it post Australopithecus. Was Adam the first homo-erectus? Or were these migrating tool makers still animals in the sense that chimps are intelligent, sentient, communal tool makers that share 97% of human genetics but do not bear the ‘image of God.’ Since Adam was a Mesopotamian it would seem that he was later than homo-erectus (who was the first to leave Africa 2.8 my ago, but spread very quickly). And hovering over the whole question is the issue of why does God seem to want to ‘warm up’ with bipedal, hominid evolution before the special creation of humans. I think it the answer relates to the fact that when we talk about God as creator we think of him as an engineer, building a functional system, rather than an artist, creating beauty and sublime complexity. I don’t loose sleep over this, but it is a fun puzzle to tackle.