Wednesday October 1, 2008

Today is the Muslim holiday celebrating the end of Ramadan. It is an interesting holiday because it is not planned in advance. They go on vigil for the full moon and the evening they see it they declare the next day a holiday. So you can predict the holiday to within a couple days but you never know precisely when it is going to be until the day before. (Note: my friend Brian in Jordan also recently blogged about this phenomena). The students said that Kenya is ~30% Muslim at lunch yesterday (which is lower than I thought) but most of the Muslim population lives in the north part of the country. My class has no Muslims[1] in it so the university administration decided that they were going to take advantage of having us here and stay open for us to hold the class. So any students that show up today will be giving up their holiday. This should be a true test of the value of our class. Anyway, traffic was eerily light this morning and it took nearly 1/3rd of the time it usually take for us to cover the couple miles between the hotel and the university.

We have also seen some grand Hindu temples in town, which surprised me. I guess there was a huge influx of South Asian labor that immigrated to build the railroad. They formed a permanent community and eventually rose to positions of ownership and economic power. It seems that Indians here are regarded as an economically privileged and powerful class. When the African independence movement began, however, they did not tend to support it even though it was mirroring a similar movement in their own country. So there was some latent animosity towards the South Asians (e.g. that they did not care about Africa, just the profits it could provide). Apparently there was wide spread, post colonial, violence against South Asians in other countries. But it never escalated to that in Kenya and relations seem to be mostly amiable now.

Matt felt remarkably better today. He said the cypro was like a magic pill. Apparently it was so bad that he was concerned about malaria. But he is up for teaching today so it will be another light day for me (since I concentrated my material yesterday). This week it is going to work out that Monday and Wednesday are going to be mostly Matthew (with me helping on workshops) and Tuesday and Thursday will be mostly me. This isn’t ideal. It works out better to split the day so one of us is in charge of the morning material and the other is in charge of the evening material[2], but it is totally doable for a few days.

Every student showed up today. That is gratifying because it means that they are finding the class to be of enough personal value that they would give up a holiday to come to another day of it. We even got a new student today (on the next to last day of a 2 week class)[3]. In the final count we ended up with ~22 students. Of them 5 are women and 8 are professors. I talked with one hydrology professor today who actually teaches in a university outside of Nairobi and has been commuting to take the class. He did his Masters and PhD in Japan. Those professors who have PhD’s (only about half of them do) mostly did their studies in Europe. One of the Masters students in my class has applied for a PhD program in Germany. While Matt lectured for most of the morning, I continued to work on the Kenyan data. Most of their data runs from ’57 to ’84 but some of it goes back as far as ’27. All told I processed about 45 data sets. It was a pretty monumental task, but their data is in modeling shape[4] now.

We decided to go out to dinner for our last night in Kenya. We had received several recommendations for a place called ‘The Carnivore.’ It did not disappoint. We were given smoking hot iron plates and then men walked around with swords skewered through various slabs of meat. They planted the tip of the sword on our plates and used a huge knife to lop a piece off for us. There was beef, pork, lamb, chicken, turkey,[5] gizzards, liver, two kinds of ribs, sausage and, of course, crocodile. Apparently they used to be famous for serving game, but that became unpopular and the started dealing only in domesticated animals…which makes one wonder about the crocodile farm out there some where.

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[1] I have met a couple Christians who were excited to see the MA Theology line on my bio. Others (particularly professors) described themselves as ethnically Christian but actually ‘nothing’ or ‘unaffiliated’ at lunch yesterday. Still others said (with signature Kenyan joviality) they were Christian on Christian holidays and Muslim on Muslim holidays.
[2] A full day of lecturing can be exhausting.
[3] I talked to him today and he expressed regret for traveling during the class. He said is seemed like the other students had learned many valuable things.
[4] Modeling shape is a funny phrase. It reminds me of the time that Amanda told an acquaintance that her husband models professionally.
[5] This is the easiest to get a mental picture of. Imageine a whole thanksgiving turkey skewered on a sword planted on your plate and carved practically in your lap.