Christianity for Real

In a couple of previous posts I mentioned about the Christian aspect of working at A Rocha, how they pray before meals, at the Monday morning meetings, and also hold bible studies. At first I was feeling a bit uncomfortable about all the praying, but I've come to enjoy it, although I have not yet decided to participate in saying prayers. I think that the Christianity practiced by the people in charge here at Mwamba is different from the Christianity I learned about growing up. I went to Sunday school at a Presbyterian church growing up and went through Confirmation in the ninth grade. Even though at that time I didn't have any solid beliefs in God or Jesus, mainly because I didn't understand, I was still made to say the prayer in front of the church community and vow my life to Christ, or whatever it was I actually did. Part of the problem, as I see it, was that confirmation class was all about memorizing books of the bible, rehearsing specific prayers, and filing away other useless information, when we should have been talking about and trying to understand faith and what Christianity is really about, and using the Bible as our foundation.

Last night we watched a video at Colin's house called "Fruitcake and Ice cream", and had a really long discussion afterward, mostly lead by probing questions about Christianity from yours truly. The video was basically a sermon by this guy named Louie Giglio (see more info here), who is really passionate and interesting to listen to--I only noticed myself drifting away twice, when it is normally more frequent. Louie read a verse from the Bible that holds one of the few basic tenets of Christianity, and it is so simple:

"God made him (Jesus) who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him (Jesus) we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21)

As human beings, we tend to complicate matters and want to explain things and know all the answers. This Bible verse basically says that God took Jesus' righteousness and gave it to us freely, and took our sins and placed them on Jesus when he was crucified; this is called Grace, and it is a gift. I asked Colin, how can this be true, how we can not have to do anything to have our sins relieved (because as a gift, Grace is freely given)? This is how we complicate things. It simply is true, but we do have to do one thing to be actually have our sins relieved, and that is to accept this gift of Grace from God. There is no requirement for doing good works, or for paying the Church, or for going to Church every Sunday, or for praying in a certain way, or believing certain things about Evolution or Creation. You simply have to accept this gift of Grace from God.

Now, there are a couple of other tenets that are required to get to this point and to make you a true Christian. First, you have to actually believe that Jesus is the Son of God. Jews and Muslims revere Jesus as a prophet, but not as the Son of God. Second, you have to believe that Jesus died for our sins and was miraculously resurrected. Then from there, you understand what the gift of Grace is and accept it from God to have your sins relieved. No more, no less. The Christians here at Mwamba say that once you get this, actually truly get it, your life will be changed for the better and you'll want to be a better person, because God is embracing you.

Certainly there are hundreds of questions about the details that we, as humans, want answers to. For instance, I want to know if a child dies before it is able to understand and accept the gift from God, can he get into heaven? Or if a person is never exposed to Christianity or the Bible, can she get into heaven? I want answers to these questions, but probably will never get them. Colin said to me that not having these answers should not prevent a person from accepting the gift of Grace from God and having faith that He can make everything right in the world when He so chooses.

Now, back to my original pondering on the problems with the church today. I simply feel that these basic tenets of Christianity are either not taught properly by churches, or they are not fully understood by church-goers, and probably both. There seems to be a lot of division among Christians, about what to believe and what not to believe and who is right or wrong. Is evolution real? Or is creation real? I don't believe they are mutually exclusive, and the Bible also does not show otherwise.

Further, I realize that humans do wrong and we sin, but some of that sin seems to come from people's faith. For instance, Christians sin against homosexuals because they believe the Bible states that homosexuality is wrong. I've read the Sodom and Gomorrah story (Genesis 19) and I don't understand how people can take from that and state that homosexuality is wrong in the eyes of God. Further, Jesus walked with wrong-doers and blessed and healed them, and it is stated that our gift is the poor and helpless. (Little children, let us stop just saying we love people; let us really love them, and show it by our actions. 1 John 3:18) I think Christians in general need to take a long, hard look at their beliefs and go back to what the Bible says, because we have simply strayed too far from the teachings of Jesus. As for myself, I intend to continue learning about Christianity, and I see myself embracing these concepts because I think they are good for the world. I have also been reading other books that are showing me why Christianity is actually different from all other religions, but maybe that should be left for another post.

Beautiful sunrise yesterday morning.

Beautiful flower on the Mwamba Nature Trail.

BioKen Snake Farm

Yesterday I visited the BioKen Snake Farm near Watamu. I went with Eva, a German volunteer, and two other guests from Germany. It was a really wonderful place, and our guide was exceedingly knowledgeable. He was able to fully understand and answer all of our questions, and he was also very pleasant. I learned a lot of interesting things about snakes. For example, some snakes digest their food with venom instead of saliva or other digestive juices. Some snakes can spit their venom up to 3 meters away (spitting cobras!). Boas are different from anacondas because one of them lays live young and the other lays eggs (can't remember which is which now...). I also held the species of snake that crawled into bed with me a couple weeks ago, and felt really badly that the one in my bed died because of me, since it is completely harmless.

This is the snake that was in my bed.

Eva really wanted to hold the python!

BioKen is really neat because it will go out on calls from people complaining about snakes and rescue the snake and often reimburse the person for whatever was lost. For instance, one farmer called in about a snake consuming one of his goats. When BioKen got there the goat was dead and mostly inside the snake, so they took the snake/goat to be released elsewhere and reimbursed the farmer for the goat. Really a neat system to encourage people not to kill snakes, which can be valuable for keeping down the rodent population, and thus disease transmission.

If anyone visits the Watamu or Malindi area, I would strongly encourage you to visit the snake farm. See more information here: http://www.bio-ken.com/

BioKen also has injured turtles, and they rear the eggs from the
turtles mating and then release the young into the wild.

One of the spitting cobras, all the white slop on the glass is venom.

We got to hold a lot of snakes!

Yellow-flapped chameleon, very cool. 

Brief Update

The most recent outing or event that I wrote specifically about was my trip to Marafa for Farming God's Way. That was on March 7, now it's March 24. I haven't done a whole lot of exciting things between then and now, but I have gotten out on a few little things. On the 10th, we went to Malindi for a crow count, which is where I got to see that nice new apartment building that is pictured in the previous post about the middle class. We also went to the Sabaki River Delta that night to count gulls and terns, but were unable to do the survey because it was too cloudy so the moon could not light up the area.

Attempting to count gulls and terns, but too cloudy.

I also never mentioned that I was house sitting for Colin while he was been away to South Africa to work a bit on his PhD. I got to take care of Bonga and Jongi, two obnoxious but sweet yappy dogs. So in the mornings I walked the beach between there and Mwamba (about 2.5 km), and most nights I walked back after dinner. It was good exercise and nice scenery since I've been mostly sitting at the computer doing data stuff all the time! The only annoyance was having to fend off beach boys and men dressed in Masai garb trying to sell bracelets or give you a tour. One weekend morning I walked south instead of to Mwamba to visit the rock pools that have really neat inter-tidal life like starfish, sea urchins, eels, and tiny brightly colored fish. Peter, a local beach boy, decided to show me around and find various wildlife to show me. He was very pleasant and I enjoyed his company, and he did not even ask for money (which I didn't have, anyways). He showed me a big starfish, and also got the eels to come out of hiding by tempting them with a crab on a stick. Only problem was that the next bunch of mornings I would walk to work, he'd be there and either want to chat or walk with me the whole way! So that is one reason I'm glad I don't have to walk to work in the morning, even though he was pleasant and not dangerous in any way, I tend to prefer no human contact before I have my breakfast!

Eel being tempted by a crab.

Big starfish.

A fun thing I've had the chance to do is help two of the Kenyan volunteers with their resumes. Neither of them had an electronic version, and neither of them (that I know of) had any written record of their jobs or the things they did at various jobs. So I was really glad to help them write down their work experience, and put it into a format that will hopefully allow them to get a job in the future, or apply to university. Even though a lot of Kenyans didn't grow up with computers like I did, I think that the culture is definitely changing to be more electronic (i.e., applying for jobs over e-mail). As far as I can tell, getting access to a computer is not too difficult if you have a bit a spare cash to spend at an internet cafe. Although sometimes I wonder if these two would even think to go to an internet cafe to update or send their resumes, because computers are not really on their radar like they are for me...

On the 15th I went with Stanley, the Environmental Ed coordinator, and Festus to the Nyari Primary School for a meeting with the nine Wildlife Club teachers, who also manage the ASSETS program for their schools. The meeting was pretty boring (it was mostly in Swahili), but the field trip after the meeting was fun. Nyari means "depression", and the spot we visited was really just that. The land had slid away and eroded from the top of the escarpment, and there were trees hanging on to the side of the cliff, likely to be swept away when the rains start in a couple weeks. At the bottom, there is a dry creek bed now, as wide and as tall as me, and I can imagine the water that rushes through there during the rains. The view of the forest beyond was also quite beautiful.

On the brink at Nyari.

Nyari Depression.

On the 17th, a bunch of us went across Mida Creek to a place called Manfridays, which is a little slice of paradise. Benjo wanted to do something fun to celebrate his last days in Kenya for a few months, and he was able to get us a deal to spend the day there. We took kayaks out to the coral reef and went snorkeling, swam in the pool, had the most delicious lunch and calamari I think I've ever eaten, and spent the afternoon relaxing poolside. It was a really restful and beautiful day.

Poolside at Manfriday's.

Beautiful view of Mida Creek from on of the guest rooms.

The kayaks we took out for snorkeling.

Lay of the land at Manfriday's.

On the 20th we did a bit of bird ringing here at Mwamba beach over night, we caught 13 birds. There was a group of students here from the Rift Valley Academy where Andrew also went to school. It's basically a school for international students near Nairobi and they teach in the US format for high school so that the students can attend college in the states. The group was really great, well-behaved, and they were very interested in what we were doing here.

During all the rest of my time when I was not doing fun things, I was working on Colin's bird ringing database. Fortunately, I finished entering the crucial data on March 13th, and now I get to do fun things with the data like pulling out averages/min/max on wing length, correlating some of the data, and possibly getting a small paper out of it. That is, if I can pull something together in the next two weeks I have left! Even if I don't though, I think it will really make Colin's life much easier having all his data entered, especially since he wants to use bunches of it for his PhD. I'm glad to have contributed in a meaningful way to the conservation of Kenyan birds.

Kenya's Middle Class

One of the first things that I remember Benjo saying to me when I got to Mwamba was that Kenya has a very strong and growing middle class; in other words, Kenya (mostly) is not the Africa seen on infomercials portraying starving children with bloated bellies. Especially in the Watamu area, with all the money coming in from tourism, you can see nice houses and shops, people are generally dressed very nicely, and there appears to be plenty of food to go around. It’s really good that there is a strong middle class in Kenya, because it means more people have disposable income, and more kids are getting to go all the way through high school. With more educated people, there are more opportunities for sustainable development in the country, and individuals have options for what to do with their life beyond simply surviving.

Brand new apartment buildings going up in
Malindi, the apartments themselves were
very nice.

Malindi, with new buildings going up all over.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of places use recycled materials in their buildings, such as recycled tin roofs (often rusty), or throw together materials to make walls, or use mud and poles in the traditional manner. Kenyans are very concerned with their personal appearance, but there is not too much interest in other aesthetics; I think it is simply not high on the priority list (unless tourists are involved). With a growing middle class, there will probably be a growing demand for increased “beauty”, which will mean new building materials instead of re-used ones. If this trend is similar in Africa in general, I wonder what sort of strain may be put on world resources for extracting new building materials, or for growing non-native species in-country for building purposes. I hope that Africans can learn about sustainable and responsible development and put it into practice, and learn from “first world” mistakes and problems. I understand that people's well-being and improved standard of living are of utmost importance, but I believe that there is enough knowledge and wealth in the world to have a high standard of living and environmental conservation.

A typical local restaurant in Kenya, not much for decor.

There is one thing I hope will change with a growing middle class and the desire for greater beauty in the world. Everywhere you look, pretty well no matter where you are, you can find trash blowing around, mostly plastic bags. I have even seen people drop trash on the ground. There is no garbage collection in Kenya, although there are some small companies starting up that are collecting recycling. With little interest in keeping a place pretty, who will pay to have their trash collected like we do in the US? And so far there is no government agency that provides trash collection. I think when people need to get rid of their trash that has built up they probably burn it, which can be dangerous depending on what is in the pile. If I had the money I would start a non-profit trash collection group, because trash really is ugly, but Kenya is really beautiful.

Farming God's Way

Last week on Wednesday I had the opportunity to take a trip past Marafa, to a place where A Rocha Kenya is working with local farmers. They are teaching the farmers, often through churches, about something called "Farming Gods Way." This method is supposed to be better for the environment, and the farmers we talked to were seeing that it actually produced a more robust and abundant crop than the traditional way of farming. What I could not understand was why these farmers were growing corn. Corn comes from America, requires lots of water and fertilizers (or very healthy soil) to do well, and can be very harmful to the soil if grown for too many seasons in a row. So, why corn?

Katana, who is 6'4" at least, with a really tall stalk of God's corn.
He said his was even taller at his own shamba.

I asked Raphael, who is the new national director for A Rocha Kenya, why these people were farming corn. He told me that the traditional lifestyle was actually hunting and gathering, but with a population increase, they were forced into farming. I can't fully believe this, because a population likely would not be able to grow very quickly in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle due to natural checks in place. It seems to me that first a change to farming would then require population increase because of the increased demand for agriculture. The one exception I can come up with is that there was a boom in the game population, or an overabundance of the gathered foods, allowing more children to survive to adulthood. If this boom ended, then those people may have sought a way to avoid starvation, and decided to try farming.

Another interesting thing is that the switch to farming in this area happened fairly recently, only about 50 or 60 years ago. So these people did not have a well-developed traditional agriculture or traditional crops that had been selected for over hundreds of years, such as corn was in the Americas. For this reason, I am certain that this group of people was willing to accept any help or advice about what to grow that the government would give them. And the Kenyan government decided to push corn, for reasons that I do not understand. Perhaps they saw corn as being very successful in the US so they decided it would do well here (common misconception: one solution will fit all similar problems). I think that corn is probably destroying the already fragile soil that is near Marafa; it is very dry there, and the wet (growing) season is only about three months, just long enough to get a crop off.

Anyhow, back to current day in Marafa, people seem to be doing fairly well with their corn crops, and this year was particularly successful, especially for the few farmers "farming God's way." Their sheds are full of corn, and they have extra money from selling the corn to spend on whatever they choose (hopefully good things!). The two farmers we talked to (and their families) were very, very excited about this new method, and want to pass it on to other farmers in the area.  They even explained how the Red Cross' method, which involves digging 2-foot holes in the ground, does very poorly compared with Farming God's Way.

One of the shambas we visited where Farming God's Way is used.

One of the new sheds being built to hold corn.

However, one thing that Raphael said about Farming God's Way struck me as being very odd. He said that A Rocha's business in speaking with these farmers and getting them to switch their farming methods is not about food security, but about conserving the environment. OK, A Rocha is about conserving and protecting the environment. But, what if Farming God's Way didn't work for producing enough food, or produced less and people no longer had disposable income to send their kids to school? Would A Rocha Kenya still push Farming God's Way? If these farmers understood that we don't care about their food security, would they still accept our new methods? Since, at the moment, Farming God's Way seems to be producing more food, maybe these questions will never arise. But once corn destroys the soil (and I expect that it will), what will the farmers do? Can Farming God's Way save the day? I think A Rocha Kenya has this one completely wrong, in that helping to protect the environment involves people every step of the way, and when you don't think about people, plans for the environment probably won't work. Research and adaptive co-management are crucial for understanding the impacts of Farming God's Way, and ensuring that the farmers and the families involved are completely involved in the implementation of the program.

These are the people who's families we need to be thinking about.

Language Barrier = Cultural Barrier

I remember my music teacher in middle school, Mrs. Mears, saying "What, am I speaking Swahili?!" when she would say something that us students didn't understand. Now I actually hear Swahili every day in Kenya. It's an odd thing though, because Swahili is not the native language of most Kenyans, but some other tribal language. Also, most of the people here speak English very well, and are often taught in English at school. For example, Ivy, the center manager's daughter, has not yet learned to speak Swahili, but knows English very well. The expectation that there is very little or know language barrier follows. Unfortunately for me, there is a solid language barrier, which has led to a cultural barrier.

The staff and other volunteers here at Mwamba speak Swahili with each other, because although they all know English, Swahili is their common language and the language they know best. This may be changing for the younger generation (like Ivy) but for the people I want to interact with, Swahili is the preferred language. While studying at the Natural Resources Institute for my Masters degree, I learned a lot about the imporance of language and culture. When a translation is made between a Native American language into English, much of the meaning is lost. Native Americans simply have a different worldview that imparts meaning into their language, meaning for which no words exist in English.

It is not necessary for me to learn Swahili in order to do things in Kenya, like buy groceries at the store or get from Mombasa to Malindi, but I am missing out on a lot of important interactions. The staff here at Mwamba always seem to be laughing about something, or joking with eachother, but I have no ability to understand what is so funny. And requiring a translation to understand the joke can remove some of the joy, in my opinion. I think that understanding the language is a big step in understanding the culture. I do want to learn Swahili, but so far my efforts have been lazy, and my learning slow. I can pick out a word here and there, and greet people (with some amount of hesitation), but getting to the point of understanding the joke could take years. And, one thing I have learned, is that Kenyans are always joking and pulling pranks on eachother.