Site 1: Nairobi (Jan 12th – 16th)

Written by:
Kirsten Aleksejev & David Barrington Marquis
(Program Staff)

After a week of orientation in Montreal, everyone was quite ready to officially embark on the 2015 Canadian Field Studies in Africa Program. On Saturday January 10th, after months of preparation, we finally took to the air, heading eastwards into the night. After an astonishingly fast red-eye across the Atlantic complete with breakfast in Paris and a stunning sunset over the Nile as we flew south, we stepped into the Nairobi night less than 24 hours later. Needless to say that we were full of excitement and aspirations as to what experiences the following few months would bring. We were welcomed at the airport by our local manager and safari extraordinaire, Mukhtar, whose vehicles carried us to our accommodations in Nairobi, a research facility called ICIPE – the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology. A late meal and short de-briefing later, all were headed to bed, with a busy first week looming over the horizon.

Nairobi is a city of contrasts. As the economic powerhouse of East Africa, it boasts the third largest United Nations compound after New York and Geneva, and is the home of both the UN Development Program (UNDP) and Environment Program (UNEP). With a population of almost 2 million people, a staggering 65% of Nairobi’s inhabitants live in informal settlements or slums without any form of legal land tenure. Evidently, there is a ripe mix of challenges and opportunities here, which our enthusiastic students were promptly cast into.

Over the course of our weeklong stay, we took advantage of our strategic location to visit several more institutions around the city. First and foremost, before anything seriously academic could be broached, our need for viewing baby animals was met by the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage, where a couple dozen young orphaned elephants gallivanted around in a puddle of mud to the beat of our camera shutters excitedly clicking away. Later that day in the savanna grasslands of the Nairobi National Park, we got our first taste of the continent’s iconic fauna. A myriad of gazelles and antelope, herds of buffalo, giraffe, and the occasional rhino were outlined against the Nairobi skyline. This tableau showed an interesting juxtaposition, and a stark reminder of our species’ omnipresence in even the rolling green hills of East Africa.

Baby elephants frolicking in the mud at the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage

Not all visits were so biologically-themed: we were received at the Canadian High Commission in Kenya, where the High Commissioner himself spoke to us on Canada’s diplomatic role and economic interests in the region. An afternoon was spent in the Nairobi National Museum’s collection, a morning devoted to lectures at the International Center for Agroforestry, and finally a field trip to the Community Cooker, a small local NGO attempting to implement a clean, safe, and efficient garbage-burning machine that serves as a stove and oven for an entire community.

Whilst thoroughly educational and essential to settling in to our new field-study lifestyle, after a week in Nairobi’s urban jungle we departed into the countryside. Following a vaguely southwesterly bearing, we crossed the Ngong Hills and descended into the Rift Valley, en route to experience the grit and glory of true rural Africa.

A Masai giraffe with the Nairobi skyline visible on the horizon.