waterfall moshi

hash

fancy

flowers

king lion piki piki

amarula

make a loud noise

drama exercise 

ordinary day

Just another day's work in the field.

dancing elephants. why not?

why did the kuku cross the road?

possibly to escape my wretched driving.

master chef

i am an amazing cook. 

Paka Hii Mtoto Ameumia

I am very sad. I am fairly sure the baby kitties that I have been sneaking my lunch to have been hurt. There are normally 4--three that look just like my own cat, Chui, looked as a baby, and one black little runt. Two of the babies were suspiciously absent today. I wouldn't think much of it, but of the two that showed up to eat my lunch, one has clearly been burned. His whiskers have curled up like an old gilbert and sulivan mustache. I don't know about whiskers, but hair does not curl up like that without trauma. When I first looked I thought it was so funny, then I realized how pathetic it looks.

This is the mother and the hurt baby. She did not look like this yesterday when she leapt all over my fingers. I joke about teaching the kitties that white, blonde ladies will feed them. They do follow me like the pied piper. But today I watched a tanzanian man throw rocks at the babies and kick them, pretend to give them food and then throw a bottle of water at them. :(

:(

:(

poor baby paka.

Bored Maasai

Lake Ambussel

This weekend we camped at Lake Ambussel. The "lake" is about ten miles across and only has water during the rainy season. Walking on the lake bed is a bizarre experience--almost the feeling of trecking across sand. The water has been gone for several months now, I believe, leaving the mud to dry to a crunchy dust that sinks as you step.

A5

serious business is happening.

Hash

yet another countdown

does anyone really blog anymore? what once were "blogs" are now freelance articles for the Huffington Post, pithy comments vomited on twitter, or hasty photoshopped gifs on tumblr.

i imagine, truthfully, that this is yet an over ambitious attempt to begin fresh at the start of a journey.

and that it is. another, only slightly less surprising, trip across the pond.  in, what?, 10 days i will board another transatlantic flight, running away from the present to the murky shores of africa. my old age has worn away the more romantic notions of such a trip. it's not so much that i see it for what it will be, but that i have few illusions of what it could be. that being said, i have set my sights much higher than they should be.

in the most simplistic terms, i will be forming a theatre company and attempting to study the process and then say some stuff about it. for someone who hasn't had a professional job in a year, this will be a bit of a miracle of good luck. but why the hell not? you gotta shake things up. make things come to you.

at least that's what i used to say.  i'm a bit out of practice, for too many reasons.

but now i have africa. the motherland. the heart of darkness. ok, maybe not all of that. but as Dinesen said:

"Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be." 

Shira and saying Kwaheri

planning the hash

wazungu in the mist...

freezing, but successful!

someone here is tasty...