Nairobi

Settled into Nairobi easily. No matter where you are or, even, who is doing the greeting, being met at the airport just feels good. Here, a driver named George, just outside customs, held a printed sign for "Sarah and Armand Perry." There's a first for everything. One police checkpoint later -- looking for "thugs," George told us -- and with the sound of a few gunshots ringing as the guard opened the gate to Ben's apartment, we were done traveling for the day. Several samosas and a beer later we began to sleep our way into Nairobi time.

The next three days mixed work with exploring. On Sunday, we had a very Western and cheap breakfast at Java coffeehouse in the YaYa Centre near Ben's apartment. Afterwards, we explored a traveling Maasai market, made much easier than it should have been as 90% of the vendors were ensconced in a monthly meeting a hundred feet away. Items ranged from woodworking of native animals and oil on canvas paintings of Maasai to sandals made of used tires. An afternoon orientation included the local Kenyan resident, Wairimu, a tall, thin, impeccably postured Nairobian who speaks an especially gracious form of King's English. She is also going to Kisii for the first time and is leaving family, a boyfriend, and her second year resident class to do so. After the orientation we spent the afternoon at the Arboretum, which borders the State House (read: White House), where a dirt trail wound through beautiful and gigantic trees and dozens of gray-brown monkeys with bright blue balls played endlessly in the branches above.

Monday, Sarah had meetings with the local residents and staff, went on rounds and explored the main hospital in Nairobi. I took a matatu into town, cut through the University of Nairobi's campus, and headed to the National Museum. The campus felt like any other, with students filling a large, grassy quad. Two of the larger buildings were named "American" and "Ghandi." The bookstore, also named after Ghandi, featured a life-sized, bronzed statute of the man in the entryway. I headed for the law section and found mostly UK-based materials, although there were a few books on American criminal justice and a handful of texts on corruption in Kenya and the committee to develop a new constitution. I struggled to get an overview of Kenya's legal structure and didn't spot the familiar case-law based books I am so used to in the U.S..

Nairobi was hectic and dusty and congested; the buildings fewer and less modern than I expected; the markets focused more on plastic than local produce. The museum was a cool respite to all that noise as I wandered from exhibits displaying local artifacts to an impressively long room filled with nothing but taxidermied birds. The archeological exhibits were unquestionably the prize, though, with skulls and a few nearly complete skeletons of early hominids. Every piece in the room was found within Kenya's borders, including a 1.5 million year old skeleton of "Turkana Boy." The exhibits brought home Kenya's unique geographic position as the country in which man literally first stood upright and provided some much-needed context for the travels ahead.