This entry is the first in a series covering GNU/Linux, an Operating System consisting of the Linux Kernel and applications from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community, with an emphasis on its connections to the developing world.  These articles assume at least a moderate understanding of the Linux and FOSS communities.  For more information regarding these, I would direct interested parties to Linux.org as well as the Free Software Foundation and finally, for the truly interested, the GNU Manifesto. With all of this knowledge now in hand, I hope you enjoy the series.

Many an article has been written regarding how, “Linux,” is not ready for the big time.  It seems every year, and with every new iteration of a major distribution such as Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora, yet another computer pundit decides to come out and emphasize why Linux is not ready to even attempt at replacing Windows as the dominant Operating System for home computer use.  I am going to continue in this trend, and I won’t even try to sell my reasons as different, or more profound from these other articles.  Instead, I am hoping the article is simply able to stand under its own weight as well as provide groundwork for future articles in this series.

Sound

To begin, let us take a look at some of the more annoying technical reasons that prevent Linux from becoming Big Time.  The first and foremost technical issues preventing primacy are two: lack of a unified sound system and lack of a standard Graphical User Interface toolkit or API.  Let us take sound first.  We all know that when a problem arises in a system, growing the system size in an attempt to fix the problem will only add to system complexity.  This has been the result of the Linux sound subsystem.  Problems with existing sound systems such as ALSA lead to forks in projects, or completely different projects to begin with such as OSS and PulseAudio.

However, there is a lack of control over which system is dominant, and it seems each layer of the software stack is able to change sound system preferences, adding significantly to troubleshooting time.  If my sound is not working in an application, I must first check the system’s sound preferences to see which subsystem my OS is using, then confirm that my application and all intermediary applications (such as a mixer) are also using the same system.  This creates far too many points of failure for the common user, especially when sound is such a critical selling point in these days of Media PCs, MP3s and playlists.

User Interface API

The duplication of functionality in sound systems is also apparent in GUI APIs.  With Windows, there is a dominant GUI API in the form of Win32.  On Mac, there is a strong programmer emphasis to use the Cocoa Application Framework.  However, with Linux, which API do you use?  If you are a GNOME developer, it’s GTK.  If you are a KDE developer, it’s Qt.  But what if you are like me and you jump around from platform to platform (including to Windows and Mac)?  Tk? wxWidgets?  These offer native look and feel, but they do not offer the same access to API layers as programming for GNOME or KDE specifically.

Computer users nowadays expect a certain level of sameness from application to application, especially with refinements in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) best practices, and a unified User Experience (UX) API makes such sameness achievable with minimal pain inflicted upon the developer.  It also makes teaching applications much easier when all application development follows some form of guideline for their HCI, guidelines which are provided by GNOME an KDE , but of which there is again, no uniform agreement within the Linux Community as a whole.

User Interface Experience

Of course, GUI problems are only an issue if one is using the GUI to begin with.  In the Linux community there is still a prevalent attitude that every computer user should have, at least to some degree, a willingness to open a Command Line Interface (CLI) and type away at their computer.  This will not fly with an expanded userbase.  GUI and CLI are completely different types of interaction.  A CLI session requires an extremely large amount of recall memory, knowing exactly which, “magic words,” (i.e. commands, parameters and syntax) will create the desired effect.  Knowing these words is also a willingness to devote part of one’s memory to remembering them as is.  There are manuals, but needing to always refer to a manual removes from the experience and creates a hurdle for many users.

GUIs on the other hand provide the user with clues and feedback to help aid their memory.  You do not need to always remember which switch or button does what because many times they are labeled according to the action.  Menus use language that also aids in narrowing down possibilities to find what you want.  Instead of spending time remembering the magic words for each and every application you will ever need to use, GUI applications provide a much more comprehensive paradigm, where learning the paradigm once will translate into being able to understand and manipulate many more applications.  A far more practical use of memory.

Lack of Attention to Detail

Simply deciding to use a GUI over a CLI does not immediately prepare your application (or Operating System) for the Big Time however.  Once ported into a GUI, many Linux applications still fail in their lack of attention to detail.  For example, take the new Network Manager being used extensively in Ubuntu and Fedora.  It provides a very nice interface to ifconfig and iptables.  When I connect my USB 3G modem from one profile I am able to subsequently select, “Disconnect,” and it will sever the connection.  If I try to connect to a different profile, that disconnect function does not work.  I cannot think of a logical reason why this would be the case.  Network Manager only handles one modem connection, and in fact is only handling one connection period.  Should the disconnect not sever that one existing connection?  This is just but one example where expected behavior is not met, which would cause an average user to cry bloody murder, call the application stupid and move back to another operating system completely.

The lack of attention to detail also comes into play when Linux GUI applications fail.  When a Windows application fails, it tends to seize the whole system and require a complete reboot.  Users are accustomed to this, and usually know not to repeat the action that caused the seize (or at least some do…).  When a Mac application fails, many times it will simply close the window, claim that the application has performed unexpectedly and been closed, or ask if you want to force quit.  An upgrade from the Windows alternative, as it usually does not require a complete reboot, simply a restart of the specific application.

Linux applications have demonstrated, at least in some cases, a level even better than Mac (which in my opinion is a more graceful crash than Windows).  Linux applications, at least the GNOME and cross-platform apps I have used, when encountering an application-wide issue, will freeze a bit (oftentimes locking up the entire windowing system) but then resume operation, provide a crash report in some external window (or pop up a terminal), and continue on their merry way.  This action, though from a performance standpoint is very specific and does not crash an entire system, or even the app itself, is too much for the average user.

Crash reports can be scary, including scary messages, scary memory addresses, and scary words, which are often some obscure API class name or function call and are completely unhelpful in resolving the problem.  Popping up windows also confuses users, who may not be aware that that single warning frame has grabbed focus (even though it popped up behind the full-screened application).  Users are not accustomed to applications telling them what is wrong, and telling them what is wrong in computer-speak only is not a way to educate users as to their mistakes.  Until developers create more graceful and informative crash/error reports and dialogs, maybe it is better to just crash the app completely in a Mac-style way.

File Formats

Crashing and user experience are all about making the user comfortable in the environment out of the box, because that is the expectation of users these days.  As developers, we all know that out-of-the-box experience is not only a combination of application functionality, but also of the ability to manipulate all types of data that user may throw at it and right now Linux does not handle the most important formats of all: MP3s and DVD video.  Of course there are very legitimate reasons for this from an FOSS-philosophy standpoint, but new users will not care about this.

This is not to say they shouldn’t however.  Instead of simply not allowing the formats, if there is a true belief in FOSS-mentality amongst all users of Linux and FOSS, then there should be transition tools to help migrate users into new formats.  Services should be set up so that for inexpensive costs, entire music collections can legally be migrated to .ogg or .flac.  Movements should be made to somehow secure legal rights to the DVD video codecs so that users can play their favorite formats.  Users should be educated in which music-playing hardware can support FOSS multimedia codecs. Yet this does not happen, and instead of people condoling them, they offer obnoxious workarounds or sometimes even simple, “Deal with it,” atitudes.

The Community

Yet all of these small, nit-picky, programmatic issues regarding the actual architecture of Linux and many FOSS projects are simply the user-level indicators of much larger community trends, which when the stereotypes are fulfilled, are single-handedly preventing Linux from making it to the Big Time. In fact some may ask, does the community really even want Linux to go Big Time?

Let’s attack the community where it lives: the Internet.  There exist very few common-user appropriate, “real space,” helpful institutions or companies that are willing to promote Linux.  The Linux community has always existed on the web, in forums and Usenet, ftp servers and mailing lists.  And though these are more common nowadays, the average computer user still does not make use of the Web in such as a fashion as Linux users have been doing for going on twenty years now.  Until Linux people can step out of their cyber-realms and into the physical world, people will continue to perceive Linux as something ethereal, existing only for the most wizardly of computer users in Cyberspace.

The community has also always developed amongst the elite computer users of the world: the system administrators, the, “basement hackers,” scientists and researchers.  It is because of this that many of the above problems exist in the first place.  Many of these groups are highly oriented towards speed, efficiency, and thus as a result, customization; mixing and matching parts like the mad scientists some of them are to create the perfect beast of a computer, highly optimized for specific tasks.  Who needs graceful crashing when you wrote the program in the first place and know exactly why it crashed.

Finally, there is the notion of the community to push out any code that is at least, “dog-foodable,” (term taken from the Chandler Team) and then get everyone in on development.  It also means that a Linux perspective of a finished application is different from many other applications.  I can probably count the number of applications (qualifier: GUI-based, common-user perception of application, i.e. not locate or gcc, etc.) on my desktop with a version > 1.0 on one hand.  And this is out of the dozens I use regularly.  This difference in perception actual creates many hurdles bringing over new users who expect that by the time they install an application, it will have a high degree of polish in everything it does.

The Other Issues

Of course, these larger issues do not even begin to cover all of the minor issues that need to be resolved before Linux hits the Big Time, including device support, an overall more responsive and fast windowing system, lack of big name applications like Microsoft Office (even Mac has Microsoft Office), or the Adobe Creative Suite. Not to mention lack of big name games. Not to mention a different, and also exposed, notion of libraries. Not to mention the plethora of branding applied to the community (distribution branding, flavor branding, etc). Not to mention the rapid-release cycle of new applications and updates. Not to mention the lack of a single entity to go complain to (people like to have targets). I am pretty sure I could continue this list. But I think we get the point.

Conclusion

It’s obvious that Linux is not ready for the Big Time. The reasons spelled out above, and by almost all of the articles on the web regarding this same topic, are fairly conclusive, even if only in an anecdotal sense. The common user is a picky creature, wanting certain things, expecting certain capabilities from their computer, and intolerant of that which does not provide per spec. Yet there exists a thriving Linux community, and somehow Linux is making its way into the public perspective.

In spite of all mentioned above, the real problem with Linux is not sound or GUIs or crash reports, but a much bigger one: we, as a Linux Community, don’t know where we want it to go. Many of us joined because we disliked Microsoft of Unix and wanted to beat them at their own game, which means taking over desktops and servers. We are at a time in the software’s life where we need to decide, what do we actually want? Do we still want simply to beat Microsoft and Unix? Stay tuned for Part Two of this series next week: Linux, Do We Want To Go Big Time?

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Personal encounters that lead to conversations are a bit different in Kenya compared to those in America, or at least those in America I have ever partaken in.

Oftentimes an American greeting includes an acknowledgement of the person relevant to the time of day, “Good morning,” followed by an inquisitive into the nature of the person, “How are you?” Other more common phrases might be, “Afternoon, how you doing?” and variations on this theme. They may also include slang, such as the popular, “What’s up?” which is not often preceded by temporal-based initiator, but instead stands on its on.  Also, there is usually an accompanied physical motion, such as a hug, or kiss or handshake. With greetings concluded, it is on to the meat of the conversation. 

Greetings are most probably the largest area of difference between the two cultures regarding conversation. Kenyans take their greetings much more seriously. First there is an acknowledgement, such as “Jambo,” or in my case, “Mambo,” which is then followed by several inquisitives. “Habari yako?” “Habari za leo?” “Habari za nyumba?” “Habari za jamaa?” These are the formal inquisitives, asking simply (and in literal translation), “Your news?” “News of the Day?” “News of the house?” “New of the family?” Not all are used every time, but it is very common to hear more than one in a single greeting and each one requires a response.

I personally will usually start my conversation with a “Mambo?” followed by a quick, “Habari yako?” “Habari za leo?” The correct response to all these habari’s is “nzuri,” which translates to good. Everything is good in Kenya, all the time. Sometimes you use a “Si mbaya,” which is, “not bad,” but you never, ever, ever say that something is bad, ever.

If you are greeting an elder, you start the conversation with, “shikamoo,” which translates to, “I hold your feet,” and the correct response is, “Marahaba,” with a laying of hands on your head. I rarely see this these days, but my compound also does not really have anyone who warrants a shikamoo.

None of this includes the slang you’ll get. For example, sometimes greetings just get out of hand, and you get strings of “Mambo? Poa! Vipi? Poa! Sema? Poa! Niaje? Nzuri! Salama! Ayeya. Habari yako?…” I kid you not, this is a series of hellos I went through just the other day.

There is also a culture of greeting the white person in English.  Kenyan children are drilled from infancy (I know, I’ve seen it happen), to ask white people, “How are you?”  The correct (and in some cases only) understood reponse is, “I am fine!” This is the case everywhere except for Malindi and parts surrounding, where the children will shout, “Ciao,” due to the high population of Italians and Italian tourists in the area.

Kenyans take their greetings very seriously.

The actual discussions though are a bit interesting. For the most part a discussion is comparable to an American discussion.  However, I notice a lot more repetition, both in Kiswahili or English, during conversations.  Also, like most other cultures, Kenyans are very quiet, especially when compared to us loud Americans.  Finally, there is the stereotypical talking around the problem, though you will notice with the youth and with many of the more urbanized Kenyans there is less and less of this.  Maybe in the more rural villages, but you will need to ask my colleagues.  Most of my conversations are very direct, on both sides of the discussion.

With farewells, some major differences arise again.  Americans will usually end a discussion quite explicitly, and should parties depart, there is usually some level of physical contact, whether it be a hug or a kiss or a handshake or whatnot, followed by a distinct, vocalized, farewell, whether it be, “goodbye,” or, “Nice day,” or, “I will see you later,” etc.

Kenyan casual farewells are different.  Sometimes a party will just leave after they are finished.  There is not as much a perceived necessity to agree upon departure.  If there are vocalized farewells, they are few.  Kiswahili has a translation for goodbye, it is “Kwaheri,” but rarely do Kenyans use it in my area.  Sometimes you will get a, “Good day!” in english, and in fact this is the most common I have noticed applied to me.  But still, many times conversations just end and people walk away.  No hugging or handshakes either.

Finally, it is very uncommon to hear “please,” and, “thank you,” (tafadhali and asante respectively) here.  You just don’t.  In fact, I was told by a culture instructor that it sometimes makes Kenyans feel uncomfortable to hear it so much from the Mzungu, because they are unaccustomed to it.  And it’s not that they either appreciate it or don’t appreciate it, it’s just not part of the culture.

There ya have it.  A very brief recount of some bits of Kenyan conversationalism.  Look forward to other posts this week potentially regarding the Kenyan educatuion system and why Linux just isn’t ready for the Big Time yet.

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Do Kenyans celebrate Halloween?  For the most part, no.  I did see some halloween party tips in a recent issue of The Daily Nation, but I think there are probably few enough Kenyans who know and actively, “celebrate,” the holiday to be considered a statistical anomally against the entire population.  However, this does not stop a bunch of crafty peace corps volunteers from trying as hard as possible to host a party.  Besides, we all know that technically halloween parties only need three things to survive and be considered halloween parties: costumes, pumpkins and candy (I bet you thought I was going to say some other things…).

The party was going to be at my house ever since our last get together, which was a going away party for one of the pre-evac volunteers who was part of this final pre-evac COSing group, finished and we could start thinking about the next.  If those words and acronyms confuse you, I am simply referring to the group of volutneers who were here before the evacuation of the program in 2008, and decided to rejoin the program later.  COS simply referes to Close Of Service, which is the status you get after attending your official COS conference a few weeks before your actual official COS date. For example, my COS date is currently set for something like the 9th of January, 2011.  This means I will most like have a COS conference at the end of November or early December 2010 depending on the whim of my Country Director and training staff.

All of the party plans however were throw into haywire after my little spinal-snafu.  Nobody knew what would happen, and I kept communication to a minimum because some volunteers have limited access to email and I did not want to cause even more confusion by saying the party was on, then off, then on, then off due to the unpredictability of my schedule.  When I finally knew it was on, I gave everyone the go ahead, and rushed home to have Friday and Saturday morning to plan.

I would like to thank Paul for introducing me to the Secondhand Supermarket in Mombasa.  It was a lifesaver for this party.  Of course, by the time something is considered secondhand in Kenya, it’s most likely fourth or fifth hand from OEM, but that’s ok.  The store was littered with heaps of halloween stuff.  Plastic jack-o-lantern buckets, stickers, cups, window-stickies, and even a very tempting (but left unpurchased) fall/halloween tea-light table candle holder.  The best part, I got to explain to the store owners that all of it was for an American holiday.  They had no idea what all of this Halloween stuff was for, but I did and for roughly 20 bucks, walked away a very happy party-host.

What did it all turn into?  Well, the first thing we (I had a wonderful team of friends helping me the entire time had to do was convince the guests they were not just at a regular house.  I wanted at least atmosphere.  So we rigged up some coat-hanger and tissue paper lanterns (for the equivalent of about nickel apiece… if that) to cover my lights.  This darkened, and colorized all the main rooms.  There was even a classic, “spooky sounds,” CD at the store I picked up.  Mom you would have loved it.  Finally, I bought a bunch of slightly-larger-than-tea-candle candles, which we placed in cut-open water bottle holders, to add strategic candle flickers around the house, and the mood was set. Throw some orange and black kangaas (Kenyan lasos) on the table and desk, couple of candlellt jack-o-lanters on the front step, plastic fall leaves (courtesy Mom) on the water filter and finally some static clings on the refrigerator, and all was done.

The party goers also went above and beyond their duty in costumes.  I was a classic pirate.  We also had Superman, a Viking, a samosa seller, Joeseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (played by a girl), a Queen of the Jungle, mad scientist, and my three favorites coming together: a matatu driver, conductor and an actual matatu van, each person playing their part the entire night, quite hilariously.  On top of that, it was a good mix of Peace Corps and non Peace Corps.  And Superman brought candy.  The party was complete.

There you have it.  Kenyans do not celebrate halloween, but who says we need to acculturate completely.  And with a little creativity, and a coincidentally located secondhand supermarket sitting on a goldmine of halloween accessories, a great halloween party can be had anywhere!  Pictures may or may not make it up, depending on what i can steal from Facebook.

one day all of a sudden people will realize
they will see that forever have we existed

under the power of
what we cannot see, cannot hold, cannot comprehend

for to do so
would be blasphem, would be sacrilege, would be wrong

one day people will realize
all we hold most potent has been hidden
up the mountains, in the forests, under the seas

controlled, manipulated by the a select few who
knew the words, knew the motions, knew the artefacts

yet one day people will realize
the power has not been
up the mountains, in the forests or under the seas
it has been the mountains, it has been the forests, it has been the seas

the select few who controlled the words, the motions, the artefacts
they are we, they are all, they are human
they breathe, they bleed, they eat
they love, they die, they weep

why need there be a supernatural
when nature is super enough

why need the unknown to give us friendship, love, laughter
when we, as people, naturally learned we need these to survive
is that not great enough? is that not amazing enough?

are we secretly ashamed of our world, ourselves?
that we can admire its beauty but claim it not the most beautiful
how dare we be unfit to see the most beautiful!

why must we wait for a heaven when a heaven is around us
why must we wait for eternal friendship when we have had it all our lives
why must we wait for true love, when it’s been there from the beginning

one day humans will realize their true potential
and on that day i shall weep
for we will destroy the mountains, destroy the forests, destroy the seas
and the most beautiful will be gone

we will do it because it was a mockery of that which comes later
so we have thought
but there will be no later
for nature will turn her back on her own
and all that was natural, and all that was supernatural
will finally realize the err of their ways

humans never truly learned from sadness
they thought it only temporary
they thought the end would come and all would be good

but we had missed the point
the end had already come
it was already good
we were already living it

and we destroyed it.

This is not going to be of interest to many of my readers, but I have noticed my readership base is expanding into different groups, so I have decided to add a new permanent page to the blog: Laptop Care.  You can access it from the link above.

The page is organic information regarding many aspects of laptop care in Kenya to hopefully better prepare individuals in taking care of their computers here.  I will add and subtract information as I see fit, hence it being considered an organic document.  It is not a quick read, and may be broken down into other sections later if I find people are finding it useful.

You will also notice that the “How to Contact Me,” and “Sending a Parcel?” page have been removed.  Don’t worry, the information is not gone, it’s simply been shifted under the new “Contact/Parcels” page.  My current WordPress Theme is not playing nice with the links and it would not decrease link font size, thus adding a new row to my links, which I did not like.  Until I can manually shrink the font size of the theme, I will have to dance this little dance of mine.

Hope you find all the information useful.  Comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I am looking to add a page about, “Browsing on minimal bandwidth,” on a future date as well.

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Technically, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I am assigned to the National Youth Services Technical College outside of Mombasa.  Here I am a teacher, specifically teaching an Introduction to Computer Literacy course for the Craft 1 students, all 130 some-odd of them.  However, this only occupies about 12 hours of my week, maybe 14 if you include preparation time, but considering I only have to prepare one lesson a week, prep time is minimal.  At first I thought I could do more preparation time, create more engaging lessons, but I am slowly learning that my students only in fact have two hours a week in and out of class to think about computers, and those two hours are actually in class.  If you did the math correctly, you discovered my students have no time to think about computers outside of class, a point which has been verified from many sources at all levels of this school.  It’s sad, and it also means that even if I did extra prep, it would benefit nobody as far as I can tell.

So what do I do to fill my time?  My first semester here (Jan. ‘09 – Apr. ‘09) I left the compound and went out and discovered secondary projects.  These were interesting and compelling, but also were put to an end when my friend Crystal was forced to Nairobi because armed robbers broke into her house and stole everything from her and her family.  This left me with a lot of free time, aside from the odd technical job here and there.  I tried working with a group that helped musicians, but we couldn’t seem to find anything for my particualar ICT skills.  I could have worked harder, but I think it was also partly that I was not overly-interested in the organization.  Such is life.

However, all of this coincided with NYS opening up a brand new computer lab facility and getting me a lot of new computers.  I sat and kept the lab opened and people would come and go and we had a real computer lab!  It was great.  I spent time researching some good system administration techniques, and working on my Linux administration.  I built myself a small network, funded by NYS, to allow for certain network functions in the lab, but without the internet.  Second term cruised into its end and I was on a high as I left to go and help out other people and attend Peace Corps workshops in July and August.

Semester three started on a high note.  I was feeling like a real teacher, students were regularly attending my classes, the Principal even threatened a final exam (a threat which may turn out to be baseless).  I keep the lab open, but traffic has decreased.  Some of my more regular attendees were the servicemen who were on their nationa-building year.  They had a lot of free time and I let them come in and watch movies they brought and listen to their own music.  They were using the computers and were learning while doing it.  Then they got yelled at for doing this.  I got reprimanded for letting them do it.  They don’t come anymore.

As for system administration, I administered the lab until I became expendable.  Except for the odd hardware failure, or removing a dead lizard from a power supply, the systems run without hiccups.  Because we are not on a a complete internet connection network, combined with running Ubuntu, the computers just work.  From and administration standpoint, this is great! From a time-wasting standpoint, all I can say is boo hoo.

But I have created this expectation amongst people that when I am here, the lab will be open.  So the lab services about one teacher a day now, unless I have my class, who seem to have lost their motivation due to my two week hiatus for medical in Nairobi.  At this moment I am torn.  I feel bad closing the lab, as it is the only way some of my teachers can use computers, and they are using them to type exams (hurrah, ICT integrating into the curriculum!).  According to Peace Corps, I am doing my job, and I am making a difference in at least one persons life.  But I feel locked down at NYS.

I still find myself with the odd web-site contract, but organizations
very rarely seem as committed to a web project as I think they should,
so it’s always difficult to produce results.  A lack of client
motivation, for right or wrong, leads to a lack of my own personal
motivation when it comes to web projects. Also, just as I find myself digging my teeth into a programming project, it becomes unnecessary so I put a stop to it.  I may continue it just to have something to do, even though it is reinventing the wheel.

In the meantime, I have found myself falling into a new job.  I think a lot.  I browse the web, I discover new technologies, I network with people, and I try to introduce these new ideas to these different people.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not.  Basically however, I am paid to be that guy that browses the web all day, that chats all day, that reads blogs all day.  I think I “surf,” more in Kenya than I ever did in America.  In America I used to read the BBC and maybe Facebook a little and then log for the day.  Not here.

I just wish I was able to act more on some of the ideas I have.  And maybe I am.  Maybe I need to ditch NYS.  Technically, nobody has told me I need to be in the lab all day every day for 10 to 11 hours.  Maybe I should come up with set times I am in and times I am not, then I can possibly engage with the outside like I did first semester.  Or maybe NYS will produce the ICT diploma course like they said they would a year ago.  Or maybe they will fund an expansion of the network and get internet access.  Then I really will have a hopping lab.  So many possibilities.  Until then, I think, and share those thoughts worth sharing.

Oh, and a teacher came in who I promised I would help type his already-written chapters for some continuing-education work he is doing.  I guess I am also the resident typist.  Better get at it while I am still bored!

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If you are a vegetarian, you may just want to not read this.  If you are a meatatarian, I hope you enjoy!

Two weeks ago, while I was on my medical leave in Nairobi (I am back home in Mombasa now), a fellow Peace Corps volunteer had his birthday and to celebrate we all went out to Carnivore.  Carnivore is rated as one of the top 50 restaurants in the world (used to actually be in the top 10 apparently), and as its name suggests, is a very meat-oriented restaurant.  Being in Kenya, where the national dish is effectively roast meat (nyama choma), the meat served at Carnivore is just that: roasted to roasty, roastacular, deliciousness.

When one thinks of a top 50 restaurant, one might assume such nice things as white table-cloths, black tie waiters and waitresses, and bottles of bubbly water on the table.  How dare you have preconceptions!  This is Kenya (said with a roar)!  Instead, at Carnivore you sit at large wooden tables, with servers walking around in garish zebra-print aprons, and people singing happy birthday songs a la Applebees or TGI Fridays.  Apparently, “mature, quiet atmosphere,” is not one of the top 50 criteria.

Which is fine by me.  Because where Carnivore shines is in the meat, and its wide selection of different meats to be exact.  Back in the old days, before humans cared about animals and simply enjoyed eating them, you could get everything from zebra to giraffe to lion even, all of it roasted to perfection and served in endless quantity.  Sadly not anymore, but still the selection was good.  My meal consisted of: roast beef, turkey, chicken wings, chicken breast, crocodile, pork ribs, roast lamb, lamb chops, ostritch-meat meat-balls (written to be as unambiguous as possible), and pork sausages.  Each was roasted and seasoned or glazed appropriately and each was divine.

The meal is served Brazillian BBQ style (if I understand that style correctly).  You have a little flag that you keep up when you want the carvers to bring you more meat.  You can ask for as much per carving as you like, all for a flat fee (including a dessert and bread and soup, but not drinks).  Once you have your meat, feel free to sauce it with the appropriate sauces provided in a spin-server on every table.  Confused about which sauce to use, ask the carver for his or her recommendation.   Chow down.  Now, in reality we had to bug the carvers for more food towards the end, when normal people would be full.  Us, being far from normal, meat-starved volunteers, kept stuffing our faces and politely but insistently asking for more meat because as  anyone could see, our flag was up.

I left the meal quite happy, albeit with a significantly lighter wallet.  The roasted regulars (beef, chicken, turkey, pork) were far above any choma I could get on the street.  The chicken wing glaze must have been laced with some addictive additive because it was impossible to stop eating them.  The crocodile was… interesting.  It had a slightly fishy taste to it and each piece also seemed to have tough-muscle or tendon pieces or something.  The taste was good, the texture was fine, but these tough bits were a bit off-putting.  The ostritch-meat meat-balls were amazing, slightly spiced, and never enough.  Finally, the lamb chops were just what I needed to put me in a good mood, even served with a homemade mint jelly!

Lesson learned: don’t go to Carnivore for the atmosphere or for a nice, quiet, adult night out.  Go for the meat.

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This morning as I was sitting at my computer in my house catching up with people, I started hearing the students outside running around.  In the morning, students are on duty, which basically means keeping the compound nice and clean.  Once a week for one section, duty is cutting the grass of the big field outside my front door.  All of these students were running around and at first I thought they were chasing each other jokingly for some small, “insult,” one made against another (same type of horseplay we have in the States).  But no, they were organized and going after something.

The way they were hacking the ground with their scythes I thought it was a snake.  Snakes here are the devil, and all must be killed, says conventional wisdom.  This includes the little garter snakes that crawl around and couldn’t hurt anything bigger than a mouse even if they tried.  Kenyans take their snake-killing very seriously.  But as I watched, I saw an obviously mammalian head pop up out of the grass.  My students were still chasing it quite energetically, trying their best to kill it.

Which they eventually did.  Just as I got outside, they succeeded in cornering it and killing it.  I asked what it was, and they said a gazelle.  It was too small for the species of gazelle I know, so I asked if it was a baby, and they said yes.  But at the same time the animal had too much fat on it and was too disproportional for a baby gazelle (again, my opinion), so I am putting bets on it being a member of the dik dik species, which are of the same genus as antelope, not of gazelle.

My students will most likely hand it over to the kitchen, who will then properly butcher it and they will eat it for lunch or dinner.  This is a fairly regular occurrence on this compound, and two of these chases have now happened on the field in front of my house.

Being on medical visit means that I get to be spending all my time in Kenya’s largest city, the shining star of East Africa, Nairobi.  I will not bore anybody with the details of this city and its history, but keep this article deliciously subjective as I tear into the bits and pieces of the city as they pertain to me.

The city itself is broken up into neighborhoods which, like many cities, become stratified representations of class and wealth.  Each neighborhood has its history, its list of famous residents, and so forth.  The Peace Corps office is located in the neighborhood Westlands, which, to my understanding, was the first up and coming “wealthy,” neighborhood in the city and as the number of wealthy has steadily increased, the truly wealthy have slowly moved on to other neighborhoods, making Westlands now a middle and upper-middle class neighborhood.  Nice single-family houses built into housing compounds, placed behind heavily-fortified (seriously) walls, guards out front.

The hotel volunteers stay at when brought into Nairobi for, “official business,” is also conveniently located in Nairobi, making it easy for Peace Corps drivers to pick us up on time, avoiding the notorious traffic jams that plague all parts of the city, but particularly routes heading into the central business district.  We are about a 5 minute walk from the main road, and about a 10 minute walk from the shopping district of Westlands, which includes the Sarit Center and Westgate (western-style shopping malls), and plenty of food.

All of this is to our benefit.  But it’s very expensive.  All of it.  We call it ‘mzungu-priced,’ which is fine for the wealthy Kenyans and western-salary development workers who frequent Westlands, but is not ideal for Peace Corps stipends.  This is not a rant against our stipends, and in fact I am quite happy with our stipends to the point where I would rather the office spend extra money on other things before us (don’t tell the other volutneers, shhhh!), but it’s also impossible to deny that our stipends are not Nairobi-friendly.  Stipends are supplemented by a per diem when here on medical, but even then, it is not truly Nairobi friendly.

On top of this, its in our best interest to not travel at night, especially alone, unless in a cab.  That is not inexpensive, with one-way cab rides alone costing our entire per diem.  It creates a true sense of being caged into Westlands, which also significantly reduces options for finding more stipend and per diem friendly prices.  It is also a necessary move however, with the city being so large, and not safely navigable via public transport at night.  The result: I was never a mall-rat at home, but people-watching at the Sarit center has become a favorite past-time of mine.

Then there is the jam itself.  Almost every day, in seemingly 2 hour intervals, the city’s roadways jam up.  This can be due to cows crossing the road (Nairobi was traditional Masaai grazing land), the roundabouts, annoying police checkpoints, push carts or any other myriad of reasons.  10 minute trips easily take 40 minutes or more.  Getting even from Westlands to downtown becomes a stressful endeavor.  Peace Corps drivers refuse to take volunteers into downtown because of the jam and the unpredictable travel conditions that exist outside of Westlands.  I say that it seems everyone in Africa is waiting for Jesus to come, but he’s stuck in the Nairobi jam.

There is fantastic food though, especially for Western-food (read: cheese) starved volutneers.  A future post will be on one of these restaurant alone.  So when it does get worked into a budget (more times than it economically should…), volunteers are in heaven.  Also, with Nairobi being the medevac for many countries in Eastern Africa, we always get to meet volunteers serving around the our corner of the continent, swapping stories, intrigued by the differences of service in other places, and bonding over the similarities.

Other ammenities are also abound.  Java House has free wi-fi (via which this is being posted), and it seems to be speeding up.  The hotel also has nice hot showers (in most rooms).  There are no sidewalks however, with the exception of the downtown region.  This can be hard to conceptualize for those of us accustomed to sidewalks everywhere, especially in cities.  Trust me, it’s not fun.

Also, a note on the language.  Most people will tell you that Nairobians speak english, and that’s true.  Nairobians speak english.  As a result, many [white] people simply speak english. But this is still a class difference.  If you listen to locals speaking to each other, they are speaking kiswahili.  I can count the number of personal conversations I have heard shared in english or even sheng (kiswahili/english mix) on one hand.  Instead, the cityfolk are using kiswahili or their mother tongues.  It is a reminder to me that english is still not the people’s language.  People in this country do not use English, they speak it, but they do not use it, and until everybody admits this, I just feel communication issues will still exist.

Finally, Nairobi is the center of everything in Kenya.  Politics, commerce, culture, transport, all of it is centered in Nairobi.  But it seems to be a very introverted center.  People do not look from here around to other parts of the country.  Instead, “getting here,” has been the goal for many Kenyans, and once achieved, it seems all the problems of the rest of the country vanish.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a horrible generalization, with plenty of holes.  Do people move to Nairobi to get jobs and send money home to the villages? Yes they do.  Do villagers succeed against all odds and get to come here to get a veritable education at some of the best Universities in Africa?  Yes they do.  But we all know how one bad apple spoils the bunch, and there are plenty of bad apples who drive around in million shilling Mercedes-Benz, “serving their fellow countrymen,” while those fellow countrymen are in their drought-stricken, famine-prone regions, starving, and dying, living with no sense of hope or oppurtunity.

Yet we are all here.  It’s the “Little West,” of East Africa.  It’s where there are resources.  It’s where there is some sense of infrastructure.  It’s where there are doctors and dentists.  It’s where there are other NGOs.  It’s where the government is, the Embassy is, the UN is.  And for the next week or so, it’s where I am.

Don’t anybody panic after reading that subject, nothing is broken that wasn’t already… apparently…

It all started with a crazy notion to run a marathon, specifically the Lewa marathon in June 2010.  I needed to get exercise, but without a clear goal, I could never seem to motivate myself properly.  I had done distance running before in Australia, so I figure, why the heck not, a marathon would be easy, especially with so much time to train.  This was the end of September.

Around two weeks ago I noticed something was wrong however.  Or rather, what was wrong made sure it was noticed.  if i moved in certain ways, I would get sharp pain in my left hip.  Running, walking fast, reaching for my wallet, getting on and off matatus, all of these things soon became off limits.  This wasn’t right, but I also felt that it could just be normal strain.  So i called up my friend who is a runner and asked his opinion, and within five minutes he had already named the cause: running on uneven pavement causes a particular amount of strain on the body and that’s what I was running on.  Bingo.  Simple muscle strain, give it the obligatory week of rest and see where it goes from there.

It never got better, and in fact got worse at some points.  Called up my friend again, and he said to call medical.  I knew what this would mean: trip to Nairobi, intense sessions and frustrations with doctors followed by boring lulls at the hotel, but at least getting to hang out with whichever volunteers were in Nairobi for whatever reason, and there are always some.  I called medical, and within two minutes the decision was made that I would be coming to Nairobi for scans.  I expressed concern about missing time at school, and just my simple dislike of the city (a topic for another post), but my medical officer insisted that there was not a doctor in Mombasa with facilities to handle whichever situation should arrive.  I was off to Nairobi a few days later, giving me enough time to administer my last classes worth of exams.

The next three days (over this past week) included x-rays, visits to the peace corps office and the doctor’s, as well as hanging out in Nairobi with various volunteers coming in and out.  On Friday, I had my final appointment with the doctor where we went over the x-rays together to decide what was wrong and what I would need to do to get better.

Apparently for my entire life I have been a member of 5% (doctor’s statistic, not independently verified yet) of the population that has a lumbarized sacral-1.  In non-medical speak this means that the top part of the lower region of your spine, known as the sacral section or tail bone, does not completely fuse with other parts of the sacral section, and instead becomes more of an extra vertebrae in the lumbar section (lower back) of the spine.

Compound this with my running on uneven pavement and apparently my spine has become aggravated and is aggravating a nerve that coincidentally(?) ends in my hip.  So I don’t actually have a hip pain, I have a back pain.  The doctor also informed me that this would be the reason I would suffer lower back pain during long car drives and the reason I can’t touch my toes! I asked my doctor back home a few times about my lower back pain and he always just chalked it up to a “tight back.” But it’s not a tight back, I am just a mutant, haha!

I now sit in limbo over the weekend as my doctors and peace corps hash out where to go from here.  The only thing to do is Physio-Therapy.  A lumbarized s1 is in no way a major concern (according to my own internet research) but it can sometimes lead to inconveniences like this.  Of course, what are little inconveniences in America very quickly become large inconveniences in Kenya.  Such is life.  Also, have no fear: this will in no way lead to an early termination of my Peace Corps service.  The thought never even crossed my mind, and I am even a pessimist about that sort of thing.  I have a year and a few months to go, and I fully intend on serving them out