Quick trip to Njiru
I just got back from an emergency trip to assist our purchasing crew. They had been out shopping and their SUV broke down. They push started it several times then were stranded when that no longer worked. Doug (Rafiki over seas and mechanic from Abilene) and I made a quick trip to take them another battery and follow them back to the village. Everyone was relieved when we got home with no problems. It is generally a very good idea to be off the road before dark and we managed to make it by about 20 minutes. The workers that had been shopping however were not starting their walk home until it was already dark.
The road has not seen a road grader in at least six months and much of it has had some pavement in the distant past but the remains of that cause more problems. The potholes make Dancer Rd. look like a freeway. Most traffic runs on the shoulder(because it is a bit better than the middle) unless someone decides to pass. There was a constant flow of pedestrians on both sides of the road and hundreds of small businesses set up along the sides. Beds, couches, shoes, fruit, mints, etc. There were also fruit and candy vendors along the way withthings for sale to people driving along the road-no need to park or even stop in order to buy their goods, they just run up to your window to make the sale. Surprisingly it all seems to work better than "Mr. Cautious" (Rog) would ever imagine it could. Although many vehicles have scrapes and dents, we have seen only a couple of accidents and only one ambulance since we have been here.
Getting water in dry areas
We flew over the Rift Valley on the way to Masai Mara and looked down onmasai villages located in such dry areas that I couldn't imagine how anyone could survive there. All brown-no apparent vegetation-no source of water. While in the Masai Mara I read a book about David Livingstone, the famous missionary/explorer that spent 32 years in Africa traveling over 40,000 miles by foot, boat, and ox cart attempting to convert the native populations and save souls. The story tells of him traveling in a very dry area and sending scouts ahead to find water so that when they arrived with the ox cart(12 oxen to one cart) there would be water for the stock. They would find a depression and start digging-often finding water about four to five feet below the surface.
I have been teaching the students about where water comes from this week so did some research on how people in dry areas get their water. I thought it was pretty interesting: Nature provides for the formation of "pans" of water in many spectacular ways of which two are particularly fascinating, dust devils and ants. The Karoo, in South Africa, is a semi desert region and has a pan belt. There are hollows in the plains and during the rainy season, they keep filling up with water and this water eventually soaks into the ground and becomes mud. The mud dries into dust at the bottom of the hollow in the dry season and appears very white as it has concentrated minerals in it. The air above this whitened area becomes extremely hot and starts to rise, forming a spiral and picking up the dust then moving off across the plainas dust devils do. When it loses its strength and collapses, the dust falls back onto the plain, away from the hollow. With repetition, over the years, a pan is born due to the deepening and widening of the hollow through removal of dust. So nature gives birth to a dust devil in order to assist in the creation of a pan, truly amazing!
All animals love salt and lime and wherever these appear on the surface, browsers, especially such as elephant, eland, oryx, kudu, giraffe and rhino, are attracted to these salt "licks". Ants play a very important part in bringing these salt deposits up to the surface because they create ant-heaps with the soil they bring up from far below. The animals are attracted to the ant-heaps and eat the soil in order to get the lime. The area surrounding the ant-heap gets trampled to dust, which in turn gets blown away by the wind and a hollow is formed. When it rains, the hollow that has formed fills with water and lime from the surrounding surface, becoming a pool. The animals drink the water and by tramping the floor of the pool, they firm it into a leak-proof seal. So from a hollow to a small pool which heavy rains swell into larger pans and even become small shallow lakes in some places, all engineered by industrious ants. These pans are enlarged in the following amazing way: When the water level is low an elephant drinking 250 liters of water would be carrying away in its stomach, at least 25 kg of soil and in one year, one elephant might remove 5 tons of soil just by drinking and then there is still the mud it carries out on its feet and body when it has finished wallowing. The more lime in the water the greater the attraction for animals and a herd of several hundred buffalo, after just one visit to a pan, significantly change the size of a pan.
Just one more thing to be thankful for in the U.S.-clean water!
