Masai Mara-1

Jamboooooo,

Blogging is very hard with the Internet speed in Kenya, and especially in Machakos. It can take hours to post a blog. Another handicap for my blogging was the lack of a proper data cable for my other camera, which is a SLR. I tought that there is one universal data cable which can work with all cameras, so I just brought the cable for my compact camera. But, apparenty I was wrong. I tried to find a solution, could not succeed. And gave up. And without my safari pictures, my blog would be nothingL Thanks to Henriette that she offerred me to try hers and it did work indeed. Now I am ready to share my Masai Mara experience. But first, I have to catch up with other necessary things like Machakos where we are based now. Machakos is a really small town which one can walk around in 15 minutes. Here is a snap from the centre. 



  



 Africans are very colorful people in terms of decoration. All the shops, houses, matatus (local buses), motorbikes and lorries have colorful paintings and other interesting decorations. As you can see in the other snaps, these are typical African shops. Below is a typical African lorry. I think African lorry drivers are as creative as their Turkish colleagues. What do you think? 

So, this is all about MachakosJ Now I am jumping to Masai Mara as I am very impatient about it. Anyone going to Masai Mara wants to see the Big Five. That is for sure. And I did 4,5 out of 5. The missing half is LeopardL Actually, we saw the tail of one leopard, so I guess it can count as halfJ She hided in the tree so well that it was almost impossible to notice her. Anyway, the other big Four are quite exciting as well. 

On the way from Nairobi to Masai Mara, you pass through the Rift Valley. This magnificent valley is 6000 Km long and starts from Syria and goes down to Mozambique. The view is literally hillarious.

And ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to Masai Mara. 

Masai Mara is an amazing place. When you see the vast plain savana with almost nothing on, you are amazed. And in the middle of this nothingness, sometimes there is this single acacia tree standing still all alone. Probably, this is the most classical image of Africa in people’s mind. And it is there indeed.

And suddenly, you find yourself among a herd of zebras. They so are beautiful. Here are some cute Zebras for you.

 Zebras are usually accompanied by Gazels which are as cute as zebras. They are pretty, fragile creatures with very gentle moves. When they walk, they move their tales in such a way that, especially if they are in herds, they look like they are going with butterflies behind them. 

So we continue our drive game to meet with the Big Five. And here comes the first one: the Elephant. Ohh man, they are so big and this shakes your perception of earth’s magnitude and relativity for a few minutes. The elephant shot with the safari vans below though I am aware it is not natural due to cars and usJ, I put it for you too appreciate their hugeness.

 

While we were watching the elephants feeding on the trees vigorously, all of a sudden Mr. Jumbo appeared out of the bushes. Jumbo was more than big, he was "huge". Moreover, he was very excited which is something you cannot miss in the below picture:) And apparantly, he had a crash in one of the young ladies in the group who was much smaller than him. Mr Jumbo was stalking her to seduce for a morning session perhaps. But, the young female elephant was reluctant without no surprise. So everytime Mr. Jumbo tried to get close to her, she ran away. All these chase was very funny to watch. 


Mr Jumbo

  After watching the elephants who were satisfying their basic needs like feeding and in case of Mr. Jumbo, trying to satisfyJ, we moved on to other parts of Masai Mara to searh for other Four of the Big Five. And not more than half an hour, we were face to face with the Lion King.

The weird thing is that thay are very used to people. Of course “people in safari vans”J. I am not sure if they would be as friendly as they are if we get out of the van. So to say, we do not disturb them with our existence. So, you are in front of a group of lions and you just stare at each other quietly. And there is no TV screen and Discovery Channel logo between you. This is real and unbelievable.

Lion King's Harem

The morning session of our safari tour was already very succesfull with Two of the Big Five. After a picnic lunch on famous Masai blankets on a spot far away from the Lion King and his family, we headed towards other spots where we could capture more animals. So that was how we met dear Giraffes on the way.

And for the beauty that lies just below, I cannot find any words that are good enough to introduce the Cheetah. Gorgeous!!!!

After a 10-hour game drive, we were exhausted but very happy with what we had seen so far. On our way to our camp site, the sunset over Masai Mara was awesome.

OK, let me tell you something especially to those who are not used to camping. One thing that is highly necessary in a campsite is a torch or a flash light. It was damn dark in Masai Mara. Without a light, you can do nothing. Thanks to those who were smart enough to consider this fact, we could walked to restrooms in groups. We had a very nice dinner in the evening. Actually it can be considered even luxuriuos for a camp dinner, but this is Masai Mara. If you have money, you can eat lobster in the romatic candle light. After dinner, we sat by the camp fire and consumed dozens of Tuskers before going to our dark tents for a sleep  that was frequently interrupted at night by strange sounds of various animals and birds.  

And that is it for today. But Masai Mara game drive has not finished yet. The other Big 1 and a Half will be coming tomorrow: the Rhino and Tail of the Leopard. And other bigs like Buffalo. A couple of baboons. And many more..... 

Meetings, clients and the Kiss

Today's blog may be boring for some of you as it will be full of with meetings, clients, business pictures. But I assure you, next week will be hillarious because we are going on safari to Masai Mara tomorrow. And just to cheer you up a little bit here comes my African lover:) Finally, I found "the one":)

Since my last blog, I could not have any chance for blogging because I must say that they make us work hard hereJ. #ibmcsc During the time we are in Nairobi, we ran from one client to another in a really chaotic traffic. Nairobi’s traffic is as challenging as Istanbul’s, maybe more. And due to the content or processing method of the gas used by the cars I guess, the air is very polluted. The hotel we are staying is just across the Israel Embassy in the Upper Hill area. So, the security is very high. From the hotel’s main gate to my room, I swipe my room-key 4 times. Here  you can see some shots from the hotel with the one below being my only freedom zone in Nairobi. Smoking is strictly restricted in Kenya. You cannot smoke in public areas even if in open air. And there are only a few smoking zones around the city which are actually more like cells or cages. Believe me, you do not want to go in and smoke there. Moreover, it is not common for women to smoke or drink alcohol. Shortly, they made all the things possible that can make you feel inferior if you are smoking. So I could only smoke in this little garden of the hotel when I arrive in the evenings. Also, this restriction makes me think about smoking all the time. So I am having very hard times as a smoker hereL.

And regarding business, we have made a good start. Starting from Sunday, we have met our clients and had a few meetings. The CSC team is divided into 3 subteams. I am in the Subteam2  which will be working with KAM (Kenya Manufacturers Association) to offer them new strategies for membership growth through value proposition to catalyze sector in line with Vision 2030 (Kenya’s blueprint for development). All the sub-teams attended the fist client introduction meetings. And the picture below is from our first meeting with the Client.

Sub team 1- they call themselves Twiga, client is Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. Monday morning, we had the first meeting with them. The meeting time was at 9 am but it took one additional hour for all the people from the Ministery to come together. So the meeting started at 10 amJ In Kenya, time concept is different. As our Project Consultant Muiriki says, Kenyans are task-driven, not time-driven. Furthermore, there is no specific end time for the meetings, either. Because Kenyans think one meeting should end when all the issues to be handled ends. None of the meetings so far started on time. We had waited between half an hour to 2 hours for all the meetings. The first picture above is taken at the main gate of Ministry. And the one below is with with the Ministry officials.







The meeting with the Ministry was of course more formal than ours. During the meeting, they offered us tea and coffee together with a box which included dishes including one sausage, one samosa (deep-fried Indian stuffed pastry/borek) and another deep-fried pastry. We had already have the breakfast but as it is regarded impolite to reject offerings in Kenya, we ate all of this stuff too just 2 hours after the breakfast. But I must tell you that they were delicious. The same night we continued to discover Kenyan’s cuisine at Ronalo’s restaurant located in downtown. Actually, this place is more like a wedding saloon in terms of Turkish standards. There was a live band playing African music and sometime later, Richard joined them to sing “No woman no cry”. That night I could not eat anything because I already had meat in quantities more than I could handle in just 2 days. I must say that Kenyan cuisine not very vegetarian. A typical menu is a meat dish deep-fried or stewed in dense tomato sauce and a starchy side dish like either plain pilaf, ugali (cornmeal mush) or chapatti (wheat flatbread- very alike to katmer). Below is a sample of this typical menu with ugali. Ugali is the dish that surprised me a lot. My grand grand-mother is Abkhaz and many women who are married to the men in our family, too. And they cook an Abkhaz dish which is exactly the same of Ugali, just darker in color. Can you believe that? Caucasus is thousand miles far away from East Africa but people have the same dish. It is amazing.

And finally comes the Tusker beer. It is the most popular and for me best local beer in Kenya and everybody in the team likes it. There is also Guinness here which I was very happy to see at fist but after trying it I decided to go on with Tusker as the African version of Guinnes is far more smoky and a little bit sweety; pretty strange to me. And no surprise it is called Guinnes ExtraJ

Another pleasant meeting was with IBM East Africa. IBM EA is quite new and small organization at the moment but has potential as it is operating in not only in Kenya, but also in Uganda and Tanzania. And I must add that Tony Mwai, CEO of IBM EA, has this charismatic leadership spiritJ.

October 22, First Day in Kenya

Jambo Friends,

After 3 months of impatient wait, finally I am in Kenya:) And Kenya welcomes me with a very pleasent sunny day and a beautiful rainbow.



Today is the first day of my IBM CSC assignment. OK, let's start from the start. IBM has a program called the Corporate Service Corps (CSC). If you want to learn more about the CSC, you can visit the following link and if you are one of my IBMer friends I highly recommend you apply for it on the  next cycle:
 http://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/corporateservicecorps/.

Anyway, I applied for this program and with a very nice coincidence, I was informed that I am accepted on my birthday, 25th of July. It has been one of the best birthdays I have ever had. There were several deployment regions that you can select and Africa was my first preference, so I am very happy to be here. In this programme, we are 12 colleagues from IBM all around the world. We are the fourth team IBM has sent to Kenya through the CSC, and hence the name "Team Kenya 4". We have already started to know each other 3 months before our arrival here via weekly conference calls and preworks. And I want to introduce you my team mates whom I will be working and actually living with for the next 5 weeks:

Adekunle from USA

Bahram from Germany

Cammy from Mexico

Jennifer from Canada

Henriette from Denmark

Isabel  from Potugal

Kensuke from Japan

Lotem from Israel

Marissa from USA

Richard from India

Rob from UK

I was the lucky one in the team with the only direct flight (6 hours, 10 min.) from Istanbul to Nairobi with Turkish Airlines. I am a fan of THY:) It took more than 20 hours to arrive in Nairobi for some of my team mates like Cammy, Kensuke and Isabel. Hopefully, everybody arrived safe and with their luggages. I was on the same flight with Jennifer and Henriette, so they were the ones I met first in person. We arrived in Nairobi around 01.20 am. And first time in my life, somebody was waiting for me at the airport with a poster in his hand with my name written on it:) It is a nice feeling:) Afterwards, we went to our hotel in Nairobi which we will be staying until Wednesday.

In the morning, we met with the other team members and had breakfast together. After the breakfast, we had free time until 5 pm, so we went out to discover Nairobi. We walked around the city, went on top of a high building to see the skyline. Here we were provided with a very vivid and interesting presentation of the skyline by an enthuastic tour guide.

Nairobi is a quite modern city with many large and high buildings. Many of them are serving as government offices. The city is large and very green. Everywhere you can see huge trees and very colorful flowers. The people are very friendly to the visitors.

 We came accross an outdoor church event and joined their fest. We sang and danced with them. Moreover, a local TV channel recorded us for a TV program. They found it very interesting that the team is very international. Now CSC Kenya Team4 will be famous in Kenya.

Another highlight of the day was Massai Market. It is held on Saturdays on an open park area. And we are very lucky to catch it. Here you can buy all varieities of African handcrafts like bags, wood carving, jewellery, clothes, pottery, paintings and many many other things. I bought 2 little pretty bags. 

In the evening we met out NGO coordinator Alex Mutungi. He is a very friendly and nice person. He will be with us in Kenya during all our stay. Right afterwars, we went to the Fairview Hotel to have our welcome dinner and to meet Muriuki Mureithi, the Consultant of our CSC programme and other members of DOT. It was a very lovely dinner and I ate a delicious dish called something like Hot Chili Duck. Mmm, yummyyy:)


 Tomorrow, our subteam (Team 2: Me, Isabel, Adekunle and Rob) will meet at breakfast at 7 am to prepare our presentatation to present to the client at 3 pm. So I must go and sleep now. It will be a hard working day for Subteam 2 and I am very excited to meet with the Client. I will talk about our project and client later. For now kwaheri (goodbye)