May 25, Back to Nairobi
I’m back at the Gracia Guest House, where I will be walking distance to my next gig, another two-day workshop for several Nairobi-based organizations. My host is Lucy Waruingi, who is an energetic and dedicated GIS guru for the African Conservation Center www.conservationafrica.org
Other participants include staff from Save the Elephants www.savetheelephants.org, Amboseli Baboon Research Project, National Museums of Kenya, ESF Consultants www.esfconsultants.org, and GreenBelt Movement www.greenbeltmovement.org
This last one is well known for it’s Women’s Tree Planting project, headed by Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Professor Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan activist who founded an Africa-wide movement that empowered women, confronted corrupt officials and planted millions of trees in ravaged forestland…
We get an early start on Friday morning, and keep moving at a fine pace. This class is only 7 students, and they all have some GIS experience – we are mainly getting them tuned to ArcGIS 9, as they have been using ArcView 3, along with most the conservation community in most developing countries. At lunch Lucy calls a shop about fixing my laptop monitor, still dead. I back everything up on the portable hard drive I am carrying, and off goes my machine into the streets of Nairobi. I finish the day using Lucy’s desktop for the presentations. Later that evening, my laptop shows up with a new monitor for Ksh $8000, about a hundred bucks… amazing, and I can work at night again!
The course went well. And now my total number of students is 82, from 14 different organizations – I hope to far exceed my goal of 100 students in six countries. I’m calling the trip “Service for Africa”.
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