I went on an evening visit to the elephant orphanage, on the edge of the nearby national park.
This area is the ‘nursery.’ These elephants are sometimes only a couple of weeks old, maybe having fallen down a well and been rescued by local farmers, or the mother was killed by poachers. They get fed about six litres of milk every three hours, and have a keeper in their stable 24/7, even the keepers’ food is brought to them. Each keeper has a bed, down low for the tiny elephant stables, but up high for the not so tiny ones. The littles ones sometimes try to sleep on the keeper’s bed, and have to get pushed off.
This is one of the 6 pm bottles being gurgled down:

This little one is testing its bed

before settling down.

They get covered up with another blanket once they are settled.

Our neighbours are ‘going home.’ They came here with a three year old six years ago, and are leaving with nine year old, a four year old and a toddler. They have had numerous house clearing sales, their house was looking bare, the hamster and goldfish had been rehomed, but the dog remained steadfastly unrelocated.

So we are now the proud carers of a black Labrador / Retriever cross (can some dog expert tell me why this counts as a cross breed, I thought that Labradors ARE retrievers …). Faithful to the McClintock tradition, she is named Hannah after her previous carer, with the obligatory Swahili ‘H’ inserted.

She is a hungry, friendly, famished, well trained, ravenous, affectionate, starving, tailwagging, food orientated three year old dog.

Her ex-family came visiting today

she was delighted to see them

this is Henry (the toddler), big brother Joe, and Anna

A great family.

Every year the ILRI staff have a fundraising night called ‘Africa Night.’ It was a gentle but entertaining evening, with food largely supplied and cooked by donations (Sandy supplied a goat, which the kitchen fried in traditional style), with a band (four singers and backing track), a fashion parade (in drag)

and a slave auction. I bid all of my money (about $9.39) on my potential slave, but got overtaken by the potential slave’s girlfriend.

It was a sociable, fun night: we were all encouraged to dress up in our African gear, it was quite amazing what people have in their bottom drawers!.

You can get an idea of the variety of clothing in this rather fuzzy photo (it was dark … and the innocent have to be protected).

Kapiti is ILRI’s ‘ranch’ out of town, about 80km down the Mombassa road and turn right down a three kilometre dirt track.

The Mombassa road is the main road / artery from the port of Mombassa to Nairobi and western Kenya, and also the landlocked countries of Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda. Down it rumble the grossly overloaded trucks that carry everything from petrol to mascara to the landlocked inland countries. So the road is awful. In addition to the usual pot holes are deep tracks squished in the tarmac by the trucks, making ruts that are so deep that they are sometimes impassable by cars, which then move out into the middle of the road. This is particularly so on uphill grades going westward: heavy trucks going uphill. However there is hope in the form of the privatisation of the railway (‘the lunatic line’) from the Kenyan government to a South African company.

But we survived the trip, inspite of very heavy rain and the usual hazzards of pot holes, poor driving and trucks.

In complete contrast, Kapiti is an old Kenyan colonialist family home, very reminiscent of a hobbit hole, sunken into the side of a hill.

It seemed to have been built in stages, almost as if whenever they ran out of bedrooms another few (on two storeys) were built on, not quite in line with the older parts. The photograph is of what I assume is the original end, and the extensions are behind it, and in the same style.

The roof is thatched with reeds, ceilings wooden beams, with rabbit warren like corridors. The floors are crazy paving stone.

Old magazines circa 1958 lying on shelves, lots of bedrooms and vaguely adjacent bathrooms with huge baths, a little bit of hot water, spectacular views over the 10,000 hectare ranch stocked with cattle, sheep, warthog, giraffe, hyena and the odd lion. The gardens around the house were beautifully maintained, the rambling house was maintained a little bit, there were 56 workers on the farm (including the wonderful Joshua, to look after us), views straight out of a movie,

roads slippery (it is the rainy season), fires to sit in front of and toast marshmallows after the generator had gone off.

place of real shabby chic character. Though the house was immaculately clean, the paintwork should have been tidied up about 25 years ago, and the beds were as damp as Irish beds in the west of Ireland. I felt really at home.

Sandy has some research sheep on the Kapiti ranch (all REAL men in Africa have livestock to their name), complicatedly bred collection of Dorset, Persian and Red Maasai, which we inspected.

There has been a long running program of looking for genetic markers for worm resistance, nothing exciting coming out of that project yet, but it is very high flying science (which means it is very interesting but the practical use might be a little way off still). They also have a small herd (about 50) of Holstein cows, which produce enough milk for the farm workers and perhaps their families. The cows produce an average of about four litres of milk a day, compared with Australian cows that get dried off if they produce less than about 18 litres a day. This is because feeding is on poor pasture, which the cows have to hunt out each blade of grass themselves. But the giraffes look rather fine on this diet! They are so picturesque, but I might stop being amazed by them eventually.