new reason to blog

it's a way to stay awake in the jetlag-resistance countdown. I'm holding at bay my body's longing for sleep. If I give in and nap, I know I'll sleep for the next twelve hours. Then I'll take several days longer to readjust to Pacific Standard Time. Five hours more to go before a legitimate bedtime..........

poem that just made me grin

Homage to My Hips

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!


-Lucille Clifton

chocolate welcome

Got home yesterday from my trip to find a blue gift bag of chocolate goodies hanging on my doorknob.

Chocolate-dipped orange peel - one of my addictions.

Chocolate-coated sunflower seeds - never encountered before. Can chocolate-infused flax-seed oil be far behind?

Chocolate candles - totally new to me. Look like gourmet dark and milk chocolates, decorated on top with white chocolate flowers. As you reach for one you see a slip of paper: Candles. Do not eat! On closer inspection, they all have little wicks in the center of the white chocolate flowers.

A box of Luscious Lips - which make me laugh. Exaggerated-pouty-lip-shaped chocolates. Hot Lips, with cashews and red chilli. Honey Lips with vanilla and wildflower honey. Peachy Lips, with dried peaches. Espresso Lips with coffee.

No idea yet who this is from. Only 3 of my housemates are home this weekend, and they haven't a clue.

Feature in Kenya's Daily Nation

Read the profile of me that ran yesterday, in the regular My Take column.

why do you see so few people

stretching, doing yoga or tai chi, in airport departure lounges? And on planes?

The body cries out for it. You'd think it would be infinitely preferrable to slumping in bucket chairs. Yet I'm almost always the only one doing spinal twists, standing poses, in the airport spaces and planes I'm in. If I designed an airport, every departure lounge would have an enclosed space, free of furniture, with rubber flooring, exercise balls, yoga mats and props.

slow motion thought

is how I'd describe my mental activity today. Every hour or so, since I got up, I've wanted to cry. Homesick is too simplistic - it's more my body and mind trying to encompass the multiple worlds they've swum through in the last few weeks.

Less that 50 hours ago, I watched a herd of cows feed on bushes alongside Argwings Kodhek road during rush-hour traffic. The drought has driven herders into the city to search out any patch of green that will keep their animals alive.

Less than 40 hours ago, I stood inside the departure terminal at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye to my parents on the pavement outside. The post 9/11 security madness is so intense, British Airways won't allow non-travellers to even wait on the pavement outside. They have to stand on the other side of the road opposite the terminal.

When we arrived, the security guard told me I could check in and then go out again to say goodbye. So my parents dropped me off and went to park the car. Once I'd checked in, they wouldn't let me out again. They said he'd been wrong. They wouldn't even open the exit door so I could speak to my parents without the barrier of glass in-between. So I left without hugging them, without proper goodbyes. With only the image of my father's battered, work-worn palms pressed flat into the glass wall from the outside, against mine, on the inside. My mother's face holding back tears, blurred through the faint reflection of my own face in the glass, my own tears.

oakland bound

In departure lounge at Heathrow's Terminal 1. Feeling amazingly alive, given that I've come off an 8-hour flight from Nairobi, and will get on a 13-hour flight to San Francisco in 2 hours time. I attribute it largely to finding a restaurant called Giraffe that's the first place I've ever really wanted to hang out in an airport. Putumayo music, fair trade coffee, and food you'd actually want to put into your body in-between cross-continental flights: muesli, soy milk, smoothies.

I'm beginning to absorb and process the whirlwind of the last week. Laugh at the surreal intensity of it: back-to-back meetings and interviews, blitz of media coverage, 6 days running of features in national Kenyan newspapers, TV channels, radio stations. So much wonder, adrenalin, excitement at the amazing responses to my work, the electric connections, the universes of possibilities opening up.