invisible hand communality

I know its been a long time since many of you have heard from me. In light of this I decided that with my limited time on the internet I could piece together a few of the things I've written in journals and to friends real quick so you could have some semblance of an update. Before I do that let me catch you up on at least my whereabouts. I think the last time I updated I had just gotten back from an expedition to Tsavo-West National Park. Since then I've been in southwestern kenya for a few weeks in the Amboseli ecosystem, in and around Nairobi National park and nairobi proper, and camped in Masai-Mara National Reserve. Long story short. I've been out of the office. Today I am finishing up on three papers that will mark the end of one part of the semester and the beginning of another. Academics here have a lot to do with writing. I like writing, but it takes me a long time to put comprehensive thought into comprehensive writing. I've been busy and stressed. Thats neither here nor there. I'm happy about it. In the next week I will enbark on the next part of the semester, which is directed research. It hasn't been decided yet, but I will most likely be using PRA techniques to conduct surveys and group meetings with the local communities surrounding Amboseli national park with a focus on human wildlife conflict perceptions, problems, and solutions. I'm still excited to be waking up to Kilimanjaro every morning and to be participating in community based natural resource management. Kenya has been good to me.

Heres some other stuff.

End of October...
I’m not even kidding. I’ve figured out a way to make communism and the invisible hand work together. I signed the patent rights yesterday. So get this. In East Africa 82% of the land is arid to semi arid land. This means that the best way to utilize it is to graze livestock. If you do anything else, like grow corn and beans, the whole ecosystem gets out of whack and people die and you have to start over. So, East Africa is in the process of starting over. The World Bank has done many good things, but they have also had some very shortsighted moments. In 1968 they decided that they would set up a system of communal lands called Group Ranches in Kenya. This was supposed to solve all of the problems of land use and land tenure and sustainability and be a one size fits all fit. It didn’t work.
note: alright, mayb'e communism comes with certain connotations that nobody wants to deal with, you know what I mean

But that’s neither here nor there. Tomorrow I am leaving for two weeks. I will be living in Nairobi National Park and The Mara. Today marked the end of one section of my time here and tomorrow marks the beginning of another. At the moment I feel as if I am either burnt or dead. Probably because today I took three essay exams that were comprehensive for what I’ve learnt thus far. They were each an hour and a half long and for each of them I was writing for an hour and a half.

Lately I’ve been thinking about putting things in the right places. Some of you know this and most of you don’t. So, let me fill you in. Putting things in the right places is about honesty, reciprocity, and house cleaning. If we put things in the right places our friends know what we think about them and the situational happenings of life, our dirty dishes get clean, and nobody gets hurt. All I’m saying is that it works and it’s abstract and I like it.

I wrote this among other things to the house I live in at school...

...And then I realized that everybody else doesn’t know what they think about Jesus and things like dishes not mattering and nothing really being a big deal, because nothing was ours in the first place and it made me sad, but it also made me curious. I like being curious because it makes for good conversation, in and out of yourself. So this takes me to now when I’m having conversations with all these different people that I live with and some of them are about how that one song by Sufjan Stevens is really sad, and some of them are about how I like to eat bananas but they like them better with crunchy, not plain peanut butter, and some of them are about how that time I barked at a dog in the market and all the mamas selling bananas laughed was funny, and some of them are about how I used to live in this place called Joshua house that is both similar and different to the place I live in now and the difference is at Joshua House we’re trying to love each other and learn how to do that by loving Jesus...

I’m excited about getting back, but I’m also excited about continuing my time here. I’m excited that I can relate the two and make both places better in that way. I’m excited that our story is not over and that you have things to tell me when I get back that I’ve never heard of in the realms of faith, school and life. I’ve been learning a little bit of the language here and it seems to me that when you start to get a language, which I haven’t by any means, the indicator of that is thinking in that language. That’s weird to me, not only do people have different languages they think in different languages. I don’t know why I think that’s weird, I just do. So, I was thinking about that and then I wondered what it will be like when we think in God’s language and that got me so excited. It seems to me that in general I’m excited about lots of things. I hope you are too.

November 6...

Today I had RAP again. Today, I got inspiration on what I should do for this RAP. This inspiration came in the form of a sprite. The sprite tasted funny. At least I thought it did, but Ally tasted it and she said that it tasted like regular sprite. So, I was left sitting there with this sprite that was neither different than the sprite I have had before or the same than I have had before. The sprite was the same, but my taste buds have changed. I guess after two months of getting used to some things you start to forget what others are like. I think that this is a good thing. When I get back to America I know that there will be a process of tasting things that are very much the same, but in the same sense, very much different. When I say taste I am not trying to convey one sense, I’m trying to celebrate the whole collection of senses that we, as humans, have been endowed with. My home will taste different, my school will taste different, burritos will taste different, my friends will taste different, church will taste different, my cell phone will tast different…