Indian origin man is feeding 24,000 families in Kenya amid lockdown, let’s Salute him

Amid the lockdown which was imposed to prevent the spread of the epidemic, which has claimed more than lakhs of people’s lives, an Indian-origin safari operator based in Kenya is feeding thousands of families there.

Pankaj Shah had started the initiative after he felt heartbroken to see people starving and struggling to live.

“People were getting hungry and angry,” Shah told Reuters.

As per news agency Reuters, Shah started communicating with citizens who were really interested in helping the less fortunate ones in this crisis. Luckily, a local school which was shut down due to the coronavirus epidemic had offered their campus premises as headquarters.

Kenya’s Asian community, which was officially acknowledged as the country’s 44th tribe three years ago, came altogether to contribute in every possible way. They even brought cheques and truckloads of food that could not be transported owing to the suspension of flights.

Meanwhile, the volunteers named “Team Pankaj”, have sent out 24,000 packages of food since March 22. Each hamper comprises enough food to last a family of five people for up to two weeks.

“One old woman told us she hadn’t eaten for days – her sons had stopped supplying her because they have no work,” Shah told Reuters. Pankaj Shah finds his spirit for community service from his idol Mother Teresa whom he says he met decades ago in Nairobi.

Shah is now urging wealthy Kenyans to do their bit to donate 4,000 Kenya shillings (Rs 2,890) for the food packages alone. He had also pointed out that amount is about the cost of two pizzas and a bottle of wine.

“I just need half the rich people here to care enough to fund a hamper,” he added in a statement.

It has been learnt that lorries full of food were sent for distribution in Deep Sea slum last week only. Pregnant woman and those with babies were also assisted by the volunteers.

(Source: The Youth)

The Kenyan dance parties where men are banned

The team behind a new event in Nairobi argues all-women's dance parties can create safe nightlife spaces for women.

On a warm evening in a suburb of the Kenyan capital, a residential outdoor space has been hired out to be used as a dance floor.

Music is playing loudly and women are dancing.

"You have to be so strict in a place with men. You just want to go out with your friends and men interfere," says Jane, 26, who's come to the party with her best friend Shani.

"So having a space where it's all women immediately feels safe and you feel you are with people who understand you."

Security is tight and while a few men are let in, it is only to drop off the women they are accompanying.

After that, the men all have to leave immediately.

And it's not just the partygoers who adhere to the single-sex policy: the bar tenders, security officers, DJs, sound mixers, MCs and ushers are also all women.

Unpleasant experiences when out with friends in mixed clubs is part of the reason the two welcomed the idea of an all-women's rave.

'A difficult year for Kenyan women'
"When I learnt that it is a safe space for women I immediately signed up," says Shani.

Shani and Jane enjoy clubbing and heard about the all-women's dance party on Twitter.

The night, called Strictly Silk, was conceived by Njoki Ngumi, Njeri Gatungo and Akati Khasiani, all members of The Nest Collective, a Kenyan multi-disciplinary arts collective that also works across film, music, fashion and other arts.

They started the all-women's dance parties in 2018 but the inspiration behind it was more than simply a night of fun.

"2018 was a difficult year for a lot of Kenyan women. There were a lot of stories about violence and people were becoming bolder about misogyny online and offline," says Ms Ngumi.

"There were a lot of stories around sexual harassment. We just wanted to curate this energy in celebration of women in spaces that are not usually welcome for women and especially things to do with nightlife," she adds.

Kenya has been in the spotlight recently with some well publicised cases of rape and alarming cases femicide.

In 2018, international charity Plan International ranked Nairobi sixth among 22 global cities where women were most likely to be sexually harassed.

The interviewed experts said Kenyan women stood a 50% chance of being sexually harassed in public spaces.

And in May 2019 the Federation of Women Lawyers Kenya (Fida Kenya), raised the alarm, saying they had recorded over 50 femicide cases in the first five months of the year.

Not only for lesbians
Munira, 22 and Khadija, 25 are best friends. As practising Muslims, they often find themselves with minimal options when it comes to night life.

They say that, although women from all faiths attend the all-women parties, they particularly suit Muslims.

"Some of us have to remove our hijabs to blend in when we are out dancing. When they see you with a hijab, people are surprised and wonder what you are doing there.

"A space like this is also better because we are forbidden from freely mingling with men," Khadija says.

"It's difficult because there are simply no exclusive all-women clubs," adds Munira.

Although all-women dance parties may seem like a novel concept, the idea of exclusive safe spaces for women is not new.

Ms Ngumi asserts that Indian, arab cultures and even some religions like Islam, have long had exclusive spaces for women, although these spaces were mediated by patriarchal or religious systems.

There is however a belief among some people that an all-women rave is simply code for a gay party, something Ms Ngumi dispels:

"We are deliberately queer-affirming and queer-celebrating but people would imagine that this is an exclusive queer event. There are events that are exclusively queer but this is not that kind of party. We welcome all people, including non-binary people."

It's an assurance that those in the LGBT community, who face intimidation and even violence in public in Kenya, have openly embraced.

Gay sex is illegal in Kenya and punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

In May 2019, Kenya's High Court upheld the law criminalising gay sex after campaigners had challenged it.

"Unbeknown to a lot of people, there is a large lesbian community in Nairobi and sometimes we want to be in a space with just women and being in a place where people are of like mind, is safer," says 22-year-old Ann Marie, who is bisexual.

Binti, 23, who also identifies as queer, adds that having an all-women rave without judgment has been the highlight of her year so far.

Ms Ngumi hopes to make the all-women dance parties not only regular in Kenya but across Africa.

"This is a worldwide issue. There are conversations around the toxicity of club culture and nightlife particularly towards women, gender identity and orientation," she says.

"As we shift towards mainstream club culture, we must have spaces that celebrate women both exclusively and in the mainstream."

The names of some of the people in this article have been changed to protect their identity.

(Source: BBC)

Kenya coins replace leaders with animals

Kenya has dropped the images of presidents from newly minted cash coins, in what is seen as an attempt to prevent their glorification.

Previous coins bore the images of Kenya's three ex-rulers: Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki.

Many Kenyans saw this as an attempt by their leaders to promote themselves, and to personalise the state.

The new ones have images of the country's famous wildlife, including lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinos.

President Uhuru Kenyatta - the son of Kenya's first leader Jomo Kenyatta - said the new coins were a "big change" and showed "our nation has come a long way".

All three of the incumbent's predecessors had their images printed on the currency during their rule.

Mr Kibaki, who won elections in 2002 ending Mr Moi's 24-year rule, broke a promise not to have his image printed on money.

Notes with images of Kenya's founding leader Jomo Kenyatta are still in circulation

Intense public pressure led to a new constitution, adopted in 2010, to entrench democracy and human rights. It states that the currency "shall not bear the portrait of any individual".

The central bank has fulfilled the requirement in the case of coins, and is likely to do the same when it prints new notes.

The bank said the choice of animals gives "physical expression to a newly reborn and prosperous" Kenya, and shows respect for the environment.

(Source: BBC)

The Kenyan teenagers tackling FGM with an app

A group of Kenyan teenagers have created an app called i-Cut to help girls affected by Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

The five Kenya girls, 'The Restorers', created an app called i-Cut, designed to connect girls affected by Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) to legal and medical assistance.

The students, Stacy Owino, Cynthia Otieno, Purity Achieng, Mascrine Atieno and Ivy Akinyi, have named themselves 'The Restorers', and will be the only Africans participating in the 2017 Technovation Challenge in Silicon Valley in August.

The powerful story of a #WorldPitch team who wants to restore hope to girls in society: https://t.co/VQf6GDhPIz @LakeHub #WednesdayWisdom pic.twitter.com/uSA5wuOaL4

— Technovation (@technovation) July 5, 2017

The app will help connect affected girls to legal and medical assistance.

Girls who are forced to undergo the procedure can also alert local authorities by pressing a panic button on the app.

Despite being illegal, Kenya still records a high number of FGM cases. According to a 2016 Unicef report, one in five girls have undergone the procedure in the east African nation.

The practice is mostly done when the girls are between the ages 10-14 years.

"This app a good way of getting people to talk about FGM," said Dorcas Adhiambo Owino, the group's mentor and Kenya's Technovation program lead.

"It is a conversation starter and that shows anyone can be involved in the fight against FGM."

The team beat nine Kenyan semi finalists to secure a spot at the Technovation Challenge taking place in August in California.

They will meet other finalists from other parts of the world and compete for a chance to win $15,000.

Sponsored by Google, Salesforce and Adobe, Technovation challenges girls aged 10-18 to create an app that solves problems faced by their communities.

(Source: CNN)

Unesco announces new heritage sites around the world

Mountain monasteries in South Korea, a Saudi oasis and Mumbai's art deco buildings are among a number of sites to make it on to Unesco's World Heritage List.

Being listed gives them legal protection under international treaties.

The UN's cultural organisation, meeting in Bahrain, have been agreeing which landmark sites around the world need preserving for their cultural, historic or scientific significance.

Here are some of the chosen sites:

Ancient port city: Qalhat, Oman

Bibi Maryam Mausoleum in Qalhat, Oman

In the east of Oman, the walled city of Qalhat was a bustling port in the 11th and 15th Centuries.

It is a "unique archaeological testimony" to the links between the east of Arabia and the rest of the world, says Unesco.

Hidden Christian sites: Nagasaki, Japan

Nokubi Church, Nagasaki

The site on Kyushu island consists of 10 villages, a castle and a cathedral and were built between the 18th and 19th Centuries, at a time when the Christian faith was banned in Japan.

They reflect the earliest activities of Christian missionaries and settlers in Japan, and "bear unique testimony to a cultural tradition nurtured by hidden Christians", Unesco says.

Gothic and Art Deco architecture: Mumbai, India

Art deco buildings adorn Mumbai's Marine Drive

Having become a global trading hub in the late 19th century, Mumbai embarked on an ambitious urban planning project, constructing beautiful buildings for residential and commercial use.

The Victorian buildings are more classical constructions with balconies and verandas, while the Art Deco buildings are cinemas, flats and hospitals in an array of colours.

"These two ensembles bear testimony to the phases of modernization that Mumbai has undergone in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries," Unesco says.

Evolving cultural oasis: Al-Ahsa, Saudi Arabia

Al-Ahsa boasts more than two million palm trees

Al-Ahsa, in the eastern Arabian peninsula, is the largest oasis in the world and has been home to humans from the Neolithic era to the present day.

It also boasts 2.5 million date palms, gardens, canals, springs, wells, a drainage lake, historical buildings and archaeological sites.

Unesco called it "an exceptional example of human interaction with the environment".

Mountain monasteries: South Korea

Magoksa temple in Gonju is one of the seven ancient temples

The Sansa mountain monasteries in the south of South Korea have been operating as centres of faith since the 7th Century.

The seven temples contain open courtyards with lecture halls, pavilions and ornate Buddha halls.

Unesco called them "sacred places, which have survived as living centres of faith and daily religious practice to the present".

Sassanid archaeological landscape: Iran's Fars region

Qal'eh Dokhtar castle in Fars

The mix of fortified structures, palaces, and city plans - at eight archaeological sites across Fars province - date back to the era of the Sassanian Empire, from the 3rd to 5th Centuries.

The sites not only reflect the "optimised utilisation of natural topography", but also bear witness to the influence of Roman art and the Achaemenid and Parthian cultural traditions, Unesco says.

Dry-walled settlement: Kenya

An entrance at the Thimlich Ohinga dry-stone wall settlement

The Thimlich Ohinga is the largest and best preserved dry-stone wall settlement, typical of Kenya's Lake Victoria region.

The settlement, situated north-west of Migori town, is thought to have been built in the 16th Century and appears to have served as a fort for communities and livestock.

Unesco called it "an exceptional example of the tradition of the first pastoral communities in the Lake Victoria Basin".

Photos courtesy of Unesco

(Source: BBC)

Hippos poop so much that sometimes all the fish die

Their dung consumes the oxygen around it, creating lethal pulses of suffocating water, writes Ed Yong in the Atlantic. Read on: 

At first, Chris Dutton and Amanda Subalusky had no idea why the fish were dying.

At a bridge on the border between Kenya and Tanzania, they noticed that whenever the Mara River rose by a few feet, dead fish would wash up on its banks, sometimes in the thousands. Storks, vultures, crocodiles, and hyenas made short work of the carcasses, so “if you weren’t there to see it, you’d never know it was happening,” says Dutton. Local rangers knew about the die-offs, but they blamed the events on farmers who sprayed pesticides in upstream fields.

It wasn’t the farmers. Through an increasingly bold set of experiments, involving remote-controlled boats, computer simulations, a makeshift dam, and vast tankers of excrement-filled water, Dutton and Subalusky identified the real culprits: hippos.

The duo, who are married, published their results in a paper with the remarkably polite title of “Organic matter loading by hippopotami causes subsidy overload resulting in downstream hypoxia and fish kills.” To translate: Hippos sometimes poop so much that all the fish choke to death.

At night, hippos wander into grasslands to graze. During the day, they return to rivers to keep cool and protect themselves from sunburn. As they wallow, they constantly urinate and defecate. Every day, the 4,000 or so hippos in the Mara deposit about 8,500 kilograms of waste into a stretch of river that’s just 100 kilometers long. “Down at the bridge, you can put a net in the water for a few seconds, and the entire middle will just be coated with hippo feces,” says Dutton. “There’s hippo feces everywhere. Over the rocks. Over the bottom.”

A hippo pool. (Chris Dutton)

In the dry season, when the Mara becomes narrower and shallower, certain stretches of it become especially thick with hippos—and their dung. Hippos are aggressive and dangerous, so only the foolhardiest of researchers would wade into these so-called hippo pools. Instead, Dutton and Subalusky deployed a remote-controlled boat armed with sensors. It revealed that the mud and water at the bottom of these hotspots is a stagnant mess of ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other chemical grotesqueries. It’s also starved of oxygen: Almost all of the gas is consumed by bacteria as they slowly digest the accumulated hippo poop.

During heavy rains, extra water floods into the hippo pools, churning up the putrefying muck and sending it off downstream. For good reason, these events are called “flushing flows.” To study them, Dutton and Subalusky used an oxygen-logger—an arm-long cylindrical device that, to the untrained eye, looks rather like a pipe bomb. “We always get stopped at airports,” Dutton says. Once dangled off the side of a bridge, the logger revealed that flushing flows dramatically reduce the oxygen levels of the downstream river, often to levels that are lethal for many aquatic animals. That, says Dutton and Subalusky, suffocates the fish.

The duo went out of their way to confirm this idea. They added hippo poop to bottles of water and demonstrated that oxygen levels fall. They added poopy water to “experimental streams”—long trays designed to simulate a flowing river. But they still craved a more realistic experiment. “We were talking about ways of how we could create a flood through a pool, and some other researchers said: Why don’t you build a small dam?”

Inspired, the duo used sandbags to block off the water supply to a nearby pool that’s in hippo territory but not frequented by the animals. A Maasai fixer connected them to a guy who had a large truck, another guy who owned two huge 4,000-liter tanks, and a third guy who owned a large wastewater pump. With all of that, the team transferred 16,000 liters of soiled hippo water into their artificial pool. And when they released the sandbags, they found that oxygen levels did indeed plummet in the water downstream.

8,000 liters of poopy hippo water going into an artificial reservoir. (Chris Dutton)

Bizarrely, this is the second study to be published this week on how hippo poop affects river environments. Keenan Stears, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, did similar work in Tanzania’s Great Ruaha River. Unlike the Mara, the Ruaha’s waters have been heavily drained by upstream farms. During the dry season, it stops flowing altogether, and its hippos are confined to isolated pools. Stears found that pools with lots of hippos have much less oxygen than those where the beasts are rare. As such, they had half the diversity of fish and invertebrate species, and just 4 percent the numbers of fish. Only in the wet seasons, when water once again flowed between the pools, did the fish and invertebrates bounce back.

Stears estimates that around 94 percent of hippo populations in Africa live in rivers like the Ruaha that have either already started to dry up or will likely do so as the climate changes. “The results from our study are indicative of emerging issues relevant to the whole of Africa,” he says.

This “reinforces the need to maintain flows in these river systems during the dry season,” adds Frank Masese, from the University of Eldoret in Kenya.

But Dutton and Subalusky’s study shows that hippos and their oxygen-sucking waste can occasionally be problematic, even in relatively pristine rivers like the Mara. And their work challenges us to reconsider what pristine even means.

Last year, the duo showed that migrating wildebeest nourish the Serengeti by drowning en masse in the Mara, adding about 1,100 tons of dead meat to the river every year. “The Mara really is a unique system,” Subalusky says. Hippos and wildebeest act as conveyor belts, channeling land-based nutrients into the water in the form of excrement and carcasses. And that water runs through a landscape that’s dominated by herds of elephants, and thousands of zebras and gazelles.

In this way, the Mara reflects what rivers elsewhere in the world might have once looked like, before humans slaughtered their way through mammoths, bison, and other megafauna. It’s not a babbling brook of clear water. It’s a world of dead bodies, putrefying poop, and the occasional wave of suffocation.

Rare white giraffes sighted in Kenya conservation area

A pair of giraffes with leucism, a condition that inhibits pigmentation in skin cells, have been filmed by conservationists for the first time, writesNaaman Zhou on the Guardian. Read on: 

A pair of rare white giraffes have been spotted in Kenya, to the delight of local residents and conservationists.

The reticulated giraffes, a mother and child, suffer from a genetic condition called leucism, which inhibits pigmentation in skin cells. Unlike albinism, animals with leucism continue to produce dark pigment in their soft tissue, which explains the white giraffes’ dark eyes and other colouring.

After local residents tipped them off, conservationists found the giraffes in the Ishaqbini Hirola Conservancy in Kenya’s Garissa county.

The area is managed by the Hirola Conservation Programme (HCP), an NGO dedicated to preserving the critically endangered hirola antelope, one of the rarest in the world.

The HCP wrote in a blog post that the giraffes were first reported to rangers in June by a local villager.

“They were so close and extremely calm and seemed not disturbed by our presence. The mother kept pacing back and forth a few yards in front of us while signalling the baby giraffe to hide behind the bushes.”

According to the HCP, this most recent footage is only the third known sighting of a white giraffe.

A white giraffe in the same Ishaqbini conservancy was reported in March 2016, while in Tanzania, a Masai giraffe calf called Omo was observed in Tarangire national park in January 2016.

Reticulated giraffes are listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, with an estimated 8,500 individuals in the wild. They live in Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

Breastfeeding in public places

My latest on breastfeeding in public places on the occasion of International Breastfeeding Week in today's Vishwavani V+. Here's the link: