Beautiful People

We have only two days left in Kijabe before we hit the road for our East Africa travel adventure. Here are a handful of photos posted in tribute to the gracious, hospitable and resilient people of the Kijabe area.

"In 1997 . . . The New Republic published a special issue devoted to Africa. The cover featured a striking black-and-white photograph of ragged refugees in flight, and an ominous headline across the top in appropriately grim, gray letters: AFRICA IS DYING. The headline captured the conventional American conception of Africa as a unitary landscape of unremitting despair. But this and other attempts at apocalyptic concision hardly squared with my experience of a continent churning with passion and rage. Most Africans I encountered, far from passively succumbing to their fate, were struggling mightily, and ingeniously, to survive. "

~~Bill Berkeley, from The Graves Are Not Yet Full

Photos: women hauling firewood, Kijabe; Sammy and Veronica, Maai Mahiu; Veronica and her tent, Maai Mahiu; house, Kijabe Town; widow with prostitutes' abandoned children, Kijabe Town; kids, Maingi; John Njane, Kijabe; building, Maai Mahiu; Dickson, Maai Mahiu; walking to Maai Mahiu.