Home

"I have watched the sun set, shrunken and mean, over a cold, drab London street and stood outside a mud hut next morning on a Kenyan hillside and seen it rise in glory over the East African plains.


Africa is close.

Yet, few go there. Africa has a reputation: poverty, disease, war. But when outsiders do go they are often surprised by Africa's welcome, entranced rather than frightened. Visitors are welcomed and cared for in Africa. If you go you will find most Africans friendly, gentle and infinitely polite. You will frequently be humbled by African generosity . . .

. . . Africans meet, greet and talk, look you in the eye and empathize, hold hands and embrace, share and accept from others withouth twitchy self-consciousness. All these things are as natural as music in Africa.

Westerners ariving in Africa for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size--even the sky seems higher.

And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open. They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived.

In Africa the essentials of existence--light, earth, water, food, family, love, sickness, death--are more immediate, more intense. Visitors suddenly realize what life is for. To risk a huge generalization: amid our wasteful wealth and time-pressed lives we have lost human values that still abound in Africa. "


~~~Richard Dowden, from: Africa; Altered States, Ordinary Miracles.

Photos: sunrise, near Amboseli; our welcome at Maasai boma, Namuncha, 2004; lunch with John, Maingi; lunch with Maasai, Namuncha, 2004; chai with John, Leah and Esther Njoroge; Tsavo; Zanzibar; Siyapei Children's Home; dancing with the Turkana; Siyapei Children's Home; Tsavo.