Beestly

I visited the vast UN Nairobi complex for a meeting with a former colleague and it was bewildering and fascinating. The atmosphere couldn't have been more different from within an NGO and I couldn't imagine how my friend handled the 'process driven' approach when he'd previously been a renegade operator in our Cameroon and West Africa work.

However I always come out of such meetings overly optimistic about future funding and partnerships. To make themselves more effective practically I firmly believe that agencies like the United Nations Environment Programme must work with 'boots on the ground' organisations like ours. There are some good conversation threads to follow up on future trips and I'll transit through here more regularly.

Nairobi has been interesting. It's an incredibly complex city, not only in its layout. It has great green, rolling, wooded stretches, huge gated communities, shabby apartment blocks, some of the world's largest sprawling slums, paralysed traffic, rampant and worsening corruption, noise, energy, development, bougainvillea everywhere. 

I spent the evening 30km outside of the city at the 1920s whitewashed home of Philip, a longtime project supporter who urged us in 2007 to return to South Sudan (southern Sudan as was), where our organisation began its history in 1903. The Athi River area and the ranch on which Philip lives present Kenya in microcosm. 

Unregulated new cement factories blotting the landscape, cut flower farms supplying the European market, conflicts over land rights, overpopulation on fragile soils, rocky outcrops that draw climbers, a dusty atmosphere, high temperatures promising much wanted rain, an explosion of warthogs and a fluffy hyena.

After a cheese soufflé and tales of South Sudan stretching back several decades, I fell asleep listening to the sounds of wildebeest snorting on the lawn, which they have chosen as a safe calving spot.