The Agrinautica

Wednesday, May 24th - It's just about two hours from Spokane to my next destination, a tiny town called Marcus outside a small town called Kettle Falls north of Spokane. While the terrain south of Spokane on my approach had been rolling prairies, north of the city I was immediately in amongst narrow valleys of farmland separated by small forested mountains. This highway wasn't so big as to scare away the quaint red barns nestled into the bucolic landscape either.
   Passed through a few small country town blocks of Kettle Falls and then just out of town, surrounded by tall pine forest again, my GPS had me turn off onto the road for Marcus. Minutes later I found the road skirting what appeared to be a lake, and the lake appeared to be very low, which I thought was odd since the whole west coast has gotten record rain this year. And furthermore, it looked like there was the remnants of a road upon one of the barely exposed sandbars, which also intrigued me.
   As I'd find out later, the lake is actually the Columbia river (again), but it is dammed somewhere below here, and they have recently lowered the level quite a bit in anticipation of more snowmelt coming down the line from further up. And the roads? Apparently the town of Marcus had originally been where the lake is now, but when the river was dammed the whole town was moved, and you can still see some roads (as I did) and foundations when the water is really low.
   My friend Doug mentioned that Marcus was one of the first European towns in the area .. wikipedia doesn't mention that but it did have a role in a gold rush of the 1860s, since boat traffic couldn't pass the nearby Kettle Falls, Marcus became a staging area for boat traffic on the section upriver of the falls to the "Rapids of Death".
   And now, over a century and a half after this little town was founded ... it has a population of 183, no retail shopfronts, not even a post office. But it's ten minutes from the town of Kettle Falls so I think all business is there and Marcus is now just a few sleepy residential streets along the river/lake banks. Doug later told me there's a big apple cider festival every year in Marcus.
   The Canadian border is only 35 miles further up the river, but Doug told me he discovered the other day when he tried to take his wife to Canada that they wouldn't allow him in because he was arrested some 40 years ago for trespassing ("even though I had permission to be there!"). I'm similarly not legally allowed into Canada for stupid reasons. Eff Canada man.

   My friend Doug I met on my first project in Nigeria in 2012, where he was also doing a beekeeping project just like me with the same organization. In fact it was his mischievious influence that led to me talking to the princess. We kept in touch and in 2014 he joined me on a trip to East Africa to attend a beekeeping conference in Tanzania. We ended up having a grand old time traipsing around East Africa for about 40 days. Doug is in his seventies, a retired beekeeper, joking so much one never is really quiet sure when he's being serious, and he's an inveterate flirt. As I said he got me to talk to the princess, and a classic example of his mischievious influence: when we saw two cute girls at a restaurant in Ethiopia, he urged me to go talk to them. "Ask them where the Air Ethiopia office is" he suggested. "I KNOW where the Air Ethiopia office is!" I objected. "But they don't know you know!" he explained [cue that meme of the guy tapping his forehead knowingly]. I went and talked to them and they told me to sit with them and they'd show me where it was when they finished eating. Sage wisdom! No ladies would have been safe from Doug... if it weren't for the fact that on his previous visit to Ethiopia he had met and married a 22 year old Ethiopian woman.
   On this visit shortly after I arrived at Doug's house, he mentioned that Mebrihet had recently moved to Spokane to be nearer civilization and other young people.
   "I hope not permanently?" I asked, and he kind of shrugged and said
   "maybe? ... it was my suggestion actually."
   ...
   "Hey want to go look at some beehives?" he suggested brightly
   "Sure!"

   So we drove down the road another ten minutes in his pick-up to a beeyard of his where he had some nucs (small hives recently split off) he had introduced some experimental queens to from the University of Washington. It was around 5pm at this point, there were still several hours of daylight but it was quite brisk and a light rain misted down upon us intermittently. As we opened up the beehives to check if the queens were present and laying an F-18 fighter jet screamed through the valley on an apparent loop that brought it past us once every six minutes. It was quite close, and low, and I figured out it was a six minute loop specifically to try to be ready to get a picture, but never succeeded. Unfortunately for one reason or another many of the queens hadn't taken.

   Back at Doug's place he slapped some steaks on the grill for us and we cracked open some beers. As we were finishing a young fellow (early twenties-ish?) dropped in to talk to Doug, apparently he's on the autistic spectrum and doesn't have many friends, and so Doug tries to be friendly and makes him feel welcome to stop in.

   Suggested Musical Accompaniment For Next Bit:

   Like nearby Marcus, the original town of Kettle Falls was also flooded by the damming of the Columbia River

Thursday, May 25th - The next morning Doug took me to see some sites in the town of Kettle Falls. We poked around an old mill site, and the cute general store in town had a big antique store section that I perused for interesting things. Got several more beers from the fridge -- there's not much craft beer in Australia so I've been buying a lot of beer, more than I could drink, and when I finally returned to Australia I actually left quite a few interesting beers in their pantry! Good thing good beer ages well.
   We had lunch at this cute little diner style restaurant in Kettle Falls where we both had bacon burgers ('Murica!) sitting at the counter. The waitress walked by just as I was telling Doug I hoped to avoid petting any dead people in Bellingham, where Maureen works at a funeral home, Doug having asked what I would do there, and said waitress gave me an extremely strange look.

   Our last stop was the interpretive centre / museum by Kettle Falls. I just read the wikipedia article on Kettle Falls to make sure I got my facts right and if you have a minute it's actually worth a read, not too long and concisely encapsulates the story of the whole area I rather feel. For most of the last 9,000 years native Americans from a large surrounding area from the coast to the plains would come to Kettle falls to fish during salmon fishing season, with up to fourteen tribes meeting to trade, socialize, and settle disputes as well as catch the fish. The would only catch the weaker fish to ensure that the strongest would go on to breed. On June 19th, 1811, the first documented European explorer reached the site. Fort built nearby in 1825, Jesuit mission in 1845, hotel and resort town in 1891. In 1940 with the abovementioned dam building, Kettle Falls was flooded along with 21,000 acres of prime land used by the native peoples, and in June of that year 8,000-10,000 people attended a "ceremony of tears" as the falls disappeared forever under the lake. The dam now blocks the salmon from coming to to this part of the river at all.

   Inside the interpretive center we met a man dressed all in clothes made from pelts like a trapper, and it turned out he had made them all himself and was a thoroughly interesting man. He is or was a history teacher at the local high school, and there were a number of absolutely gorgeous muskets in the museum which he said his students had made under his direction -- I'm not talking about model muskets I mean fully functional and beautiful looking guns! He seemed a bit accent-deaf, he seemed to assume I was just Australian without any further complications (frowny face), and launched into an interesting story about this time he was arrested for vagrancy in the Northern Territory, locked up overnight, but of the two cells in the jail the male one was full so they put him in with the women much to the great envy of the other fellas, and in the morning the local magistrate, who happened to be a friend of his, came and let him out. Immediately he was asked "do you have a license to drive a truck?" "yes?" "good because this truck of pig iron needs to get to Sydney but the driver just died!" ... so shortly after being sprung from jail he found himself driving a truckload of pig iron the thousands of miles toward Sydney. And then apparently some time later he was employed shooting deer from helicopters in New Zealand, apparently with plentiful dear and venison being (at the time at least) worth twice as much as beef, it was cost effective to employ helicopter based teams to hunt deer for their meat. Which I'm only making the connection just now but that's kind of a weird modern equivalent to the trapper he was dressed as in the interpretive center.

   And by now it was around 13:00 and I was overdue to get on the road to meet my friends in Seattle for dinner! I'll save the drive to Seattle for next entry

   Continueing the Ethiopia trip
   This is getting so long ago that it's getting seriously hard to recollect what happened. I better get the rest of this out quickly! This trip only lasted till Dec 7th so it's almost done.
igure
Sunday, November 30th (2014) - We hadn't really been happy with the Planet Hotel in Mek'ele (recall our earlier epic round of hotel indecisiveness) so on returning sunday night from Axum we chose to check in to the good ole Axum Hotel. We had been really unimpressed with the new building but this time we walked into the old building and it was much nicer! It had that old timey elegance they can't seem to recreate with hotels any more.

Monday, December 1st (2014) - Enjoyed waking up not being in a hurry, but was stressing out all morning about having to change my flights around. I was going to fly to Bahir Dar via Addis Ababa on Wednesday, spend all of Thursday in Bahir Dar visiting the university there, fly into Addis Friday, Addis-Nairobi Saturday, and home Sunday ... but our friend Daniel had put me in contact with a fellow who had been a high up in the ministry of agriculture (head of the apiculture section?) and I wanted to meet up with him in Addis if I could. As you can see, my schedule was tight, and unfortunately I was having a hard time getting ahold of the guy (Muleford), and I didn't want to change my flights until I could talk to him and figure out when we could meet.

   Doug and I walked down the street and found the Ethiopian Airlines office, which fortunately was just down the road from us, and then decided to have lunch while I tried to figure the plans out. The nice "beefman" restaurant with its comfortable airy courtyard was also in close proximity so we went there.

   Now Doug is a sly fellow -- if his wife reads this let me emphasize he behaved himself! ...but instead he pushed all his sly ideas on to me. In this case there were two cute Ethiopian girls at a nearby table, so Doug started egging me on to talk to them. "Ask them where the Ethiopian Airlines office is!" "we know where it is!" "yeah but they don't know we know! Go on they've totally been stealing glances at you!" ...
   Well they were cute, and I did think I'd noticed a giggly glance in our direction, and this Ethiopian airlines plot was fairly plausible, so I went and asked them. "oh hang on a few minutes and we'll take you there" was their response. So I ended up sitting with them for a bit, they were both students at Mek'ele University, Dagm and Merry, architecture and electrical engineering. Them and I and Doug presently walked down to the airlines office, and he gallantly volunteered to entertain them while I took care of my flights. I swear, no lady would be safe if he was still single (he married an Ethiopian after his first visit in 2012 thouh), he's the suave-ist 70 year old I've ever met.
   Since I still hadn't go ahold of Muluford I just booked the earliest flight in to Addis on Wednesday morning, giving myself the whole day there. That way whenever he was available I could fit it in. I was really worried that Ethiopian Airlines would levy a fee on me for every one of my flights that had to be moved but for one $50 they made all the changes, so I'd be in Addis all day Wednesday, fly in to Bahir Day on Thursday, back to Addis on Friday, to Nairobi on Saturday, and back home on Sunday. A flight a day!

   I came out of the airlines office... to find that Doug had volunteered me to take Dagm with me to Bahir Day O: I'm telling you, that guy. Anyway, at least he'd proposed the idea but it didn't end up happening.

   I forget who gave me the idea but I eventually was able to message Muleford via "Viber," a messenger app that seems to be popular in Etihopia (like Whatsapp). I even commented to someone that I thought that was weird to message him on that ("in America you never conduct business via text messages) aaand it would sadly be shown why. Well I can laugh at it now -- completely unbeknownst to me, when I thought the conversation was over, I accidentally hit a button that inserted a "sticker" that said "NO!" just after he said "that's great" --



And what's worse, I didn't even see it to correct it until I arrived in Addis and looked up the conversation to see where we'd left off the plans. At which point I was utterly mortified!!!



   That evening Doug and I toured the Comel honey processing plant. I'd been there before in 2012 but they'd gotten some more equipment since then. After that Daniel took us back to his house where he wad another sumptuous meal of Ethiopian food, prepared by his wife. Once again they filled me to bursting.
   After that Daniel took Doug and I to some local clubs, which was very interesting. Mek'ele, as I've mentioned before, has a rather medieval look, and this club/bar Daniel took us to was a small dark square room with rough-hewn walls, the bar tables were clearly planks, and a few plank-like shelves on the wall behind the bar held bottles of alcohol. This medieval room was lit with neon lights and most interesting of all, the music playing was kind of a synthesis of traditional and modern, and the dancing clearly resembled the traditional dancing I'd seen earlier. So that was actually really interesting. It's local experiences like that that are often the most interesting, and I'm not sure I'd have been brave enough to wander into a small dark local bar at night by myself (as it is I felt a little awkward because since I'd had it with me earlier I still had my big DSLR camera hanging from my shoulder)




   Does anyone know how I can make it so one can view my blog in an oldest-on-top format so going down through it one reads the entries in chronological order? Especially when one is viewing tags? Even if I have to migrate to a different site to do that, I'd really like it if people could read about my previous trips in the logical chronological order.

   I'd like to start with an apology, I meant to keep daily updates this past week or so, but I've been a bit preoccupied -- I'm in a third world country! This will assume you haven't read the ones I did make though.

   Today I was party to a dead serious conversation about whether or not picking certain leaves will cause rain to fall, whether or not fire breathing dragons are real ("I think they're in South Africa or maybe Arabia, Kris do you have them in that big zoo you said there is in San Diego?"), and whether millipedes can make themselves disappear and by extension be used by a person with magic to make you invisible, and later everyone who was in this conversation busted out their laptop. Welcome to Nigeria.

   Exactly oen week ago I arrived by a six hour flight directly from Amsterdam to Nigeria's capital, Abuja. It was 34f and snowing in Amsterdam at 3pm, it was 90f and humid in Abuja at 9pm. Altogether I'd been traveling for 27 hours since I left Southern California.

   My first thoughts on Nigeria as I entered the warm dark night was that it smelled very Earthy. A bit like a hedge. As my driver (First name "Blessing.") drove me the thirty or so miles from the airport into town I was actually surprised by how well developed the apartment blocks we passed were. They weren't soviet concrete monstrocities, they weren't bare brick piles like in Egypt, they weren't in abject disrepair like I've seen in Mexico, they were nice and decorative and looked like something I might see in Orange County! Well Santa Ana anyway.
   Another interesting cultural insight on that ride into town was when we passed cars driving the wrong way on our side of the highway median.
   "Uh is that normal??" I asked Blessing
   "Oh certainly, but not during the day. Only now that the traffic police aren't on duty" ...soo the traffic police don't work nights it seems! In unrelated news a few minutes later we passed a smashed car on its side in the fast lane.
   My hotel was nice, and had security looking under cars at the front gate for bombs and a uniformed guard at every landing of the stairs.

Day 2
   In the morning I met Doug, another beekeeping volunteer who had also arrived the day before, in the lobby. He was an older fellow who had done a lot of volunteer assignments before. He had just come from Ethiopia where he had trekked through a sandstorm to visit a remote volcano, had visited sulphur springs, and the lowest place on the Earth. At the latter they still harvest salt by camel, and apparently a bunch of tourists had been gunned down just two weeks earlier ("but it's okay, we had the army with us and a bunch of villagers with kalishnikovs!"). He was a very cheerful fellow who was constantly making people laugh.
   Blessing picks us up, we go meet the folks at the Winrock Nigeria field office. While we were talking to Mike, the country director for Winrock, he received a text that a bomb had gone off in Kaduna state just to our north.
   At a local market Doug and I noticed that all the honey on the shelves came from America, WTF!? We don't even have honey from America in America!! (Well okay that's a slight exaggeration, but I think literally a greater proportion of their honey came from America as does the honey on our own shelves)
   Seeing the town by day it doesn't quite measure up to Santa Ana but Abuja isn't straw huts or decrepid shanties either. To exchange my money we went to the money exchangers, which consisted of people who lurked on the curb outside the sheraton. Mike negotiated with them with the assistance of current exchange rate information on his smart phone. Couldn't reach and agreement with the first guy and made a deal for a second one for 159 naira to the dollar, which was pretty much right on the exchange rate.

   Doug drove (well was driven) down to Kogi state while I caught a 40 minute flight to Ibadan in Oyo state in the south-west. Ibadan, one of the largest cities in Africa (and yet I bet you've never heard of it!) DOES look like a third world country, The road in from the airport was lined with hovels, and we even passed a dead body lying by the side of the road. Host organization's office is about the size of a closet, but my hotel here is nice.

Day 3
   Wednesday the host organization (PASRUDESS) team picked me up and we drove to the local government headquarters. For the headquarters of the administration of a quarter of the city and 300,000 people, it was a shockingly shabby looking place! Unpainted concrete, broken windows, a broken down flat-tired grader in front of it on its grounds.
   I met the local government chairman, a very nice fellow in traditional garb, and then we all attended a very nice opening ceremony for the training. A meeting hall was nicely and colourfully decorated and at least 100 people packed in. There were speeches and was a performance by ... a dancing fire-breathing holy-man of the local traditional religion.

   After the ceremony there were many photograpghs taken, such as this one:




   I came back into the hall to see Mike from Winrock sitting at his laptop looking serious.
   "Kris, there's been an incident with Doug's team"
   I feared the worst in the pause that followed. Kogi state is not entirely free of the boko haram terrorists who are specifically opposed to "western education."
   "His driver hit a woman. She's in the hospital in serious condition, the driver's in jail, and the car is impounded." Yikes! Thank god it isn't boko haram but what a nightmare way to start the project!!!

   Next we bundled into our own vehicles (a car, an SUV, and a van packed with people) and headed out into the countryside to the bee yard. It took about forty minutes to get there. We went through two villages and lots of lush fields of shrubs. Unfortunately no thatched huts except for one small cluster that my Nigerian guides were quick to tell me were Togolese. Villages were typically small cinder-block cottages with corrugated metal roofs.
   It took about an hour and a half to get to the bees. And when we got there were didn't have any beekeeping equipment -- we'd driven all that way to just look around. Hives were a rectangular topbar style that is not the best. Was surprised by how little bee activity I saw at the entrances.

   Back at my hotel that evening I was filled with stress over the idea that I'd be expected to teach about bees 8 hours a day for the next week and a half to the same people. How could I possibly fill that many hours with bee lessons????


Day 4
   My panic grew more acute the closer the beginning of class came, until I was actually sitting in front of everyone and kind of wanted to shoot myself. Class was held at the local government center under a corrugated metal awning in a corner. There was a lot of background noise.
   Attempts to figure out where to start / fill some time by having everyone introduce themselves weren't terribly productive since most of the beekeepers barely smoke English and stumbled through a few basic sentences.
   So I began at the very beginning, talking about the three castes of bee in a beehive and their life cycle. It quickly became apparent they didn't understand me so a young fellow named Dayo ended up being my interpreter, translating what I said in English into.... English. Somehow no matter how slowly I talked and carefully enunciated, it was greek to them, but this fellow, whom I could understand perfectly well myself, also was perfectly understandable to them.
   We also quickly developed a system of them passing notes up to me with questions, and thus I filled the entire day with lecture along the lines of a marathon Q & A session.
   The next day I planned to talk mainly about bee diseases, as well as how to make lotions and creams from wax, and queen rearing.

   After class I was take to the state government buildings where I met the state agricultural commissioner, some important people in the education department, and was going to meet the governor but he was busy with the Chief Justice. Meeting the governor is still on the agenda at some point. Considering Oyo state has a population of over 7 million, more than many countries, that's kind of like meeting a president!

   That evening, however, doing a little more research on bees in Africa, I found out that diseases aren't really relevant to beekeeping in Africa. The bees take care of themselves here! There went my lesson plan out the window!!!

Day 5
   Another day of panic about how I was going to fill up the time! But questions about the two remaining topics actually kept us talking about them unil an acceptable ending time in the afternoon. Whew, survived another day!

Day 6
   On Saturday we went out to the bee yard with the equipment and had a productive day working through the hives and talking about ways they could improve what they were doing and addressing some misconceptions. Another day successfully filled with training and I had Sunday off!



Day 7
   Did stuff on Sunday but this isn't about that ;) this entry would be humungous if I strayed from my theme of the stress of filling up each day with training. So just so you know, there's a LOT that isn't in this entry. Tune in to my regular entries if interested.

Day 8
   This morning, like every morning, my car was extremely late (has been more than an hour late twice and 45 minutes late twice). Being as the class members had been sternly warned "we aren't running on 'Africa time,' you need to be here ON TIME, we're starting at 9 on the dot" I've been feeling rather irked to be coming in half an hour late myself as the teacher, all because my ride apparently DOES run on this 'Africa time.' Fortunately this morning, unbeknownst to me, the start had been pushed back to 10 at some point so I wasn't even late.
   First I spent a little over an hour talking about my observations from our working the bees on Saturday, and then responding to questions. After that we:
   (1) made mead their way -- by mixing ground up honeycomb (with honey in it) with water to a 1:1 ratio, putting a lid on it, and letting it sit. Allegedly after three days it's all fermented and ready to go! My brewing experience tells me this is madness but apparently it works for them!!!
   (2) made mead my way -- by mixing honey with water to a 1:3 ratio by volume, adding yeast, putting a lid on it with a tube in it with water in a bend, so carbon dioxide can vent without air coming in. This is supposed to sit for several months until the tube is no longer bubbling. Unless it goes off like a rocket like theirs???
   (3) made candles out of beeswax
   (4) made lotion out of olive oil and beeswax. While they had their own method of making mead and candles, this was a totally new concept to them and tehy were extremely excited about it, as making lotions and creams out of wax will provide them with very marketable use for their wax.

   Altogether everyone seemed to really enjoy today's "lab work" and it was just a really fun day. It felt like a great success.

The Future
   We're going out to another bee yard tomorrow and hopefully I'll have more of an opportunity to work with the less experienced members of the bee club, since I was mostly working with the most experienced the first time we went to the field.
   After that the local university's agriculture department wants me to stop by their apiary to talk about some problems they're having with their hives.
   Wednesday I believe we're going out to another bee yard?
   Thursday we're having a general review session.
   Friday, closing ceremonies!

   The end is in sight! I think I've survived! Not only that, but I think somehow I've done well, they're talking about having me come back and modeling other classes after the way I taught this one!

   Now I need to get back to cramming up on queen rearing. I really shouldn't be getting preoccupied right now with writing LJ entries.



Pictures!