The Rest of Our Day in Nairobi

I put a separate post for the Nairobi Nursery with the baby elephants (which they feed milk until they are about 4 years old) then try to get them reintegrated into wild herds again by age 5. We also went to the Karen Blixen Museum. Remember the movie “Out of Africa” in the mid 1980’s? It won best picture in 1985, I think. It was the story of a woman named Karen Blixen. She was a Dutch woman who went to live in Nairobi, Kenya for several decades. She eventually wrote several books and one was about her life and it was made into a movie decades later. So we went to the Out of Africa farmhouse and coffee plantation of Karen Blixen. If was very interesting. I remember the movie being incredibly long…but I was a young teen at the time. Perhaps I will look into watching it again some cold snowy day this winter.

We also went to the Kazuri Bead Factory, where mothers are employed and trained as jewelry artisans. They sang and danced for us and showed us the way they made their beautiful jewelry from clay from the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is a pretty long and arduous process. Most of these women are widows or have fled abusive relationships and need to make money outside the home to support themselves and their children. We met Momma Elizabeth, the only remaining of the three women who started this bead making project back in the mid 1970’s. They sang and danced and flashed amazing smiles.

I told you we did a lot that first day in Nairobi! We stopped at one other place and it was the Rothschild Giraffe Sanctuary. There are three subspecies of giraffes: the reticulated giraffe (which is what we mostly see in our zoos in the U.S.), the Masai giraffe (which is darker and we saw in Africa), and then the Rothschild giraffe, which is found in southeastern countries in Africa but are few in number. This sanctuary is a breeding area for them. There once was only 120 Rothschild giraffes in existence, now there are 800. The baby giraffes stay in the sanctuary for 2-3 years and then are released into the wild in groups of 3. These giraffes can see for 2 km, and their leg bones contain no marrow – they are made of solid bone. They have rectangular spots and white legs. We fed them pellets out of coconut shells. They were adorable.