The Essence of the Journey!

Nairobi Birthday

By: Danica (now 10 years old!)

At Upper Hill Campsite in Nairobi they had no space for our trailer to open up and we chose to stay in a wooden banda called the Bunkhouse. The restaurant served outsized portions of hamburgers with chips for supper and we could have ordered a quarter of what we did. In the morning there was a lot of banking and shopping to be done and it was quite boring but I remembered that tomorrow was my birthday and that kept me happy. I swapped the books I had read with Jessie’s (the owner) fourteen year old daughter, Connie, and we played for the rest of the afternoon together with her little brother and Nicolai.

I had an early wake-up call in my third floor bunk bed with the family singing ‘Happy Birthday’. Nicolai gave me a fancy red card which he had made with a piece cut out of the corner in which a dolphin was drawn very nicely and a parcel of sweets tied up with banana fibre and a newly-sprouted leaf in the traditional Swahili way. Asante sana (thank you very much), Nicolai. Written in black letters on a big envelope was Danica de Freitas. Daddy had put on the surname to make it sound serious but I don’t know why. My first presents were the books I had wanted including Gorillas in the Mist, The Witch and the Wizard, The Gift and Out of Africa. I got a new diary and journal too.

Next we drove to the Rothschild’s Giraffe Centre also as part of the day’s treats. There was a viewing platform 4,5m of the ground so that I was just at the right height to see the adult giraffes at head level. It felt weird to be looking down on the juveniles and calves even if they weren’t fully grown yet. We needed to place the large, grey-brown pellets one by one onto the giraffe’s rough tongue to feed them. The first time I tried to feed Daisy, the tallest giraffe around, she bit me really hard but it was my fault because I fed her flat-handed like I would a horse so she thought my fingers were food. A gentle baby took my fancy and she was much better at the giraffe kiss too.

You might be wondering what this giraffe kiss is. Well, it’s pretty simple: put a pellet between your lips and wait for a 30cm dark purple tongue to slurpily pry it out. They also had tortoises at the centre and I found that the biggest one had some sort of infection because there was green puss coming out of his eyes and nose so I informed the keeper. In the giraffe museum hung up on the walls were beautiful projects done by local schools about endangered wildlife which meant that awareness is being created but pole –pole ( slowly slowly).

The Karen Blixen Museum was where we went to find out about my ‘Out of Africa’ book. It had some interesting things from her past life like the books she had read, her bedroom suite, big trunk suitcases

(Louis Vitton), and her mood lamps which were lighted red for when she was not in a good mood and green when she was! (Dad thought this a great idea for Mom!) I am excited to read more about her life in Africa since standing in her very own house. She thought the

African sun was too hot and always wore double hats. She ran a coffee farm and we saw the huge machine which took 24 hours to make a cup of coffee. “I wouldn’t like one of those!” Dad remarked. She used to sit at a millstone picnic table at sunset looking towards the Ngong (knuckle) Hills. Like Joy she painted too – another inspiring Lady in Africa!

Our other stop was the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust where they raise injured and orphaned baby elephants and rhinos. They fed them 2l bottles of specialized milk

which they drank in a mere 10s except for the youngest, a four-week old calf walking around with a keeper under an umbrella and covered with a Masai blanket to protect his tender skin from the sun. You see, the African sun is indeed very harsh. He was rescued only a few days ago from inside a well. Some villagers had noticed a herd of elephants clustered around their well for the whole day and when they went to fetch water in the morning they found an absolutely exhausted elephant

calf. After the playful elephants had finished mudbathing we went to see Maxwell, the blind rhino, found walking in circles alone when he was 5 months old.

 Although all these babies have had a traumatic start to life they will have a bright future. I know it! We bought a movie about the work that the Trust has done called Protector of the Giants. One of the points that struck me from it in Daphne Sheldrick’s speech is this: “Elephants are so much smarter and better than us,” and I couldn’t agree more. Let me remind you who ruined the Earth for themselves and the natural habitat for the animals. This world of ours needs help. Half of its forests have already been chopped down and what used to be 100% wilderness is only 12% today. If we don’t act now to save our planet and all the species that depend on it, then we have destroyed ourselves!