Getting there.

The following are a series of snapshots that I wrote down during my travel from Boston to Nairobi. Over the next couple days I will work to catch up with the first two weeks of my experience here. This seems like enough for now.

I used British Airways' online seat selection tool a week before departure and sat in an exit row just behind first class on both flights. Advice to any international traveler: this is a must. I could have done yoga in the leg room. I wrote the following at the time: No joke. We're right here at the red braided rope. I mean this is first class... okay maybe grade B first class. But heck we can almost stretch our feet into first class. I think that makes us first class by association. I mean we're not the private leasers of footrests and slippers. And we don't get that supreme satisfaction of closing our personal, individually-operated screen in our neighbor's face but certainly I can put feet on my comrade the steward's seat and exit a conversation by way of my mp3 player.

Interesting how money is the great equalizer. I wonder what would happen if Rosa Parks sat in the front of the airplane. Maybe they should have just had a fare gradient in Montgomery. That would have saved us the need for civil rights. I say that ironically of course and as reinforcement of the fact that economic class is today the most relevant classification of people; more than nationality, race, religion, etc. I.e. there are more similarities in the lifestyles between a rich, black, baptist, American and a rich, Hindu, Indian than between two white Christians who live on different sides of the tracks in the same American city. Or, in the words of one of my professors, “The Third World exists in the First World and visa versa”.

Every meal creates your own personal landfill. By the time I've finished it's like the total mass of the meal has somehow increased. I can hardly contain all the trash on the tray with which it was served.

So many distinct layers of clouds that it seems we could descend forever. That the plane is the only vessel we have ever known. Adrift in a vaporous sea there are no destinations, no landmarks, no geography. Here we are always nowhere. The clouds below us now are thin and look like oil deposited on an invisible surface slowly spreading in gentle puddles... and now the ground finally appears, in the mist and haze it is like first land appearing through a fog. Like something we have never known but instantly recognized as something we need... and then the wing rose, wiping the slate of sky, and then dipping again to exhibit a dappled curtain of puffy sky with the morning sun nestled warmly in its folds. Despite the fact that I am looking perfectly horizontal the lack of contrast makes the sky appear a vertical canvas.

Our landing was instantly and authoritatively reviewed by a four-year-old's, “weeeeee,” resounding from somewhere in the cabin.

London. My watch says midnight but the sun seemingly has broken its restraints and raced ahead in over-exuberance. Like an old-friend that could never be turned away, its presence on the eastern horizon is comforting though perhaps not timely.

Watching Heathrow airport awaken was the perfect send-off to reinforce my convictions as why I found myself traveling to Kenya to pursue livelihoods for the poor based on cargo-bicycle design. In college I was struck to learn that advertising is always targeted at people with money. It seems obvious enough but the corollary is that the capitalist world itself is designed for people with money. It means almost all of the great minds and almost all of the phenomenal resources of this world are working for only those people who have money. This was delightfully driven home by an exhibit at the Smithsonian last year titled “Design for the Other 90%”. Worldbike's work was on display and I've been greatly inspired by reading the exhibit catalog. Sitting next to a Porsche and a Ferrari in Heathrow that morning watching the shops open I wrote: Each one opens like the pages of Vogue magazine with open arms and multi-million dollar marketing budgets to welcome the world's jet set. Just imagine if those showcase lights instead allowed poor rural children to learn to read at night and all that bottled water was inexpensive water purifying technology that provide one billion people with access to safe drinking water. What a prosperous, just, and sustainable world we could live in.

3:00am at the YMCA located adjacent to downtown Nairobi's business district- can't sleep. I guess my body is taking the scenic route; setting its own pace still somewhere out over the Atlantic. That's alright, I'm not quite ready to receive it.

My plane arrived about 9:30 the other night. That's 30 hours in Kenya so far. The soft cone of the mosquito net draped over my bed in the artificial urban twilight reminds me of a funnel spider's web. The hazy quality it lends to the narrow room matches the scent of exhaust and dust and the smoke of cooking and trash fires that lingers even at this time of night.

Coming up.... the project gets started, a description of Nairobi, thoughts on what constitutes good design, and my experiences with homemaking in a foreign country. Oh, and pictures! For now: the corner of Nairobi downtown out the YMCA window and Patrick my neighborhood rickshaw driver in Jamhuri II. This is neat because rickshaws are a really rare species here. Becoming more so if you can see the condition of his.

My other pictures are posted here: http://flickr.com/photos/27342523@N06/

As I go along some will be incorporated into the blog where I'll tell you more about them.