Welcome to Book Passage. Thank you for coming here tonight, thank you for supporting your local independent book store. I am Susan (Leipzig) and I also want to tell you that you will be able to see this tonight's event on the internet, probably in about a week to 10 days at FORA.tv yes, that's why all the microphones are here, so if you miss a sentence or two you will be able to recapture it. Tonight's event is a conversation with Dr. Jean Davison and Arif Jamal. The Jean Davison's book is "The Ostrich Wakes: Struggles for Change in Highland, Kenya". Jean Davison has traveled the world as an anthropologist and an aid worker. She is an international consultant who has worked in Africa for 25 years. She received her PhD from Stanford and has taught at several universities including Kenyatta University in Kenya. She has published four books and has worked on the effects on Naphtha on Mexico's workers and on peace issues in Northern Ireland, Morning in Serra Mattu-A Nubian Tale as told to Elizabeth Duborsky. We have Arif Gamal here tonight. Arif Gamal has been involved with Pesticide Action Network International. He has been on the North America board of directors. He has been active in the alternative agriculture and pesticide reform movement throughout his professional life. He founded the natural resources protection group in his native Sudan, worked as an integrated pest management expert for the UN Food and Agriculture Organizations in France and has researched and taught biological alternatives to pesticides I countries throughout the world. He continues his research at the biological control division of the University of California at Berkeley. Please turn your cell phones off and welcome them here tonight. Thank you. I thought I will tell you a little bit about the game plan here. I am going to talk for about 15-20 minutes about the Ostrich Wakes and then Arif is going to say something and then we are going to dialogue and open it up for questions and answers. So you know what the game plan is. This book "The Ostrich Wakes" is really topical travel narrative. And it looks at the joys and the hopes of Kenyans, both young and old up in the Mount Kenya region, Kirinyaga at the Mountain. And this is in the shadow not only of the mountain but at the most exciting election Kenya has had in many years in 2002 when they were able to the first time elect a new president for the first time in 24 years. I have been working up in this region of Mount Kenya for the last - over 20 years. And when I was doing my doctoral research at Stanford, I learnt their language and went up to live there for almost two years up on that - one of the high ridges. And one of the things that I did was was look at change, the impact of change on communities and on individuals. And I got very intrigued with women farmers lives, with the transition in their lives. With what affected them, with the impact of colonialism on the older women and the younger women who were born on independence, how things had changed for them, they were born around little before 1963 and a little bit after, the two women in that group and collected those into a group of life stories called "Voices from Mutira", the first edition was published in 1989 and the second edition came out in 1996. And this book is really looking at the new generation in the 21st century. These are their sons and their granddaughters, their daughters and their grandsons. The oldest women spanned the whole 20th century the middle-aged women whose life stories I collected including a traditional mid-wife woman who was the first of three wives, a woman who had left her husband, which was very unusual during the Mau Mau Liberation Struggle and another woman too who was a widow in the middle-aged group and then two younger women, one who had completed 5th grade and the other who had gone through high school, we would call high school, secondary school and both of their opportunities were very different because of that. What shaped this book were two things. I had been working at the University of Malawi in southern Africa and Malawi is a little like a thumbprint into northern Mozambique. If you can picture northern Mozambique along the Indian Ocean coast and I was fascinated to be there in Malawi at a time, at the same time we were having dire problems in that country with the beginnings of AIDS. Unbenounced to me, many of the man who had gone to South Africa to work in the mines had come had gotten AIDS outside in those mining communities. And the South African government still under the nationalist regime - apartheid regime in 1988 asked the Malawian miners to go home, they sent them home. They would not allow them to stay in the mining communities. So you got thousands of men coming back and then going back into their communities and we began to lose students in our campus, very gifted students. The man who taught me how to speak Chichewa, their language, died of AIDS when I was there. We were losing the heads of our departments - I was in the sociology department. It was a very terrific period of time to have this happening. And to document how people were dealing with the AIDS epidemic at this time, were they going to a traditional healer, a senyonga, or were they going to western medical practitioner? And I would visit during this period of time because it wasn't that far away, continued to visit these communities, particularly two villages Kagumo and (Gotwega Kathomo) way up on the ridges and talked to the women whose life stories that I collected earlier and talked with their families. And what I discovered is at that time in rural Kenya in this area there was a great sense of denial. AIDS doesn't exist here. AIDS is in the Nairobi, why is that? It's because stress has come to those in the urban areas. We don't have that problem of stress here in this area about three hours drive north of Nairobi. And so part of my task when I came back was to ferret out information about what was actually happening in these real communities and AIDS and also in globalization, a new word, a whole new communications revolution was going on too and how was that affecting particularly younger people. So I went back to Kenya at the end of 2002, during the handing over ceremony to Mwai Kibaki, the new president and a group of Kenyans picked me up, Kikuyu and we drove north to (indiscernible) the district head quarters. And already I could see the (indiscernible) headlight glue began to swift out and and bleed out into the new road as it spread. So population growth rate had increased but was arcing at that time and there was a lot of joy and excitement. People were dancing in the streets literally in Nairobi. The results of this election and the changes they thought were going to occur and that was one of the things that I wanted to find out. Unlike previous times that I have been there, this time I wanted to use a collaborative approach and so with my former research assistant Katawana, I began to train my godson who is her older son, Wongo and his new brothers because it was a now emerged family that I was living with and her daughter to do focus interviews - focus group interviews with their peers because I figured that they were going to find out more about these issues talking to someone their age and of their same sex then having me go in and talk with them. Well, I did interviews with the older women and some of the elder men and in one case did with some of the young girls and what I found was that again people were not talking about AIDS in particular, it was as if there was a leopard moving in the grass and that was shifting and each time I would try to probe I was getting nowhere. And I had two groups of young women, one of them girls in high school and another group of girls who had only completed eighth grade except for two of them and they were in their late teens and early 20's and the girls in the high school group said "Yes, we know about AIDS and in fact they have health workers who come in to our schools to talk to us about family planning, sex education which is very different than historically the way it was handled and we have people coming in from the health department talking about AIDS and occasionally we have videos, if there is electricity." But what they said is that the most meaningful contact that they had with if the health worker was someone who had AIDS himself or herself - mainly himself or they knew of somebody that it made it seem much more real to them, but they didn't want to talk about it a lot. What was on their minds - as young women was the increase in rape and family violence, the increased use of Kumikumi, the local brewed alcohol and the problems with a gang a Kikuyu gang that were threatening young girls at the time of the elections that they were going to go into the secondary schools and threaten any girl who was going to vote for Mwai Kibaki on the opposition party from the historical party of KANU with dragging them out and forcibly circumcising them. This was horrific because in 1983 Daniel Arap Moi had passed a presidential decree outlawing female circumcision and what I discovered that even in their early 80's most people in this area had given this up, they thought it had no more reason as in the past for their grandmothers and their mothers fine, but for them they were educated women. They knew the health problems and had begun to die out and that's true in other portions of Kenya as well. So they were concerned about this group Mungiki and what was happening to it and these men were mainly young men in their 20's who could not get jobs and unemployment is a big problem there. They would be qualified through secondary school but it was a reactionary group and it was on the roads and they were threatening people on the public means the Matatu roots and using their pangas in violence in a case in (indiscernible) and people were very concerned. So there was a concern about not only terrorism in a sense or fear of violence even within their families in terms of alcoholism, rising alcoholism but on their streets as well as having as a nation suffered two attacks internationally from terrorists. One on the American Embassy in 1998 and then the month before I arrived on the coast of Mombasa where a car bomb exploded in front of a tourist's hotel owned by Israelis and in both cases it was most of the Kenyans who were killed. So they understand and being close to Somalia as they are the problems linked with global terrorism. But they were also concerned too about dropping prices for their coffee. And what were they doing about this probably the same kind of things that we would do if we have discovered the prices are dropping on our agriculture projects. They were letting their coffee bushes go. They were ignoring them and neglecting them and where as I saw a very healthy coffee 10 years earlier - eight years earlier this time as we drove along the road or walked along the pass the coffee bushes were spindlier, they were light green and they were unhealthy. And so they were dealing with that and what they did is say okay, the prices are going down, its not worthy to grow coffee we will switch to tea and so more and more people had diversified and gone into tea and there was a new crop up in the highlands that they were planting and that was passion fruit, because some there was a demand for passion fruit and passion fruit juice in Europe. So they saw that these were two new crops that they could that they could farm and most of them didn't understand you know about global market prices, but they understood at a very personal level and I think that's something similar too were affected by downsizing and globalization and one of the things I am concerned about in my writing is to make those connecting links between the kinds of things we experienced and the kinds of things they are experiencing and the positive actions that they take to overcome these obstacles and problems. I wanted to tell you one story about a woman that I worked with in family planning and then I will stop there and let you take over Arif. To give you an idea of how women which (indiscernible) women had strength in this area handles these kinds of problems. Family planning was a big problem in the early 80s when I was there, 4.0 growth rate and it began going down and part of the reason was that Kenya undertook a very widespread family planning - Kenya family planning program and they had community workers and they trained men as well as women to go into communities and explain to them about child spacing and family planning and the uses of various contraceptive methods. Well, speed forward and with the impact of AIDS it became even more important sort of connect up this link and so what my friend (Mithamo) was doing whom I call Junior (Mithamo) in here was - she was doing education with various community groups and she would drive from her place in Kagumo around over the mountain to Embu to talk about family planning and to distribute various methods including condoms to families and to women usually meeting separately with women and men. So she was driving her white truck up over the mountain and the hill when along came a cop couple of cops and they were part and they pulled her over and they took her to the front of her truck and they said, "Ma'am look, do you see your license plate is broken, its hanging out here, you have a problem" and she looked at these two men these two policemen and she said, "You consider that a problem?" She said, "That's not a problem (indiscernible) look at the problems you have, you are leaders in the community, you are role models, how many of you are having sexual relationships?" And she said," I think I have something that can help you with your problem." And you are laughing what this woman have to say to us and she got back in her truck and she said, I have something for you here and she kind of egged them on, and finally she reached over into her box with condoms - packaged condoms and handed out packages of condoms to these cops. She said, "Now you go and use those and you teach other people how to use it and if you need help I will show you." And they went away, you know, kind of off color and said, "Go on madam, go on." They keep forgetting about her license plate and then the next rookie cop that came along and he said you see that woman in that white truck, you want to check her out. I stood back and laughed. So this is the way women up in Kirinyaga, up in this area, which is by the way the title comes because this is called the Ostrich Mountain and it's the plight rough the ostrich. Kirinyaga is ostrich in Kikuyu and what I found is that with the new elections that the ostrich, people the Kikuyu in this area were waking up and seeing hope for the future in a way they haven't done for the last 15 at least years or so. When during the 90s when I was there, late 80s and in particularly in the 90s it was just like semblance almost having given up. But suddenly with this new election they were alive and they were awake and they were interested. I can't use the microphone and I can't sit. Okay, so. Okay. My voice is so hoarse, my legs are so long. Okay. This is also about one and this story starts with 5 o'clock in Nubia. It's a desert. And at 5 o'clock this boy, he is about four or five years old. He knows, he's excited with his schedule so, he describe. His mother just brought him the (indiscernible), pairs of ____. She got it in a bowl - an aluminum bowl. And she picked it up and headed towards the middle of the courtyard where the palm trees has grown taking with them that. Big palm trees in every courtyard in Nubia. This is the time even there are no very closes, done very closely. She comes to one of those holds that are made out of the roots. She puts down there the aluminum, the milk is foaming, it is raw, it is warm and with her finger tips she knocks and scratches on the aluminum. This is the time that she had to step back because she had her son always with her. And the big blower comes out of the roots, and that itself in a matter of seconds swallow the (indiscernible) and with that things would break okay, and it go back into, and it will go back into the bottom. But just before it goes in, it can be - thank you. This is them this is my father-in-law. Imans Imans dad, was there in this story. Very strong woman (indiscernible) and and then we just went back home in December, where we had Christmas. And I asked her cousin. I think the only asset is house snake (indiscernible). You think that's the snakes like you know, the stereotype of Africans, we were also on horses and we had elephants and you know, thinks like that. So this is how snakes we usually see it and that how snake usually is a - it cleaned up it cleanse up the house. Okay no pesticides, okay. All you need is a good snake that doesn't bite you, okay, but takes care of the rats and the cockroaches. Noora, her son, her daughter was a very strong woman too. And you have two glance the Nile, it would come to the Nile, they asked like you we will at at the Livingstone when he wanted (indiscernible) the lake, he went actually said what do you call this, which which became Lake Victoria, of course, okay. And they said we call it lake. And you know what was the basis for it, but but that is there a name for it, they said yes, but the Masai always, it's the Masai land, you know, it's the Masai Lake and the Nile was always up to now, I mean, I lived with my grandmother, who worked for about 40 years. She doesn't know the name Nile, if I say Nile you mean the Sea. And and Nubia is old, excuse me, Nubia is so old, that the ancient Egyptians were not that strong, and they are sexy, lets go and get some slaves from Nubia okay and they basically all over the place. In 700 BC, the Nubians got tired of the Egyptians, often I got tired of them, by the way, okay. And they went all the way up there. They went through downtown downtown (indiscernible) and they went all the way up to the delta and at the heart care basically. He has a stature that's holding these two big gorgeous hands and he's spotted the upper Nile and the lower Nile. For six to seven years, the Nubian state and this was basically the 25th dynasty of Egypt. They were the good sheep. Some people think of them as the Ethiopians but it (indiscernible) okay. So the Nubians are very old, and one of the things that intrigued me was when my father, I have to tell you about my grandmother in a moment. When my father was in school, because my father didn't want to go to school he wanted to help my mother, right. His father died, his father died very early and he had two sons and my my grandmother was pregnant with my aunt. So he said I am going to stay with you. She said, no. In the morning you do the water picking, okay. I have land, you work my land okay. And then after that you go to school. You wake up very early in the morning. You take the bulls out, you do the waterwheel and then, I am going to buy the (carry) Cadillac which is a white donkey, right. And he was going to school with his brother and come back to help her. And then after he finished the school which is the fourth, fifth years, she said go on. Each of those, it's going to be in another place. It's very far away. She said, go on. And then you'll do with the certificate which is about what (indiscernible) or so and he said I finished now. Now it is the biggest job in the village. She said, what. Well isn't that, that's the biggest village. The biggest post in that village is the post man, okay. And you'll be drinking tea all day and listening to all these women, writing to their husbands in Egypt, send us money, so and so died, so and so, gave birth, so and so had an affair so on and so forth. And this is not a job "Go". And he said, "Where shall I go?" It's down there in the south, that tomb. And I won't see you anymore. She says, "Who wants to see you? Why would you want to see me?" And he said, "I want to help you." She said, well, when were you my husband, you are my son okay. And so get out of here, go and finish your school and he went off to school, right. So, when he was there, he was about 20-years-old. They sent for him he said come on a holiday and between about two days it's long, now of course about four days in the desert. Just as they are entering station he had enormous amount of clapping and songs and lullabies and all of these things. He poked his head and he saw everybody from the village including the maid and he is (indiscernible) you know you're all here? What's going on? He said, your marriage. He said "Who is getting mad?" He said you. Well, that's what grandmother, how she did it. And we've been leaving the the office closed and then they run in these initiation kind of things. It's - it's wonderful, but you know we don't have time I had, 20 minutes. Okay. So really they ran to the Nile and you know, they cleaned him up and the got men said, Oh man don't marry. (indiscernible) daughter, is she pretty? I saw her in the ____. Okay then you are happy? Yes, I am happy you know. And my mother is pretty by the way, okay. So anyhow, he goes and this is what the Nubians do. They lock them for seven days. Aren't they lucky? Yeah seven days they lock them in a house, of course in the morning they come and they take the bride away and and they ask her questions, they clean up and which, you know, they bring them some food, fresh food and then they lock them up again, for seven days. Each day on the seventh night after that, you have seven women. And these seven women, would basically, they take some food. And they would take it to the Nile. Followed by enormous amount of kids. When they get to the Nile, they would eat a little bit to make sure that they legalize the food, and then they serve to the Nile. That's what basically my mother did with my when my sons was here now. And then they would chant, they'll do all these kind of chants. You never understand what they other. And then this woman would come back. Before they come back, one of the woman would (indiscernible) that got the drink, put it in one of those recipients, fill it from water of the Nile and then they will take it back. Okay. And then when they get back this, they break seven bread like our - our secret is something like a crepe it's just made out of - of wheat. And they would call seven happy women. Now, you know I challenge you, who are seven happy brides who got engaged. How would they look like? Would you know? No. Yeah. There are seven happy brides. They are pregnant. If they pregnant they can be happy. So they would have these seven happy brides and they eat a little bit, of course, the kids are just waiting there, with the (indiscernible) you know, because it is fully smothered with honey and sugar. Right. So they keep on waiting, this is their candy if you like. So, I I was thinking about this. And what it this, seven, seven, seven? And they weren't really young, because much as we have developed in everything. Okay, we are looking to the west. And we look at their lives that is what's basically all over the world, okay, because my father was an ambassador. So he roamed around. But tough he he and this is so strong that can't get of what they are used to everyday. Their traditions like, you know, the 13, walking under a staircase and all of this. Somehow, it is repeated so much into you, that you you become part of all this culture. And one of the things that that you know I was asking why it is seven all the time. And who is seven, in history, seven you all would just you know - Joseph right, Joseph right. So Joseph is seven days or for 7 years or plenty and seven years for famine, right and then Benjamin his youngest brother who basically was accused of stealing the golden goblet the ring and when you go back to it and I asked my grandmother where I said, like you know, why is it 7-7-7 nobody knows, right? But they know that the traditional clothes was basically it's a (indiscernible), it's a black clothes with a (indiscernible). And because it's all (indiscernible) when they walk is the pharaoh is looking after them, you cannot see their footprints in the sand, basically it will be in the sand, must be it's the Pharaoh, okay. So this is this is Nubia, and then you come to the 50s, okay. Every village, wherever you go, the (indiscernible) you have the heroes, the mayor, the sheroes, okay, the bad guys but always you will have the shadow gun, the clown right? And there is a clown in Nubia and this clown where everybody was (indiscernible), that are usually either a white, grey or blue. So you tell us they are very sobering colors, this guy entered the (indiscernible), this guy has a flaming red, turban. I mean, you also (indiscernible) okay? If you are feeling and everybody could see it and it brings your lover with that kind of fleas, okay and we had the crooked crooked stick, when he walk into the village of the Nile you would see basically all these mountains made of (indiscernible) plank stone, who are basically the Nile cut through millions of years, right? And he is pointing at these mountain and saying, Nubians you are going to drown, all of you are going to drown. And this is a desert, except for the rive Nile there is nothing. So everybody laughed about it, now one of these days, in the 60s a group of men came, they had suits, and they had shoes. Of (indiscernible) of gratefully like we are, right and they went into the Mayor's house. Now this is Nubia, everybody belongs to everybody. Nubians don't have a key, they don't lock their doors, from inside you can close it but you can't lock your door. It's been known like that all over. So they come in they go into the Mayor's house and then they go out. Of course they rush out from the Mayor's house, and there was one cabin, there is a dam that's going to be built. Water is going to flow in Nubia, we have to be displaced, we are moving somewhere else. And all the people were crying, they were waiting for somebody to tell them that this is a lie, please say otherwise. And suddenly this guy appears Nubians you are going to drown, and water is going to come from all of these mountains. This man who was a clown of the village now became a (indiscernible). He became the wisest man as the women wanted to wanted him to come. Come and have dinner with us and tell me am I going to have a boy or a girl. Okay, it changed overnight. And Nubia (indiscernible). That was not the first dam that was the second, that wasn't the fourth that was the fifth dam over Nubia. How much can they take and every time they moved the water body got up with them. The whole culture is destroyed because what they were taking, they taking from Nubia which is old and we did not scratch the surface of it. Aswan is built by Nubian. Aswan, AS meaning tear, WAN is a stone. Right and this is where the cataract comes. As the water is moving towards, in between the stones, it looks like tear drops. So it is the second cataract. And over it of course I haven't I haven't seen really, which are these huge, huge risk stages. If they stand up they are about 100 feet, right? So they are in the land of Nubia. We did not scratch the surface of it, and there is, they are trying to work very quickly, to salvage it. Gamal went to Oxford, right. And this was in the 30s and he loved (indiscernible) this young lady, okay. That was the 30s and the Victorian times right and the English are all over the world and so on. As you said very few black kids who went to Oxford. And the girl was Catherine John (indiscernible) and that night you bring her back basically to, to do various college and they saw it was 10 o'clock, so it was that down time and they left her in and next day they called him and they summoned him to the (indiscernible) to call him. Mr. Gamal you have compromised the reputation of a young English lady and you are fired. So basically they asked him to leave and then after negotiation we suspended him for about 10 days or so or they suspended her too. So that her father wrote them a letter he said, you are right, we should keep an eye on our daughters, but I am keeping also my eye on this black guy and that's why I have them both in my house. She came to us after that you know, when my father died she came to have tea with us, (indiscernible) wonderful woman and she was telling us about the relationship in her time and how it was at that time. The book is about my father and my relationship. I have had a special relationship with my father. A very special relationship with my brother also and my family. It was very particular and this story all of you know about because he was one of the first who was educated and had basically a B.Lit at the time which was a PhD of these days and he was moved into this what you called the British quarter and the British quarter that the sort of I like to talk about is basically the first if you like, Sudanese who is near, the British neighborhood, they have these big enormous (indiscernible) between us and enormous amount of trees. One of them was basically the mango tree. But the mango tree had its mango in our house and I was about four or five years I couldn't stand it and as they say, grass is always greener, okay, so basically I am looking at this mango and I am saying like you know, to my brother we have to do something about it. Okay, it is calling for us okay. And he was my brother is senior to me. He is about 10 years old and we decided to cross basically a kind of partition between us and the British guy. So you know my brother helped me and I went so on, and I had this (indiscernible) of mine. My brother climbed up the mango tree and he would send them down and just like a basket ball I was going and catch one and catch another one and so on and so forth. At one time I did the mistake of racing my head and getting at the porch of the house and they are standing there with all of the Britishers having shorts okay, and a bit (indiscernible) because they are all hairy you know and they had these shorts on all khaki, although they had these, these intimidating kind of crescent shaped hats, which were, of course, that touched it for heat right and he had a moustache and we didn't have moustache right and at the same time he had a stick and this was overwhelming thing, yeah the small stick, right made of ebony and to top it all he had a pipe so he had a pipe and he was looking at me and you know and I said and then I don't know why he jumped. He jumped off the porch, he jumped off the porch, (indiscernible) I am off okay and I let my treasures ____ and that's kind of partitioned. It took us half an hour to go through in two minutes I was behind the dress of my mother. Crazy kid, what's wrong with you, okay. What's happened, right. And my brother come back in saying like you know, he used to, you know, he hates amongst the reasons so, but lo behold! And I said something very cool going down my arm and when I looked up it was basically, well it was my (indiscernible). Right. It sneezed. Yeah it - so we lived in this environment like 30s deal at you know, and I don't know he was a good guy because the next day I found an enormous amount of toys you know, in garage. So basically it was - it was trying to - I just had thought about his mother. My aunt, you know, my grandmother. Okay I am not taking the time. Okay just give me two minutes and I will finish but I have to talk about (indiscernible) Fat Marie, my grand mother. Rough at the edges but a very strong woman. And you know, cultured woman who becomes strong, it has to be right, you know, everybody wants them and everybody loves them. Maybe they don't get to the popular culture, they are - yeah this woman who basically work very hard and give a strong project and she worked very hard okay. And she had something to say about everybody in the village. She was the shero of the village and her rough edges were people understood, that she was basically a very good woman. She knew who was genuine, who needed and who didn't need and she would give from her heart from right hand, not the left hand, you know, this kind of a person. She was about 25, she is pregnant, her husband dies. Okay, a long story and a sad one. In our culture in the middle of the courtyard they build a tent and this tent made out of basically paddy platforms and she stayed there for 120 days, okay. Yeah long time. They stay for 120 days making sure that they are not pregnant, though she was pregnant and she knew she was pregnant but they still had. That I mean, traditions I mean, go for that. So she is - the brother of her husband, not a very nice man, a very crooked man, he is - he knows where she is sitting and he comes around and he is telling her, (indiscernible) Fat Maria when your week is over, when your mourning time is over I am marrying you. He is basically looking for what, the piece of land that she has got and that his brother and so on. He wants to inherit basically everything. And as soon as he said this, the women knew he is not supposed to be - nobody - no man should see her, she is not supposed to see men. And straight away the woman knew that my grandmother is going to violate all traditions. There is always insects around the house. So that bit people with various scorpion if there is a hen around or whatever they will shoo them off. This path, shoo them as that - and all of the woman because they don't want the violation to occur they are not trying to stop him, they are trying to stop her and pushing her inside the house but she was too quick, too strong and that was the last time that he talked with her. But he took her to court and she doesn't know what a court is. And my father was about 10 years old as her senior son. When she went to court, she saw a young judge and the young judge said, "What are you here for?" And the man explained, he said like you know, this is my sister-in-law and I want basically my nephews and nieces and I also want my father, because she kept his father. And she said ask yourself, and the judge said to his father. He said, you stay with your daughter-in-law. Yes. You want to stay with her. He said listen, Your Honor when she was young, when we married her we thought this was the biggest mistake and we called our son, and we told him. I had a dagger in my hand, I said if you don't divorce this woman, I'll kill myself right now and his mother said, his late mother may God forgive her, she took away the dagger she put it under her breast and she said if you don't divorce her, I will cut my breast off and my son who died now took the dagger and said if both of you will not go back on what you said I will kill myself. So everyone was (indiscernible). This is the woman that you never want but now after all of these years I see there is no one fit to have been in this family but this woman and the Judge said, who became a very close friend to my father, Judges (indiscernible) later on and somehow they became brothers as my father grew. He said to the uncle he said, if ever you come near this woman that (indiscernible) okay, I will put you in jail. That was a beautiful place and it's a wonderful place, some of wonderful childhood I have spent was there. One or two incidents I bring up with, traditions are we catch them on (indiscernible) right, but that is why it is so sad to see. That there is a flood and that they are constructing another dam in the valley. Thank you very much. I guess one of the things that I see, in common is a - the strength of women and voices from ____ and also in this book woman are telling their stories and they are telling about the hardships of their - the joys of their lives and how things have changed too and I suddenly, as you were describing this - these scenes in Sudan I was with a UN World Food Program doing and assessment in the early 90s and I remember looking out over a landscape and seeing a group of camels moving along and knowing the importance of education and how precious it is in countries like Sudan and rural Kenya. When I suddenly realized there is a frame of a bed on the top of one of the camels, it was the first time that I had ever scene I herd of camels with one carrying a bed frame on it's back and so we stopped and one of the herders this bed, I am taking for my son to his secondary school, because the secondary school doesn't have beds. They don't have - it's a bed frame and so in order for him to go this boarding school, this secondary school he had to take, they had to bring in their own bed frames, along with them.
member. 
