Elgin in Idaho

 As I was scrolling through my work Twitter account last week, I became aware of the passing of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband. It’s very sad, of course, for their family and for many who closely follow the royal family. I wouldn’t say that I do, though I did watch the Crown series on Netflix. I’m not sure how accurate Philip’s portrayal was but all indication is that he was an interesting man and the actor did a pretty good job of portraying him. It mustn’t be easy being married to the Queen, not because of her necessarily but because of the role. I likely won’t have to worry about it.

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Another recent death was Elgin Baylor. I would guess that most of the world has no idea who he was. Granted, he was in his heyday as a professional basketball player many decades ago before entering the NBA Hall of Fame. Back then the sport didn’t make superstars of people as they do now and there’s obviously a limited amount of footage floating around showing him at his craft. But Baylor was a legend and many believe he was one of the key players to transform the game into the modern era. His style laid the foundation for players Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan and Lebron James.

Growing up a huge basketball fan, I couldn’t get enough of the sport. I tried to imitate all the great players of the time. Though Baylor was passed his prime when I was a kid, I nonetheless was familiar with his contributions to the sport. What stunned me as a child was to find out that he had actually, and briefly, went to the same college as my dad.

I’ve been fascinated by history since I was a child. The intersection of sports AND history was even sweeter. Add to that a family connection and you have the trifecta. I would crack open my dad’s yearbook time and time again to study the old photos. There was Baylor in black and white.

And speaking of black and white, a person having even a cursory understanding of history will know what things were like well before the civil rights movement. Baylor grew up in Washington DC and was already a legend thanks to his high school career. However DC, which was segregated at the time, offered him few playgrounds where he could hone his skills growing up. But he excelled nonetheless and finished high school as one of the top players in the country. The problem was, of course, that few schools were recruiting, or even allowing, black players and his options to get a scholarship were limited.

It’s a long-ish story but a friend of his, who was also black, had a connection to a small college in Idaho (a neighbor had a brother who played for the Harlem Globetrotters who told Williams that, during the traveling troupe’s recent visit to Idaho, he heard about a college in a small town that was looking for athletes of any color). For Baylor, having rarely left Washington DC, the idea of going to school out West would be a huge change. But Baylor recounted the phone conversation in 1954, his friend said, “Come to Idaho!” He replied, “Where’s Idaho?”

You couldn’t get much whiter than Caldwell, Idaho, at the time. It’s hard for me to imagine what it was like for him to adjust to life in the West. Same country. Different world. But he wasn’t alone. The coach knew he was tapping into a fountain of talent and opened the door to more of their friends. The team ended up with six Black players altogether – something that was unheard of back then. One of the players, upon seeing Idaho for the first time, said, “I’d never seen anything so beautiful.”

courtesy of C of I

The team ended up with a record of 23-4 for that season. They went undefeated in league play for the first time in the school’s history and maintained an 18-game win streak. Baylor broke every major scoring record, averaging 33 points a game, including 53 points in a single game. But the magic was more in the way he scored that left impressions. The quickness, the dunks, the passing, etc. were something the region had never seen before, and would not see again for some time. The 1,000-seat arena was packed the entire season.

All that is interesting in and of itself, but what I find even more interesting was the overall experience that Baylor and his friends had during their time in Idaho. The son of Baylor’s friend (that initiated the whole thing) said that his father never expressed anything but joy about their time so far from home. “To hear Dad or Elgin or Gary (the guys from DC), they talked about Idaho like it was the time of their lifetime.”  The only racial profiling Baylor noticed in Idaho was of a sort that amused him. Lots of white classmates asked him for music recommendations or dance lessons. He always complied. “It feels as if W.W. and I have wandered into a private and exclusive members-only club,” Baylor wrote about the experience, “but rather than feel intimidated or excluded like I do in D.C., I feel invited.”

While it warms my heart to learn that the experience Elgin Baylor and his friends had in Idaho was positive, I realize that the state has had, and continues to have, its share of racist behavior. Since I left Idaho, I’ve lived for 26 years as a cultural minority, including 16 years as a minority in Africa. I’m fully aware that my experience cannot compare to that of a Black minority in the US. The evidence of institutional racism in America continues with no end in sight. In fact my experience has probably been more similar to that of Baylor’s in that my ethnicity has generally been seen as a novelty (reactions have varied depending on where I’ve lived). But it’s almost always a thing (less so in Nairobi). It gets old but I’m much less in fear of being unfairly arrested and/or killed by bigots.

Speaking of standing out, I recently heard a story about Jackie Robinson, the first Black person to play in Major League Baseball. On that momentous first day (April 15, 1947), he woke up early at the McAlpin Hotel in NYC. On the subway to Ebbets Field he told his wife Rachel, “Just in case you have trouble picking me out, I’ll be wearing #42.”

I’d like to think that all of this exposure to the ugliness in the US and elsewhere (thanks in part to phone cameras) is slowly nudging things in the right direction, thanks to some accountability. It’s hard to tell but it’s probably mixed. I suppose some things are getting better and in other areas people seem to be doubling down in their bigotry, and not only towards African Americans.  

The story of Elgin Baylor’s time in Idaho (he would only stay for a year) is a positive one and one worth celebrating for a lot of reasons. He was a pioneer in many ways and this was a small, albeit meaningful, chapter in the life of an amazing talent.

Light in the Sky (but not at the end of the tunnel)

Watching the news and seeing what is going on in the US and in many parts of Asia, you get the impression that people are seeing light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. As the northern hemisphere morphs into spring and summer, it accentuates that feeling of a new beginning. 

No so in Africa. Though the virus never plunged us to the public health and economic depths that much of the world anticipated, we're now seeing that as the virus drags on and continues to mutate, the lack of broader access to vaccines is increasingly problematic. It's painful to see that some countries have procured more vaccines than their population needs and other countries are struggling to even provide access to the most vulnerable. However this tactic may prove to come back to haunt the richer countries as they seem to be willing to allow a situation where the virus continues to evolve and, potentially, even threatening the efficacy of those precious (and horded) vaccines.

As of this week, Kenya has gone back to lockdown. The new variant (allegedly the UK variant though I don’t think that’s confirmed; could also be the South African variant, or both, or a new one) is wreaking havoc and infections and deaths are on the rise. I have been bragging about Kenya’s ability to keep a lid on the pandemic compared to many other countries, particularly in the US or in Europe. But the new variant plus the lack of a real vaccine rollout and pandemic fatigue are all playing into the current spite in infections.

Adherence to mitigation protocols varies depending on where you are, whether in Nairobi or elsewhere. But I think the real culprit has been bars and social gatherings and sometimes churches and mosques. These are the Achilles heel of a society when it comes to virus transmission, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Not coincidentally the lockdown comes just prior to a rather festive time of year. Easter is this weekend. The month-long fast of Ramadan is coming by mid-April. These are events that generally involve people gathering together to celebrate. Likely the intention of the government is to prevent these celebrations from launching the country into a perilous situation. But the economic impact will be huge. Thousands of tourists were booked to head out to the coast or on safari. Almost all of that had to be cancelled and businesses are now going to take another huge hit. Staff might get laid off again. Though I suspect that things will open up by mid-May or so, if the numbers start to go down, it won’t make up for the current losses to businesses that were already on shaky ground to begin with.

Schools in the country have been open since the beginning of the year. Kenyan public schools are currently on break so this won’t impact them but international schools, such as the one our girls go to, need to return to home school. But many Kenyans living in Nairobi have extended families in a village someplace. They often take children to the grandparents during these long school holidays and then visit them on weekends. Someone was telling me the other day that she took her children to the grandparents a couple of weeks ago and she will now be unable to see them until the lockdown is over.

It’s inconvenient but it’s not the end of the world when you consider the amount of suffering right now in Kenyan health facilities. I suppose my problem with the school closures it is that there is no evidence that schools in the country have had any impact on transmission rates. The way the lockdown is being rolled out is sort of a blunt instrument to not only stem to tide of Covid-19 but also to demonstrate that the government is taking this seriously. But I don’t think it’s thought through very well.

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Last week I was up early doing my workout as I normally do. On this day I was out the door by about 5am to run stairs in our building. On my last trip up to the roof, I normally stay up there to do some other exercises in the dark of early morning. At one point I was doing some sit-ups (crunches) facing south. The stars were out and it was beautiful and peaceful - one of the best parts of my day. All of the sudden I saw what appeared to be a shooting star. It flashed for only a second, heading downward at about a 45-degree angle, and then disappeared. That’s not blog-worthy in and of itself but then it happened again about twenty seconds later – in the same exact spot for the same duration. That was puzzling since, if it was the continuation of the same shooting star, it would have been farther down at the same angle rather than in the same spot.

So now, exercise interrupted, I’m watching the same spot. Sure enough, about 15-20 seconds after the previous flash, it does it for the third time. Same duration. Same spot. It then did it a fourth time and then a fifth. But after the fifth time it never reappeared.

I’m a skeptic by nature. I generally roll my eyes when people discuss UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. I have never been a fan of sci-fi (Star Wars being my exception). Being the boring, rational thinker that I am, I have been trying to find an explanation for what I saw and I haven’t been able to come up with anything. It didn’t fit any patterns of satellites or space debris or anything like that. It’s hard to say what it was but it was fascinating nonetheless.

Camping by the River

As usual, lots going on and less time to write. At some point I just need to sit down, ignore the news feeds, put a hold on responding to the continuous flow of messages into my inbox, and do something else. I tend to get sucked into this workday vortex that continues from the time I get up to the time I go to bed. Unlike the old days of 8-5pm, where you would leave and office and mentally and physically focus on other things, my current world has colleague workdays running from about 8am until at least midnight my time (when things are winding down on the East Coast of the US). Moreover, the Somali workweek begins on Sunday so my only non-workday is essentially Saturday. It requires a certain self-control for me to be able to at some point just shut things down. It’s an arbitrary exercise since the conveyor belt never really stops.

One event that I never had a chance to write up was a recent camping trip. In the midst of the girls’ two-week holiday in February, we were able to get away for a couple days. It’s a time when families at the French school normally go on longer trips, for example on safari or to the coast, but we were a bit less ambitious this time. One reason is that I need to conserve vacation time in anticipation that the vaccine rollout in the US will, in a few months, produce an environment suitable for us to take a vacation. We haven’t seen family in a year and a half so we’ll want to have as much time as possible to be able to see everyone we can. The other reason is that we need to be a bit conservative in our spending given some expenses coming up. It’s not really that much of a sacrifice since we always have a great time camping.

We left late morning on a Friday. I still had work to do so the idea was that we would drive to our destination (less than two hours away), get settled in and I would pull out my tablet and finish the work that I needed to do. Over the course of the two days or so, I would log in only once more to deal with some issues that had arisen on Saturday. Otherwise it was a mostly work-free weekend.

We organized the weekend with two other families, one of which had never camped before. Having new campers can be particularly fun or particularly frustrating, depending on how they embrace the experience. In this case, partially because we did car camping lite, it happened to be the former. Sleeping in a tent isn’t for everyone but when you add luxuries such as a shower and a swimming pool, it goes down much more easily.

Over the past couple of years we have thought this through, with some trial and error, and equipped ourselves such that we more or less have it down. Nowadays it’s a matter of tweaking things here and there to improve it. Thankfully the girls are big fans of camping and that makes all the difference.

People who know me understand that if I had my choice, I would head to the mountains with a backpack and skip the car camping thing altogether. For me, there’s nothing like pitching a tent at a remote mountain lake. No vehicle. No people (other than who I am backpacking with). It probably seems strange to people for me to say that given how little I’ve been able to do it throughout most of my adult life. I don’t have a career that easily lends itself to this sort of hobby. I’ve lived in cities most of my life and often in countries where such things are either logistically impractical or impossible. And then small children came along, adding to the logistical considerations.

Nonetheless, I’ve embraced car camping. If you read the blog entry of our camping in Masai Mara last year, it hopefully came across what an amazing experience that was. And as the girls get older, our options grow in this regard, so long at they remain interested. I won’t push it on them but I definitely want to expose them to what the great outdoors has to offer.

Our destination this time had a lot to do with providing easily accessible activities for the kids. As such it was almost like camping in a city park. We pitched the tent on freshly mowed grass. There was a small swimming pool about 20 meters away. There was a river on the other side. We had a shelter with a picnic table and a place to cook food and wash dishes. Across the way we had solar-heated showers. Next to that was a large facility where they organized various activities including rafting, kayaking, paddle boarding, ziplining, bungie jumping, etc. So we didn’t get bored.

One thing that was new to me was the concept of building campfires on a one-meter diameter slab of concrete on wheels. It’s actually kind of cool to have a mobile “fire pit”. It’s also a handy height for children roasting marshmallows.

The first morning we opted on a raft trip. I’ve rafted before but it’s been a long time. There were enough of us to fill two rafts plus a guide in each raft. We took a bus upriver to where we would start. The guides were knowledgeable and entertaining – good to have both but the former is a bit more important.

Some of us were more “outdoorsy” than others and there were some looks of apprehension, particularly on the kids. But once we were on the river and beginning to navigate rapids, it seemed that everyone was into it. Other than a couple of places with steep drops, the river was pretty tame. We stopped a couple of times to allow the willing to jump in and swim. East African rivers are often a bit brown and this was no different. But the temperature was quite nice and, given that the day was warm, it was nice to get in and cool down.

In the evening we did some ziplining. I’ve done this before in Kenya at a place that has ziplines over 2 kilometers (mile and a quarter) in length over the top of deep gorges. This was quite tame in comparison in that it was probably less than 200 meters mostly over a slow-moving river. The best part was that they allowed children to do it, including the youngest among us who was 4. The biggest surprise for me was that that all the kids were game to do it. I suppose that once the four-year-old says “bring it on”, the older ones don’t really have an option not to.

Kiran on the zipline

On Sunday morning, time would be limited. We were all in agreement that we needed to be on the road by late morning so as to avoid hellacious traffic coming into Nairobi. Traffic is almost always bad but Sundays, with people coming back from weekends at the village or elsewhere, it’s particularly bad. So a few of us opted on an hour of paddle boarding. I’ve done it a couple times before but never on a moving river and never on an inflatable board. Both seemed to provide me some new challenges. One was dealing with the current of the river. It wasn’t moving fast but it was powerful. Initially I was working up a sweat trying to prevent myself from drifting downstream. The guide jokingly said that if I just gave up, I would find myself pouring into the Indian Ocean in about two days.

Eventually I was able to sort out where the currents were weakest and it gave me a chance to practice kneeling and eventually standing. It was wobbly and tiring but I was able to stay up cruise around a bit. At one point the guide had us line up on one side of the river to lie on our boards and have a paddle race across the river and back. While I thought I would do pretty well at this, I assumed the guide would still kick my butt. After demonstrating my sorry paddle boarding skills, I was happy to redeem myself and beat him by two board lengths.

By 11:00, the sun was beating down hard and we were all a bit anxious to get the vehicles loaded and get on the road. In the end, traffic wasn’t too bad and we were back home in less than two hours. We had plenty of time left in the day to put things away, clean up and get ready for the week ahead. No rest for the weary.