Lukenya IPACS

Flying into Nairobi this afternoon reminded me of flying over North Western or Central Victoria (Australia). The landscape is brown, flat and arid. It's not the red dirt of the Centre, but the browns and blues of the desert. It should be wet, the monsoons should have started, but the wet season has not come yet, which the tourists are loving, but the locals are worried, it means hardship for them.

I'm here attending (and helping to facilitate) a course to be accredited to train the art and science of Integrating Peace-building and Conflict Sensitivity into Programming (IPACS). And here is in the bush at the Lukenya Getaway, off the Mombassa-Nairobi Highway, in the middle of nowhere. The drive in found us slowing down and navigating around herds of Zebra and Impala (Zulu for gazelle). In the evenings, they tell me, we will be visited by giraffe and other animals.

But for now, I sit looking out over the wide empty brown, sparse trees dot the horizon, tall with high branches and flat tops. I sit separated from the 'wild' by a fence of brilliant red bougainvillea, listening to the birds and some annoying loud neighbours. In the other direction a dusty, slow parade of trucks carrying goods along the african arterial from Mombassa to Nairobi and beyond to Uganda and Rwanda is constant and apparently unending. It feels like a long way from anywhere here in Lukenya.