Downtown Nairobi

Yup, Nairobi is a big, noisy, crowded city. Fascinating, as usual. It's been a beautiful day here as well: sunny, dry and 26. Other parts of Kenya (to the north) including southern Somalia are experiencing torrential flooding and tens of thousands of people have been displaced. Nairobi is 1600 metres high, though, and generally has pretty good weather. I'm told that Nairobi has always been too high and too cool for the malaria mosquito to survive, but global warming is changing that (though i've heard of no danger at the moment). We're staying in a modest hotel on the edge of the downtown core and all the participants of the human rights workshop are arriving this evening and tomorrow from Nigeria, The Gambia, Somalia, Uganda and elsewhere from around the continent. The curriculum i'll be facilitating is one that i've facilitated a couple of times for the annual human rights school organized by Equitas in Montreal. For you educator types, i recommend looking at the Equitas manuals which are on their website. They have a unique approach to human rights education in that they are heavily influenced by popular education, Frierian thinking and such. While much human rights education is rather document-driven (i.e. everything you wanted to know about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), Equitas has a participatory approach that balances well the sharing of people's unique experience with the need to learn about the history and documents of human rights work.