High-contrast images

My last post was made just before setting off on a five-day horse safari in S. Africa. The safari was great, and I will be going on and on about it later, once I get my pictures sorted and my laundry done.

I got back last Wednesday night, and then on Thursday it was time for Joya to head over to Jamhuri Park for the Kabete Happening, a sort of short-form event plus regular horse show. Maybe because I was tired, maybe because I hadn't ridden Joya in over a week, maybe because our safari organizer could only think of one thing to feed a vegetarian for lunch, and that thing was cheese and cucumber sandwiches...whatever the reason, it was a tough outing for Joya and me.

But when it was all over, what stuck with me most was a painfully sharp sense of contrast.

No mystery as to the source of that feeling...I've posted before about the uneasy contradiction between horse sports on the one hand, and extreme poverty and underdevelopment on the other.

From about jump 4 on the Jamhuri course, that contradiction is a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, and a knock on the head, as one of Africa's best-known slums, Kibera, presents itself as the backdrop to the course...

In the past, while aware that Jamhuri Park and Kibera are near neighbors, I had never really understood how near. That's because I had something of a habit of falling off my horse at jump 2 or 3, so we never got past the stable area. This time, with a somewhat firmer grasp on what I was doing, I actually walked the course (twice), and with a somewhat firmer grip on the saddle, I actually made it all the way around the pre-Novice course (though not without various stops and starts and bobbles and errors).

(The Kabete Happening, it's worth noting, raises quite a lot of money through sponsorship and entry fees to support various child-centered projects in Kibera. It's not like I'm the only person to NOTICE the enormous slum and the enormous need it represents.)