Mira and Sikh hospitality

Today we did some research on Mira as I mentioned yesterday.

For those of you who don't know what it is. It is a plant that is legal here in Kenya but is a strongly addictive drug that can cause a lot of health problems. It works like something between cocaine and amphetamine.

You can read more about it here.

We went to the River Road (probably the most dangerous part of the Nairobi). We didn't really shot a lot of material but we interviewed some people, found an interesting bar just for chewing Khat and bought some leaves to gain a trust of the sellers. The people were not really hostile but the atmosphere of endangerment was definitely in the air, so I think it will be quite difficult to film it.

Other then that we had quite a pleasant day. We accidentally found a Sikh temple. We wanted to visit it for a minute but actually we spent there like three hours. They were so friendly! We talked to them about religion, god and meaning of life. They showed us their rituals and shared a meal with us. It was fantastic! The Sikh are amazing and wise people. I think we will visit them again soon.

And here again a photo courtesy to Aurelia Frydrych ©:

Slums tourism feels just bad...

Today we visited a school of Kenyan Salesian Volountary Mission. We were contracted by their polish department to do a small documentary about kids that live and learn there and... guess what ... all the kids have a winter break and are gone! That is just hilarious! I have no idea how could they not checked it before sending us here.

But to be honest I don't really mind. I have more time now to pursue other topics I want to shoot during my stay here;)

We also visited one of the Nairobi's slums today. It was quite a terrible experience and I felt quite bad being there and taking photos. It feels like being a vulture, feeding on a poverty.

Still I have one of the photos for you. Again courtesy by Aurelia Frydrych ©:



Tomorrow I will start shooting some footage for a movie about a drug Khat (also called Miraa). So stay tuned!

African Rush on 1st day in Kenya;)

So we reached our final destination last night. We are staying at the outskirts of Nairobi. It's called Karen. At first I was like... there is a Karen's hospital, there is a Karen's high school. Who is this Karen? He has to be some kind of fat cat here. But sadly there is no Karen (would be good topic for a movie though) - it's a name of our district.

We just researched a bit, looked for interesting stories, meet some local contacts of ours and took a nice walk. It seems that doing documentaries here would not be easy. Day is pretty short here. It's pitch black at 7PM already. Besides you can definitely sense why Nairobi is called one of the most (maybe the most!) dangerous cities in Africa. It's not like people were hostile but we could see that they are not to friendly as well.

So our first day was quite slow but it's not so easy to get anything done here really. People are sooooo slooooow. It's called African Rush:) And here you can see an example of their style of work.

Photo courtesy by Aurelia Frydrych ©:





It was done with a Sony Cybershot DSC-HX5V that I bought lately. It seems to be quite a handy camera for both photos and videos and I will definitely write something more about it soon.

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