A Traveller’s Eye, A Thinker’s Heart
I like to tell stories. I like to take photos.
And I like to share them. Enjoy.
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OLAV OF BYNESET
I hit a brick wall once. A genealogical brick wall, that is. For five years I had been trying to find out where my great grandfather, Ole Erickson Gaustad, came from. I was getting nowhere and figured I’d never find out. But one night in 2007, I was Googling ‘Gaustad’ and the village where I
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CELEBRATING THE HUMAN LIFE CYCLE AT VIGELAND PARK
Visiting Oslo in July with family, I spent a hot but enjoyable morning walking through Vigeland Park, a monumental outdoor work charting the human life cycle. The park contains more than 200 sculptures in granite, bronze, and cast iron, all designed by Gustav Vigeland between 1924 and 1943. Vigeland conceived the layout as a single,
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A NIGHT IN COPENHAGEN
Padma and I preferred to drive everywhere in Europe, rather than flying. So when we decided to visit Norway and meet my family, we decided to drive. We arrived in Copenhagen in early evening after driving all day from Bonn. Just enough time to enjoy the long summer day and take a stroll through the
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A LIONESS ALL FOR MYSELF
It’s Sunday and I’m not working on finger millet so I took the morning off to visit the Nairobi National Park. This is almost an urban park as it is a mere 15 minutes south of Nairobi with its skyline visible from the park … and yet it truly is the home to some very
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THE CORIOLIS EFFECT
‘How’s the weather in the southern hemisphere?’ Ben asked. We crossed the Equator just north of Kisumu so we felt obliged to get the token tourist shot. A man with a bucket and some water beckoned us over for a demonstration. We knew he was just after a few shillings but let him show us
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A TALE OF TWO MARYS
Once upon a time a man married two Marys, which is something you can do in Kenya. The man passed away but his two wives, the Marys, lived on and prospered while growing finger millet. Finger millet is a traditional crop of Eastern Africa and once grew abundantly in the Western Kenya near the town
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JOY IN THE FINGER MILLET FIELD
Margaret, a progressive farmer in Kakamega County of western Kenya, suffers from diabetes. So she planted finger millet at a time when all of her neighbours planted maize. She likes the finger millet because it is high in nutritional content, is gluten free, and has a low GI. Magaret has been growing finger millet for
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UGALI AKA WIMBI
My colleague, Benjamin, and I travelled to Kenya to learn about finger millet and check up on some projects the Crop Trust is supporting. Neither of us had ever eaten finger millet so our hosts made sure we’d change that. Our hosts brought us to a small village called Ekero in Kakamega County which was
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JONAH, THE KENYAN TEA PLUCKER
It’s an all-day journey from Nairobi to Kisimu, where my colleague, Benjamin Kilian, and I will look at some finger millet pre-breeding projects. Halfway into the journey we climbed to 2400 metres on the western side of the Riff Valley and entered prime Kenyan tea country. We stretched our legs and met Jonah, a tea
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