Short, but the point is made in an entertaining way

Bill Bryson telling a short travel story. Good. Learning the facts of poverty in Africa and what is being successful in helping. Better. Making a contribution and possibly getting you interested in more. Best.

Awareness

I came upon this writing in my husband's Kindle not knowing what I had started reading. I enjoyed the story but mostly appreciate the awareness it brought forward. I will donate to CARE but more important I will investigate opportunities in which I can participate
Thank you

CARE, an international aid agency headquartered in the UK, asked Bill Bryson to visit their Kenyan operation and write about it. Somewhere along the lines the idea changed to include publishing a "book" and using all profits as a donation to charity, with a small amount of the $12 cover price used for printing and distribution costs. Most of the participants were volunteering their time.

Sounds like a great idea, right? Except, the book itself is disappointing. It's more a novelette. It's 40 pages in an undersized book with big margins. About 90% of the content is him worrying about dying in the trains, planes and automobiles that might crash along his journey. Only about 10% covered actual Kenyan life and country. Almost no history was included in complete contrast to the book I read prior, In a Sunburned Country.

It's not that it's badly written -- but it could have been so much better. He visits a refugee camp and barely talks about it for a paragraph, while devoting three pages to the airplane flight back. He visits a micro-lending organization and spends a sentence talking about his interaction with the borrowers. Ironically, he praises a local Kenyan farmer growing non-indigenous crops, the same action he highly criticized in In a Sunburned Country for damaging the Australian outback.

This was a great idea under-executed. And it's a shame, because I think had it been done right, say trade the hard cover for an additional 40-50 pages of content, and this would have been great. Having a better story would have sold more books making even more money for the charity. I'll give him a C for Charity, but a D for leaving the real story out of the book. Bill short changed himself, Kenya, and CARE by pulling his punches in the name of charity.

Some of it was good Bill Bryson.It was very short but for a good cause.

This is a lovely very short book (49 pages!) and all the royalties and profits from the sale of this book go to CARE International. Enjoy an amazing read and feel good about your reading well. Mr. Bryon's humor is still intact within this very important read about Africa and CARE International's good works therein. Even if you borrow it from the library (or just read it in a bookshop) it's well worth your time and money.....

Amazing! Bryson's style meets zebras:) Nothing like it.

A bit disappointed when I picked this up at my library, I was expecting the African version of Mr Brysons trip to Australia. This little book had his trademark humor but was actually a plug for CARE. It was interesting, just VERY brief.

Bill Bryson escribió este libro y donó todos los beneficios a ONGs. Es un libro menor, pero cuanta cosas entretenidas y sobre todo se aprecian muchísimo las ganas que tiene de ayudar a cambiar el mundo. Una lectura agradable.

Short, sweet and witty, but has now instilled in me, a fear of single engine light aircrafts.

It's a small book since it's published for charity and not for personal profit.

I have enjoyed reading Bryson’s travel books. He has a lovely sense of humor and he is knowledgeable. I started reading this book looking forward to the author’s impressions of Africa. Actually, I was keen to see how it compares with Paul Theroux’s views on the same continent. But, what a disappointment! First of all, it is just a diary of a few days’ travel in Kenya, that too just a few hundred kilometers out of Nairobi, all on the benevolence of a charity organization which hired him to write some nice propaganda material for them. To call it an African Diary is misrepresentation. On top of it, it is just a pamphlet running into 49 pages, but costing a whopping $11.99 for its kindle edition. In the interest of his own admiring readers, the author should have mentioned in the cover that it was a journey paid and supported by CARE, one of the many charities working in Africa. It does not matter that he took no money to produce this piece of work or whether CARE is a great charity organization.

In any case, the booklet is of dubious quality, something that does not do justice to Bryson’s reputation. He visits a large slum outside Nairobi called Kibare and writes about its inhabitants that they will undergo any hardship in order that their children will have a better life. Not exactly a new finding, one might think. He also flies to Dadaab, near the Somali border, to visit a refugee camp of 134000 Somalis for a day. In between, he manages to visit the National Museum to view some of the rare early human remains which are housed there, followed by visits to the Karen Blixen house and the Rift Valley.

The author steps into some controversial territory in this booklet by batting for charity outfits like CARE, Oxfam and ‘Save the Children’ with the following statements: “If anyone ever tries to suggest to you that donor money sent to Africa goes into African despots’ pockets, you must poke them in the eye. Money given to aid agencies like CARE goes straight into projects”. There is a lot of research which shows that nowadays, many charities, NGOs, the UNHCR are all actually businesses chasing the vast billions of donor money that is available and that their first aim is to perpetuate and grow themselves. Michael Maren, who spent nineteen years in Africa – in Kenya, Somalia, Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Ethiopia – reporting on the famine, civil war and military conflicts in the region, is on record severely criticising the role of CARE, Save the Children and the UNHCR as self-serving enterprises, where these organizations care less about the victims of famine and civil war and more about their own organizational interests. Even Paul Theroux, who spent many years in Africa on multiple trips, is a severe critic of these aid organizations as doing much harm in the name of development. In fact, even the author’s own account confirms these impressions inadvertently.

The CARE representative who accompanies Bryson to Dadaab, says, “It is a fundamental part of aid protocol that you cannot make conditions better for refugees than they are for their hosts outside the camps. It wouldn’t be fair and it would breed resentment. Everyone would then want to be a refugee. So, you can only do so much”. The Kenyan govt would not allow permanent improvements to the slums of Kibera because it would then encourage others to move in there, making it larger. Even in the refugee camps at Dadaab, the Kenyan govt would not relocate the 134000 Somalis to Nairobi or Mombasa to look for work and livelihood and become self-sufficient. So, the refugees are struck in Dadaab because they can’t go back to Somalia either due to the civil war. In both Kibera and Dadaab, the outcome is to keep the status quo - the slum dwellers to remain as slum dwellers and the refugees to remain as refugees, which lets charity organizations to endlessly ask for money from donors to continue supporting them. It is something like pharmaceutical companies preferring chronic diseases rather than curable diseases because they get patients as lifelong customers with chronic diseases.

The final pages of the book contain promotional material from CARE which states in the section ‘Facts about Poverty’ that nearly half of humanity struggled to survive on less than $2 a day as of 2002, when the book was published. This is at best questionable because researchers like Dr. Hans Rosling have shown, using publicly available UN documents, that this statement was true in 1966, but since then poverty has continuosly declined to the point that in 2016, it was just 9% of the world population which lives under $2 a day. This has been possible mainly due to Globalization of the world economy rather than charities and NGOs. False pronouncements on poverty only succeed in giving credence to the criticism that aid organizations exaggerate humanitarian problems in order to shock donors into continue supporting them.

In short, a forgettable book from Bill Bryson.

One and a half star rounded down.

This was my first book by Bill Bryson. As I have understood it, he is an American who have lived in England for a long time. That is very obvious in this book. He managed to combine the worst of the British colonial attitude with the worst of the American fearmongering and übermensch attitude.

Well, Bill. You’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re in Kenya.

Bill has been contracted to ”write something” about the work of CARE, a charity organisation. They give hime an eight days free trip to Kenya, and what they get is around 50 pages where he praises himself for working for free, and whines about how he is going to die in accidents or diseases. Terrible book. Don’t read it.

This short little book was written by the well known travel writer Bill Bryson. It is the brief story of an eight day visit to Kenya during 2002. It was often clever and funny, but an obvious effort to give a flavor of Kenyan life, problems and insight to the best and worst of a very special place. One of my questions, while reading the book was why was this short experience written. It turns out the while he was in Kenya his hosts were the humanity and welfare organization known widely as CARE. As a result this short book was written and all proceeds from the sale of the book are received by CARE as donations. If you have been to Kenya many of the issues and observations only reaffirm what you already know, but if Bryson is one of the authors that you follow, his humor, his insight is worthwhile.