Nairobi

A Memorable Place The pleasures and pains of Africa By David Berry SPECIAL TO THE SUN The first thing you notice in Africa are the smells. In Nairobi, Kenya, it is the smell of walking dusty paths along city streets choked with fumes from poorly tuned, oil-burning cars and trucks. It is the smell of corn roasting over open charcoal fires. Even in the best neighborhoods, it is the smell of trash burning along the roads. It is the smell of poverty so overwhelming that the average American has no frame of reference.

After six weeks as an intern at the U.S. Embassy in Kenya last summer, U.S. Military Academy cadet Alison M. Jones of Towson reluctantly cleaned out her desk and said goodbye to her embassy friends. She had walked just two blocks when a blast nearly knocked her over.A bomb had detonated August 7, crumbling the embassy in Nairobi and killing 213 people. As thousands, screaming in panic, ran from the building, Jones' first thought was, "I have to get back in there to help."She did.In the hours after the blast, Jones rescued people buried in debris, helped recover bodies, and, with no prompting, roped off the building to keep others safe.

WASHINGTON -- Less than three weeks after the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, the Clinton administration filed charges yesterday against a Yemenite flown to the United States overnight, who has said he took part in the Kenya blast and expected to die a martyr.U.S. officials told reporters that unprecedented international cooperation is producing results in the global investigation of the bombings -- blasts that are being blamed on terrorists and that led to retaliatory airstrikes last week against suspected terrorist support sites in Afghanistan and Sudan.

As I raced toward Nakuru, a town northwest of Nairobi, Kenya, at the end of February, I kept wondering how bad things could get. Taking advantage of a lull during the chaos that rocked my country, Kenya, I decided to visit my mother, who lives in the Rift Valley Province, the epicenter of the violence that left 1,200 dead in the weeks after the December presidential election. I last saw her a few days before the election, and we had planned to have New Year's together. That never happened.

Kansas City, Missouri. -- As U.N. troops are plucked from the beach, abandoning Somalia once more to the governance of gun-happy thugs, it is useless to try to put a good face on the failed intervention there. Operation Restore Hope was a waste of lives, a waste of resources, a waste of time.There was no hope to restore.There was no nation to save.We had no clear objective, and no discernible interests there -- either a direct interest, or the more general one of defending the integrity of national borders.

NAIROBI -- When I had a summer job in the Baltimore Zoo's mammal department, I never saw an operation as big as this, just to put a single animal to sleep. There were four Land Rovers and a light plane, seven biologists, four veterinarians, three camouflaged, heavily-armed rangers, one journalist and myself, a student on exchange from Dartmouth College.Because it was an elephant. The bull was shot with a tranquilizer to protect him from the bullets of hunters and poachers -- although for this particular elephant, outside Kenya's Amboseli National Park, and for all Kenya's elephants, these are not their greatest problems.

The 21-year-old college student allegedly told detectives that he hadn't just killed the man who'd lived with his family for months, but had eaten his heart and portions of his brain. The victim's severed head and hands were found in the men's Harford County home; more remains were left in a trash container outside a church. Authorities outlined the macabre circumstances Thursday in charges against Alexander Kinyua, an electrical engineering major at Morgan State University and member of his school's ROTC program, of first-degree murder in the death of 37-year-old Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a Ghanaian national and a former master's degree student.

. BAIDOA, Somalia --Kenyan officials announced yesterday that they were closing their northern border because of the conflict in Somalia, but denied that they had turned back hundreds of refugees. For the past few days, Ethiopian-led forces have been hunting down the remnants of Somalia's once-powerful Islamic movement, pushing fighters steadily south toward the Kenyan border. Ethiopian officials have said that the Islamist fighters are headed to a remote jungle outpost called Ras Kamboni, which suspected terrorists have used before as a hide-out.

Zaccheus Chesoni, 63, Kenya's chief justice, died of a heart attack yesterday in Nairobi Hospital, Kenya Television reported. Chesoni had reportedly been hospitalized for two weeks after falling ill with bacterial meningitis. Mr. Chesoni was chairman of Kenya's Electoral Commission when he was appointed chief justice by President Daniel T. arap Moi in December 1997 -- the second indigenous Kenyan to hold the highest judicial post in the East African nation since it gained independence from Britain in 1963.

Two Maryland women and their search-trained German shepherds flew to Africa yesterday as part of a Federal Emergency Management Agency team effort to rescue people trapped in the wreckage of the bombed U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.Elizabeth Kreitler, 51, of Annapolis and Sonja Heritage, 37, of Bowie took their dogs -- Garret and Otto -- on their mission of "air-scenting" to find people trapped -- but still breathing -- in rubble.The women are part of a 62-member FEMA task force based in Fairfax, Va., which responds on short notice to disasters around the globe.