45th Anniversary Peace Corps Party, Kitui, Wheelchairs, etc.
I'll try to keep things shorter this time, since there's a Returned Peace Corps Newsletter in Alabama requesting an update. For some reason the newsletter doesn’t require the 20 something pages of longwinded off-subject tangents I've gotten so accustomed to writing. So, with brevity in mind, here's the latest and greatest with life in Kenya:
This last week has been a lot of fun, and finally my whirlwind adventure tour will slow down for a few weeks. Things will pick back up for In-Service Training (IST) and Mt. Kenya at the end of the month, and maybe my family in May, but for awhile I'll be onsite, or at least in the western half of the country.
My friend Sarah, the last of the volunteers from the Canadian group, was leaving over the weekend, so Wednesday night we went out for dinner and said our farewells. Then, on Thursday I took a bus to Nairobi for a Peace Corps 45th anniversary party. The party was scheduled for Saturday but since I was in Nairobi anyway I wanted to catch up with Benson, the chairman of the Kenya Programme for Disabled Persons (KPDP) and my potential contact for free wheelchairs. I checked into the Upper Hill campsite in Nairobi on Thursday night, which I highly recommend to anyone on a budget. Most of the Peace Corps volunteers in town for the party were staying there, and to my surprise so many had already arrived on Thursday that there were no rooms left. No problem, for 300 shillings they gave me a place to sleep in the hot mosquito filled attic and I was able to tough out a night there until a tent became available to me the next day.
The next morning I left for a visit to the Peace Corps office and to see Benson. As I mentioned earlier, there is a container of 550 wheelchairs from an organisation called Free Wheelchair Mission waiting to be picked up at the port of Mombasa. The donor of the wheelchairs included shipping all the way to the port. Since this is a donation, the clearing and customs fees were not anticipated. However, Kenyan customs decided to require a $4000 clearance fee on the container. Benson did not have this amount on hand and requested additional funding from the Wheelchair Mission to cover this. After some time the organisation provided Benson with the money, but meanwhile the port of Mombassa was charging storage costs for the container at 10,000 shillings ($130) a day. As a result, the total required to get these wheelchairs cleared is now nearing $10,000 and continues to grow. With the rate things were going, it was looking unlikely that the wheelchairs would ever be able to be acquired. What will inevitably happen then is that the container will be seized and the goods sold, thus preventing the people who cannot afford a wheelchair from being able to receive one. I sent out emails to the current PCV's informing them of the situation, and I was connected with a friend of a PCV named Peter who wanted to help. He told me he may have connections willing to cover the storage fees and clear the wheelchairs, and I told him that if he wanted to help we needed to meet with Benson ASAP as the amount required is continuing to grow higher every day.
I arrived at the meeting with Benson and Peter after going by the Nairobi Peace Corps headquarters on Friday morning. Once again I found that the only guy that has access to mail I have may be receiving in Nairobi was not around. (I received most of my Christmas cards, some dated November, in early March. Thanks everyone, and please use my Kakamega address from now on).
So with my Peace Corps HQ visit out of the way I had a chance to sit down with Benson and Peter and discuss the issues at hand. Peter is a Kikuyu from Central Province and he seems to be involved in just about everything. The stereotype of Kikuyu work ethic seems to ring true in many cases. Beyond working on a honey-as-cash-crop development project with local women, a career as a tour guide, and coaching a very talented girl’s soccer team, Peter is also in charge of the Boy Scout program in Kenya, which is very popular here. Beyond all of this Peter somehow found time to learn about the Wheelchair issue and make his way to Nairobi to chat with Benson.
Benson explained the situation to Peter and showed us the latest documentation from the port of Mombassa with the current balance needed to clear shipping costs. Peter was very knowledgeable of the ways of the Port of Mombasa and had a similar story. As the leader of the Boy Scouts he received a container of camping gear, hiking shoes, etc. from the states. Once again shipping was only covered to the port, and by the time the money was available to cover the customs and clearing costs the storage fees became too much and the container was abandoned. Its contents were then seized and sold by the people who are probably doing very well with Kenya’s policy towards donated goods.
Anyway, before Benson became paralyzed, he was a relatively important person in the Kenyan government. Benson has tried every political connection he knows to get the wheelchairs cleared, including several Members of Parliament (MP’s). He has had little success.
After discussing these issues at some length with Peter he replied that he knew a few people who may be willing to assist, and he also suggested a fundraiser from people needing the wheelchairs to cover the costs. However, Benson was completely against the fundraising idea. First, there simply isn’t enough time. Secondly, Benson wants these chairs to go to the poorest of the poor and does not want any money out of them. Benson informed Peter that a fund-raising approach had been attempted several times in the past and every single time the money ended up missing or not fully accounted for. In fact, Benson was so tired of this that he finally decided to channel a fundraiser through a Catholic Diocese, only to later discover that the Bishop in charge of collecting the funds was keeping a large sum of the money for himself!
So with the “fundraising-from-the-disabled” idea unacceptable to Benson, the other option was a donation, and because of the bureaucracy and accountability required from NGO’s, a grant application approach would take just too long. However, Benson informed us that additional grant money is coming into the organization in a few months, and any money given towards the storage costs could be refunded. He even presented the paperwork from the organization to prove it. I am still a little skeptical but I have come to really respect Benson and I believe he’s an honest guy.
(Authors note: I learned a hard lesson through this experience. I found money for Benson's project and it was stolen at the expense of 550 potential disabled Kenyans)
So I left the meeting unsure of what to do and hoping for a lead from Peter. With much on my mind, I met with the volunteers from my group back at the campsite to go out for dinner.
Dinner was definitely an experience to be remembered. Nearly all the volunteers from my group were in Nairobi and we left together to eat at a restaurant in Nairobi called Carnivore. I had been told this restaurant served game meat such as Elephant and Zebra, and I was looking forward to giving it a try. I later learned that game meat is no longer legal to serve, so I was a little disappointed, but I still had a chance to try some pretty strange dishes. The meals are basically all-you-can-eat meat, and the vegetarians in our group who were with us just to be social were pretty disgusted as huge slabs of meet are carried on skewers and pieces are shaved off onto the plate. First came the chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and lamb (boring). I was really hungry, but since it was all-you-can-eat I refused to let them fill me up on things I could eat elsewhere, and I turned down each of these courses. Then things got interesting. I had a chance to eat ostrich (tasty, a bit like beef with a gamey flavor) crocodile (maybe sort of like chicken?) and camel (chewy, with a really odd aftertaste. I’d imagine horse tastes similar. Not recommended). We stuffed ourselves with meat until past midnight and I could literally feel my arteries starting to harden. Overall, the food and atmosphere at Carnivore was a lot of fun and definitely worth a try once.
The next day was the 45th Peace Corps anniversary party at the International School in Nairobi. All past and present PCV's living in Kenya were invited to attend, and there were easily two hundred people there. It was really interesting to be able to talk to the previous volunteers, and it was surprising how many “returned” volunteers are still living in Kenya. A few were married to Kenyans as well, and several ex-PCV’s had been stationed elsewhere but ended up in Kenya as a career. I even spoke to a couple that volunteered in the Congo in the early seventies; what a different world that was compared to my conditions in Kenya today!
The International School is where all the ambassadors and embassy kids attend and I have never been to a nicer school compound in my life. It was such a stark contrast from any schools I had been to in Kenya. The soccer field was immaculate, the grounds were beautiful and well-kept, and I spent nearly the entire day in the crystal-clear Olympic sized swimming pool. I even learned how to back flip off the board.
The funny thing was that Marines stationed in Kenya were serving food and drinks to the volunteers...for quite a profit. The Tuskers were 100 shillings (35 more than the normal price) and hamburgers were 100 shillings. Where were the profits going? Back to International School. My friend Tony made a joke out of how we were all able to assist, a few shillings at a time, with the deplorable conditions at the school.
At that party I also spoke with the volunteer who assisted me in finding Peter. She was interested in knowing if any progress was made and I told her everything we discussed. From a career as a lawyer, the volunteer has quite a bit of money saved. After listening to my story she felt that if Peter was unable to assist, a private donation was the only way to quickly take care of this problem before the amount for storage fees becomes unattainable. She then offered to cover the clearing costs, if needed, with her own money. I wanted her to discuss things with Benson before committing, and I agreed to meet with her and Benson on Monday.
That night the Peace Corps had rented out Upper Hill Campsite for “Peace Corps Prom”. There was a DJ and a Peace Corps prom king and queen were nominated from the group about to return in June. Some of the girls were really excited about the whole thing and one in particular was pretty upset that she wasn’t Prom Queen. I thought the whole idea was stupid, but I kept my opinion to myself. Nevertheless, I did enjoy meeting so many of the volunteers from other groups that I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and all in all it was a great day.
That night I also met an Irish volunteer setting up Radio Equipment in Somalia. He told me he had been with working with a large group volunteers in Mogadishu, and many of them had been killed in an attack. As a result he was spending his remaining time in Nairobi until returning to Ireland. I’ve tried to find more information regarding the attack online, but I couldn’t find anything, but perhaps that this type of incident is so routine it isn’t even newsworthy in Somalia anymore.
Since I had a meeting scheduled in Nairobi the following day, I left for Kitui to visit my host family on Sunday. I had told my host family I was planning to visit them in one week, and when I arrived in Kitui I realized my Swahili still needs a lot of work. What I accidentally told my host mama was that I was coming to see them for one week, not in one week. As a result, Mama had purchased a new set of bed sheets for me, cleaned up my room, and even planned a goat-eating party for the following Saturday. I felt pretty bad to tell her that I was only there for the night, but I did have to return to Nairobi and get back to work in Kakamega. Even worse, I was able to see her even less than I intended. I went to Kitui with Adrienne, one of my Peace Corps friends, because she wanted to visit her host family too. She planned to surprise her family by being in town, but arrived to find that her mama was out of town. Adrienne’s host father was there, however, and he agreed to drive us in his matatu to the nearby village where her mama staying. He assured us it was only a few kilometers away, and so I went along for the ride. I went with Jackie, my host family sister, and planned to be back in time for dinner.
It turned out that a few kilometers of driving meant two hours (one-way) on a bumpy, slow going dirt road. After the first hour I started asking if we were about to arrive, and kept getting the same answer: “We are almost there”. It was past 8:00 when we reached our destination, and we were baffled by why Adrienne’s host father would want to waste so much petrol to drive us for what was a ten minute visit with Adrienne’s host mom. As I later discovered, there had been a marital dispute and Adrienne’s host dad was hoping that by dragging us along to the middle of nowhere he could use us to get his wife to come back with him. It didn’t work and I returned in a pretty bitter mood at about 11:00 to find that my own host mom had been waiting up for me with a cold dinner. Jackie explained everything as best she could and Mama Veronica was more upset with Adrienne’s host father than me, but it was disappointing to take a three hour drive to Kitui only to see my family for a few hours.
The next day I woke up early to get in a Matatu yet again and return for a morning meeting in Nairobi with Benson. By this time I was pretty fed up with riding in matatus but I did my best to sleep a bit. We arrived in Nairobi to meet the volunteer who wanted to assist just in time for the meeting. Benson and my volunteer friend hit it off really well and after looking over the paperwork and asking him some questions she agreed to loan him the money for the clearing costs. This works out great, because Benson is very excited about using Peace Corps to distribute the 550 wheelchairs he will be receiving. Benson has had problems in the past with giving free wheelchairs to distributors who end up selling them for profit, and he feels confident that he can trust the Peace Corps to truly give them out for free. In fact, I have a distribution meeting scheduled with Benson in mid April and he is saying that when I leave Peace Corps he wants to hire me on to potentially take his place as Chairman for KPDP. I’m doubtful that two years down the road I’ll want to be living and working in Nairobi, but I took it as a compliment regardless.
(Author's note: Anybody looking into donor work in Kenya needs to be very very careful before making the same mistake I did here. Beware of people like Benson Anjere and insist on total transparency and accountability)
So I’m almost finished, but so much for brevity…sorry Scott, I’m bound to have a less busy week coming up that might work better.
After the meeting I had planned to take a Matatu to Eldoret, spend the night there, and then leave early in the morning for Kakamega. This is because it was already noon and I would be driving long into the night to reach Kakamega on the same day. Benson overheard me talking about this, and said that since he lives in Western province and was planning a trip to his house that day. He offered to give me a ride and drop me off in Kakamega. I thought it would be a nice change to actually ride in a real car instead of a Matatu and took him up on it. The result was the longest, slowest ride ever. Since Benson is disabled his driver needed to go very slow, especially on the rough pothole covered parts of the road (basically about half the length of the trip). Our average speed must have been 25kph and when we finally got to Kisumu, still an hour from my house, it was past 9:00. Benson and his assistants (we were four deep in the back of the car) were very tired and he suggested spending the night at his house, which was supposedly only a 20 minute drive from Kakamega that I could take in the morning. I was appreciative of the ride and very tired myself so I took him up on it. We arrived at his house very late and all I wanted to do was sleep, but Benson insisted I stay up and drink Tuskers with him while his assistants cooked dinner. It was well past midnight before I finally made it to bed. The next morning I left at eight by Matatu in order to get to my office in time for a 10:00 meeting. No problem when it’s only a twenty minute ride, right? Well, Benson lives on the Ugandan border and the ride was over two hours, so once again the Kenyan sense of time spent in a matatu was grossly underestimated. I figure that Benson had planned for me to spend the night at his place all along. On a more positive note, meetings don’t start on time here anyway so all in all I made it home in one piece happy to take a breather from travel for awhile.
That’s it for now. This has been a low key weekend of relaxing and the next few months are filling up fast and I plan to enjoy it. I’ll write more soon, and plan to get some pictures up as soon as I have electricity in my house again..going on one week power free as it is, so don't open my fridge.
This last week has been a lot of fun, and finally my whirlwind adventure tour will slow down for a few weeks. Things will pick back up for In-Service Training (IST) and Mt. Kenya at the end of the month, and maybe my family in May, but for awhile I'll be onsite, or at least in the western half of the country.
My friend Sarah, the last of the volunteers from the Canadian group, was leaving over the weekend, so Wednesday night we went out for dinner and said our farewells. Then, on Thursday I took a bus to Nairobi for a Peace Corps 45th anniversary party. The party was scheduled for Saturday but since I was in Nairobi anyway I wanted to catch up with Benson, the chairman of the Kenya Programme for Disabled Persons (KPDP) and my potential contact for free wheelchairs. I checked into the Upper Hill campsite in Nairobi on Thursday night, which I highly recommend to anyone on a budget. Most of the Peace Corps volunteers in town for the party were staying there, and to my surprise so many had already arrived on Thursday that there were no rooms left. No problem, for 300 shillings they gave me a place to sleep in the hot mosquito filled attic and I was able to tough out a night there until a tent became available to me the next day.
The next morning I left for a visit to the Peace Corps office and to see Benson. As I mentioned earlier, there is a container of 550 wheelchairs from an organisation called Free Wheelchair Mission waiting to be picked up at the port of Mombasa. The donor of the wheelchairs included shipping all the way to the port. Since this is a donation, the clearing and customs fees were not anticipated. However, Kenyan customs decided to require a $4000 clearance fee on the container. Benson did not have this amount on hand and requested additional funding from the Wheelchair Mission to cover this. After some time the organisation provided Benson with the money, but meanwhile the port of Mombassa was charging storage costs for the container at 10,000 shillings ($130) a day. As a result, the total required to get these wheelchairs cleared is now nearing $10,000 and continues to grow. With the rate things were going, it was looking unlikely that the wheelchairs would ever be able to be acquired. What will inevitably happen then is that the container will be seized and the goods sold, thus preventing the people who cannot afford a wheelchair from being able to receive one. I sent out emails to the current PCV's informing them of the situation, and I was connected with a friend of a PCV named Peter who wanted to help. He told me he may have connections willing to cover the storage fees and clear the wheelchairs, and I told him that if he wanted to help we needed to meet with Benson ASAP as the amount required is continuing to grow higher every day.
I arrived at the meeting with Benson and Peter after going by the Nairobi Peace Corps headquarters on Friday morning. Once again I found that the only guy that has access to mail I have may be receiving in Nairobi was not around. (I received most of my Christmas cards, some dated November, in early March. Thanks everyone, and please use my Kakamega address from now on).
So with my Peace Corps HQ visit out of the way I had a chance to sit down with Benson and Peter and discuss the issues at hand. Peter is a Kikuyu from Central Province and he seems to be involved in just about everything. The stereotype of Kikuyu work ethic seems to ring true in many cases. Beyond working on a honey-as-cash-crop development project with local women, a career as a tour guide, and coaching a very talented girl’s soccer team, Peter is also in charge of the Boy Scout program in Kenya, which is very popular here. Beyond all of this Peter somehow found time to learn about the Wheelchair issue and make his way to Nairobi to chat with Benson.
Benson explained the situation to Peter and showed us the latest documentation from the port of Mombassa with the current balance needed to clear shipping costs. Peter was very knowledgeable of the ways of the Port of Mombasa and had a similar story. As the leader of the Boy Scouts he received a container of camping gear, hiking shoes, etc. from the states. Once again shipping was only covered to the port, and by the time the money was available to cover the customs and clearing costs the storage fees became too much and the container was abandoned. Its contents were then seized and sold by the people who are probably doing very well with Kenya’s policy towards donated goods.
Anyway, before Benson became paralyzed, he was a relatively important person in the Kenyan government. Benson has tried every political connection he knows to get the wheelchairs cleared, including several Members of Parliament (MP’s). He has had little success.
After discussing these issues at some length with Peter he replied that he knew a few people who may be willing to assist, and he also suggested a fundraiser from people needing the wheelchairs to cover the costs. However, Benson was completely against the fundraising idea. First, there simply isn’t enough time. Secondly, Benson wants these chairs to go to the poorest of the poor and does not want any money out of them. Benson informed Peter that a fund-raising approach had been attempted several times in the past and every single time the money ended up missing or not fully accounted for. In fact, Benson was so tired of this that he finally decided to channel a fundraiser through a Catholic Diocese, only to later discover that the Bishop in charge of collecting the funds was keeping a large sum of the money for himself!
So with the “fundraising-from-the-disabled” idea unacceptable to Benson, the other option was a donation, and because of the bureaucracy and accountability required from NGO’s, a grant application approach would take just too long. However, Benson informed us that additional grant money is coming into the organization in a few months, and any money given towards the storage costs could be refunded. He even presented the paperwork from the organization to prove it. I am still a little skeptical but I have come to really respect Benson and I believe he’s an honest guy.
(Authors note: I learned a hard lesson through this experience. I found money for Benson's project and it was stolen at the expense of 550 potential disabled Kenyans)
So I left the meeting unsure of what to do and hoping for a lead from Peter. With much on my mind, I met with the volunteers from my group back at the campsite to go out for dinner.
Dinner was definitely an experience to be remembered. Nearly all the volunteers from my group were in Nairobi and we left together to eat at a restaurant in Nairobi called Carnivore. I had been told this restaurant served game meat such as Elephant and Zebra, and I was looking forward to giving it a try. I later learned that game meat is no longer legal to serve, so I was a little disappointed, but I still had a chance to try some pretty strange dishes. The meals are basically all-you-can-eat meat, and the vegetarians in our group who were with us just to be social were pretty disgusted as huge slabs of meet are carried on skewers and pieces are shaved off onto the plate. First came the chicken, turkey, beef, pork, and lamb (boring). I was really hungry, but since it was all-you-can-eat I refused to let them fill me up on things I could eat elsewhere, and I turned down each of these courses. Then things got interesting. I had a chance to eat ostrich (tasty, a bit like beef with a gamey flavor) crocodile (maybe sort of like chicken?) and camel (chewy, with a really odd aftertaste. I’d imagine horse tastes similar. Not recommended). We stuffed ourselves with meat until past midnight and I could literally feel my arteries starting to harden. Overall, the food and atmosphere at Carnivore was a lot of fun and definitely worth a try once.
The next day was the 45th Peace Corps anniversary party at the International School in Nairobi. All past and present PCV's living in Kenya were invited to attend, and there were easily two hundred people there. It was really interesting to be able to talk to the previous volunteers, and it was surprising how many “returned” volunteers are still living in Kenya. A few were married to Kenyans as well, and several ex-PCV’s had been stationed elsewhere but ended up in Kenya as a career. I even spoke to a couple that volunteered in the Congo in the early seventies; what a different world that was compared to my conditions in Kenya today!
The International School is where all the ambassadors and embassy kids attend and I have never been to a nicer school compound in my life. It was such a stark contrast from any schools I had been to in Kenya. The soccer field was immaculate, the grounds were beautiful and well-kept, and I spent nearly the entire day in the crystal-clear Olympic sized swimming pool. I even learned how to back flip off the board.
The funny thing was that Marines stationed in Kenya were serving food and drinks to the volunteers...for quite a profit. The Tuskers were 100 shillings (35 more than the normal price) and hamburgers were 100 shillings. Where were the profits going? Back to International School. My friend Tony made a joke out of how we were all able to assist, a few shillings at a time, with the deplorable conditions at the school.
At that party I also spoke with the volunteer who assisted me in finding Peter. She was interested in knowing if any progress was made and I told her everything we discussed. From a career as a lawyer, the volunteer has quite a bit of money saved. After listening to my story she felt that if Peter was unable to assist, a private donation was the only way to quickly take care of this problem before the amount for storage fees becomes unattainable. She then offered to cover the clearing costs, if needed, with her own money. I wanted her to discuss things with Benson before committing, and I agreed to meet with her and Benson on Monday.
That night the Peace Corps had rented out Upper Hill Campsite for “Peace Corps Prom”. There was a DJ and a Peace Corps prom king and queen were nominated from the group about to return in June. Some of the girls were really excited about the whole thing and one in particular was pretty upset that she wasn’t Prom Queen. I thought the whole idea was stupid, but I kept my opinion to myself. Nevertheless, I did enjoy meeting so many of the volunteers from other groups that I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and all in all it was a great day.
That night I also met an Irish volunteer setting up Radio Equipment in Somalia. He told me he had been with working with a large group volunteers in Mogadishu, and many of them had been killed in an attack. As a result he was spending his remaining time in Nairobi until returning to Ireland. I’ve tried to find more information regarding the attack online, but I couldn’t find anything, but perhaps that this type of incident is so routine it isn’t even newsworthy in Somalia anymore.
Since I had a meeting scheduled in Nairobi the following day, I left for Kitui to visit my host family on Sunday. I had told my host family I was planning to visit them in one week, and when I arrived in Kitui I realized my Swahili still needs a lot of work. What I accidentally told my host mama was that I was coming to see them for one week, not in one week. As a result, Mama had purchased a new set of bed sheets for me, cleaned up my room, and even planned a goat-eating party for the following Saturday. I felt pretty bad to tell her that I was only there for the night, but I did have to return to Nairobi and get back to work in Kakamega. Even worse, I was able to see her even less than I intended. I went to Kitui with Adrienne, one of my Peace Corps friends, because she wanted to visit her host family too. She planned to surprise her family by being in town, but arrived to find that her mama was out of town. Adrienne’s host father was there, however, and he agreed to drive us in his matatu to the nearby village where her mama staying. He assured us it was only a few kilometers away, and so I went along for the ride. I went with Jackie, my host family sister, and planned to be back in time for dinner.
It turned out that a few kilometers of driving meant two hours (one-way) on a bumpy, slow going dirt road. After the first hour I started asking if we were about to arrive, and kept getting the same answer: “We are almost there”. It was past 8:00 when we reached our destination, and we were baffled by why Adrienne’s host father would want to waste so much petrol to drive us for what was a ten minute visit with Adrienne’s host mom. As I later discovered, there had been a marital dispute and Adrienne’s host dad was hoping that by dragging us along to the middle of nowhere he could use us to get his wife to come back with him. It didn’t work and I returned in a pretty bitter mood at about 11:00 to find that my own host mom had been waiting up for me with a cold dinner. Jackie explained everything as best she could and Mama Veronica was more upset with Adrienne’s host father than me, but it was disappointing to take a three hour drive to Kitui only to see my family for a few hours.
The next day I woke up early to get in a Matatu yet again and return for a morning meeting in Nairobi with Benson. By this time I was pretty fed up with riding in matatus but I did my best to sleep a bit. We arrived in Nairobi to meet the volunteer who wanted to assist just in time for the meeting. Benson and my volunteer friend hit it off really well and after looking over the paperwork and asking him some questions she agreed to loan him the money for the clearing costs. This works out great, because Benson is very excited about using Peace Corps to distribute the 550 wheelchairs he will be receiving. Benson has had problems in the past with giving free wheelchairs to distributors who end up selling them for profit, and he feels confident that he can trust the Peace Corps to truly give them out for free. In fact, I have a distribution meeting scheduled with Benson in mid April and he is saying that when I leave Peace Corps he wants to hire me on to potentially take his place as Chairman for KPDP. I’m doubtful that two years down the road I’ll want to be living and working in Nairobi, but I took it as a compliment regardless.
(Author's note: Anybody looking into donor work in Kenya needs to be very very careful before making the same mistake I did here. Beware of people like Benson Anjere and insist on total transparency and accountability)
So I’m almost finished, but so much for brevity…sorry Scott, I’m bound to have a less busy week coming up that might work better.
After the meeting I had planned to take a Matatu to Eldoret, spend the night there, and then leave early in the morning for Kakamega. This is because it was already noon and I would be driving long into the night to reach Kakamega on the same day. Benson overheard me talking about this, and said that since he lives in Western province and was planning a trip to his house that day. He offered to give me a ride and drop me off in Kakamega. I thought it would be a nice change to actually ride in a real car instead of a Matatu and took him up on it. The result was the longest, slowest ride ever. Since Benson is disabled his driver needed to go very slow, especially on the rough pothole covered parts of the road (basically about half the length of the trip). Our average speed must have been 25kph and when we finally got to Kisumu, still an hour from my house, it was past 9:00. Benson and his assistants (we were four deep in the back of the car) were very tired and he suggested spending the night at his house, which was supposedly only a 20 minute drive from Kakamega that I could take in the morning. I was appreciative of the ride and very tired myself so I took him up on it. We arrived at his house very late and all I wanted to do was sleep, but Benson insisted I stay up and drink Tuskers with him while his assistants cooked dinner. It was well past midnight before I finally made it to bed. The next morning I left at eight by Matatu in order to get to my office in time for a 10:00 meeting. No problem when it’s only a twenty minute ride, right? Well, Benson lives on the Ugandan border and the ride was over two hours, so once again the Kenyan sense of time spent in a matatu was grossly underestimated. I figure that Benson had planned for me to spend the night at his place all along. On a more positive note, meetings don’t start on time here anyway so all in all I made it home in one piece happy to take a breather from travel for awhile.
That’s it for now. This has been a low key weekend of relaxing and the next few months are filling up fast and I plan to enjoy it. I’ll write more soon, and plan to get some pictures up as soon as I have electricity in my house again..going on one week power free as it is, so don't open my fridge.
posted by KenyaJoe at 7:07 AM
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