Back from the Mountain and Back to Work

One thing about Kenya is that it can a lively place at the most unexpected of times. I often walk home from the taxi stand in Kiminini to Pathfinder Academy where I stay. One day when I was walking home, I passed the place where on Sundays they usually weigh grain and place it into sacks. Only on this particular day there was a keyboard, microphone and PA system set up and a crowd was dancing to the free show. It was quite the sight to see.

In Kiminini, people dance

Another time when I was waiting at the taxi stand in Kitale I witnessed the unusual sight of someone blowing up a condom until it was quite big. I joined in the circle that had formed around him to see what was going on. He was speaking very emphatically, but in Kiswahili so I have no idea what he was saying, but every now and again he would say: “Citric Acid! Vitamin C!.” He used orange juice to pop the condom. From what I gathered it was a “medical” product.

This balloon tastes funny

CITRIC ACID!!! VITAMIN C!!!!

Work at the factory has been going very well. The transition to electrically powered equipment has been a smooth one, and thanks to Sammy, the production manager, things have been going quite smoothly. We adjusted our method of firing filters in the kiln by a little bit to help slow things down and it has lead to an increase in efficiency which has been quite pleasing.

Martin and Collins are now safe.

I also took a day off from KCP business to accompany Ron, an American who works with a faith based charity, to deliver some food to an area in West Pokot. The day began fairly early, it’s been so long since I’ve been able to say it, but, we left on time, so it was a good start. We left in a lorry carrying about four tonnes of food, and when we got to the first town we realized we had a puncture in one of the duals, so we waited for about an hour while the driver fixed it. Only when the driver came back the puncture was not repaired, we went on anyways. After some driving we stopped for lunch, chapatti and beans, standard Kenyan fare. When we went to drive off our driver informed us the battery was dead, so we had to push. Only he’d parked in the ditch, with sand, so thanks to help pushing from about the whole village we finally got rolling again.

The trip was a little rough, in some places the roads were pretty shoddy, and it involved going through dry river beds which could be somewhat steep. In one of the riverbeds our driver misjudged the slope and put the truck precariously towards its side. When he tried to put it in reverse he stalled the truck. This left us with a stalled truck in a river bed, with no battery. We were stuck and the sun was hot. Our only option was to unload the truck of all the food and hope that we could then push it backwards up the slope. That was a lot of fun. So with all of us pushing we got the truck back up, and it chugged to a start. So the driver took it back down to the river bed and there we loaded back on the potatoes, which were the heaviest of the cargo. After this the truck backed up again, and took its shot at the slope and this time conquered it. The rest of the cargo was then retrieved from the river bed and carried up, and finally we were off again. After all the excitement it was nice to roll in and be greeted by the singing crowd, but we couldn’t stay long, we were there long enough to be presented with a gift of chicken and eggs.

It was a long day, and as we got close to home it got dark. At that point the driver pulled the truck over and wouldn't drive any further. He wanted more money. We got out and took a taxi home. A few days later I heard Ron telling someone he sent the police after the driver, for kidnapping, or something like that, but Ron is a little crazy, so who knows.

And one more taxi story. There are some station wagon taxis, and when the taxi is full sometimes people ride in the trunk. So not wanting to wait for the next taxi I decided to get into the boot and hope that someone would get out early. After we were rolling an mzee noticed me sitting behind him. “You shouldn’t be sitting back there” he told me “you’ll write things about this country.” I told him I was reporting for the Wall Street Journal but he recognized me from a promotion we had done in town, and had good things to say about our filters.

Kilimanjaro!

The conversation about Kilimanjaro had begun in Edmonton.  When Justin and I arrived and continued talking about it, Joshua heard about our trip and the three of us decided we would go together. Joshua is a busy man, but putting him in charge of booking made sense because he knows far more people than we do, and he knows how to get a good deal. There are many ways to climb Kili due to the nature of our late booking we ended up on the “Coca-Cola route” so named because you can literally buy Coke on the way up, and the lodging instead of being tents is in huts on the way up.

The week before Kilimanjaro was especially busy as there was a lot of work to be done at the factory and we were working on preparing a quote for an NGO, so I didn’t put anything into the planning process, and wasn’t totally sure if I would be able to make it. It wasn’t until two days before the day that we had to leave for Justin to be able to make his flight that Joshua announced the details. And I of course wasn’t going to pass a chance, the chance, to climb Kili.

Leaving from Kitale we boarded the night bus for Nairobi. This time the bus company was to be Akamba. It was an old bus, but the seats were like armchairs, only the person in front of me reclined his seat to the max, and when I tried to recline my seat, it actually moved forward and refused to adjust. When I asked him to move, he acted like he didn’t speak English. So I moved, and had a decent bus ride, sleeping most of the way the bus got pretty cold in the night. Justin had it a little worse though, some rain was leaking in by the window where he sat.

We pulled into Nairobi around what I think was 4 in the morning. We were a little excited as our ticket came with a meal voucher for breakfast listed as eggs and toast. We got a mandazi, which are basically balls of dough cooked like donuts only they were hollow, so it was a little disappointing. Eventually we shuffled onto our next bus, which was to take us all the way to Arusha. This meant crossing into Tanzania. We arrived sometime in the early afternoon and were greeted by Ritha; Joshua’s friend who was to accompany us on our climb. She took us to our hotel, and the we visited her place which was just nearby.

Next we went for lunch. At lunch we decided the division of labour, Ritha and I went to the bank, while Joshua and Justin started on the shopping. I spent about half the afternoon standing in a bank. We also went to a market which was very cool to see, but unfortunately I didn’t want to scream tourist by taking out my camera.

As a last note on exposition I should have long ago mentioned that bargaining is a way of life here. The first rule is that prices are negotiable. When I arrived in Arusha I didn’t have a sleeping bag so we went to an outfitter. Two hours later we walked out with walking poles, Justin had some gators, and I had a sleeping bag, and we weren’t much poorer.

Day 1: Driving up to Kilimanjaro we weren’t afforded a view of the peak, Kili just has a giant base, and the top of the mountain is covered in clouds. When we got there we met the porter team, took our packs, and after signing in we began the climb. The first day scenery was forest, and the first camp was actually at an altitude not much higher than where we stay in Kiminini, so things were pretty easy for us. We saw some monkeys in the trees and walked to see a crater, which was quite deep and had a swap in it. One of the surprises of the trip was to be how good our cook was, most of his meals were pretty similar, but decent none the less.

The next day we began our hike up to the next camp. In doing so we left the forest behind and climbed above the clouds to Horombo huts at 3720m. The hike was slow, the motto of the mountain is “pole pole” which means slowly, so nothing about the hike was too challenging. The night at Horombo was quite cold though. The next day was our acclimatization.. day To acclimatize we spent an extra day at Horombo, during which we hiked to the base of Mawenzi peak, the jagged looking of the two peaks, and spent most of the afternoon there. The other part of the afternoon was spent making a figure out of rocks and wood we called “Mr. Maji.”

After acclimatization we left Horombo for Kibo. Kibo is at 4700m and is the camp from which the summit attempt is staged. Again, there was nothing challenging about moving between camps, during the day when the sun was shining the weather was quite pleasant, and some of the views were quite impressive, and by mid afternoon we were at Kibo. The fun part about climbing Kilimanjaro to Uhuru peak though, is that the climb is made at midnight so as to reach the peak by sunrise. So after arriving at Kibo we had a quick lunch and went to sleep.

Waking up was easier than expected, I couldn’t sleep much anyways, I was a little excited, and the room was not too cold, probably because there were about ten of us crammed into a pretty small room. Stepping outside was a little colder though. Especially my feet, I had on five pairs of socks so that my feet barely fit into my boots, but it barely registered. The ground was scree, loose rock and sand, and slowly, slowly, slowly we trudged up against the cold. Our water bottles froze, at for hours we hiked. Joshua has since described it as the most difficult thing he has ever done. It took us about seven and a half hours to reach the summit. Unfortunately Justin has all the summit pictures on his camera, so I can’t even offer photographic evidence to back my claim of ascension.

That very day we made the hike back to Horombo, and the following day we climbed down the mountain and rode back to Arusha. After that it was a bus ride to Nairobi where Justin caught his flight back home, while I was to head back to Kitale.

Renos and Updates

After returning from Safari things were of course very busy. Right upon our arrival in Nairobi Justin and I spent a day running around the industrial area with a driver who who was only half familiar with the area. We sped around getting quotes, or rather there were many moments of sitting in traffic jams punctuated by other moments of rolling around back alleys.

After returning to Kitale we got right back to work. One of the things I was working on was the upgrading of some of the factory equipment. A few months ago we’d purchased some equipment from another filter factory, but to get it running we needed to make some adjustments. Firstly all the equipment runs on 110V power where the standard here is 220V power, secondarily different equipment just means that there are many little adjustments to be made.

The other project of the week was of course to continue promoting the filters, through a mix of speaking with businesses and presenting to customers at supermarkets. During this time we have been working on building a staff of salespeople to work in the community. And of course, the normal course of things dictates that there is always much more to do than there is time to do it, I spent Wednesday on a daytrip to Kisumu, where I had meetings at SWAP and Practical Actions. While there I also managed to get my visa extended to the time when my flights are, and I also applied for an alien residency card, making me a resident of Kenya.

This week was also Justins last week.  So in between in all there were some typical moments of ridiculousness. One idiosyncrasy about Kenya, or at least Kitale, are the ‘NGOMBE’ hats. In Kiswahili ngombe means cow, on all the hats underneath the word ngombe is a picture of some barbed wire. ‘NGOMBE’ is therefore cow wire. Wearing one of these hats puts you inside an elite club of crazy old men who either work in hardware shops, or simply wander around the streets. By popping into some of the local hardware stores we managed to amass a pretty impressive collection of hats which we shared with the family, who enthusiastically embraced them.

Since before we’d arrived, Justin in particular had been very enthusiastic about climbing Kilimanjaro. When we mentioned it to Joshua he decided that he would also like to join us. So after procrastinating down to the last minute on July 31^st we actually booked our trip, the next day we were Arusha bound.