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.