Midnight Truck to Nairobi

Things here never seem to slow down. On Friday Safe Water and Aids Project (SWAP) came to pick up the first of their order of filters. They brought a Land Cruiser so they weren’t able to take them all in one go, but they were able to pack quite a few of them and they came back to pick up the remainder on Monday. The rest of the weekend was kept busy as we performed maintenance on our equipment and installed an automatic brake on our presses to make them a little more user friendly.

Swap Land Cruiser

I spent my Monday in Eldoret. Eldorent is about 100 kilometers from Kitale, so it isn’t too bad to travel to. A ticket on a 7 seater Kangaroo is 250/= which is roughly $2.75 Canadian. In Eldoret I went to where I was told I could by seals for our hydraulic jack. When I got there, they told me they in fact didn’t but they thought they could point me in the direction of a shop that did. In the end I did a lot of running around town without finding a good place. Luckily I also made a trip to our printing shop, so something was able to get produced in this time.

When I was on my way back to Kiminini I was also organizing for our truck to Nairobi to get loaded with 370 filters, so we could leave first thing in the morning. Sometime during the drive the truck driver told me he wanted to leave immediately after the truck was loaded. Great. I got back, I changed and hopped on the truck. It was 6pm, the truck seats were not comfortable, and I was sharing the cab with some farmers who were brining their beans to market. I never managed to string together much more than a few minutes of sleep at a time. The moon was full and I mostly just watched the scenery. The strangest part was when at midnight we pulled into a truck stop, about 80kms out of Nakuru, the middle of nowhere, interesting people. One of whom had already claimed the bed. I’d been told it was supposed to be a 8-9 hour ride, but it was just after 6am when we pulled into Nairobi.

Truck to Nairobi

After getting to Nairobi we unloaded the truck, and the truck left. I then proceeded to jump into a cab to take me to the Industrial Area. The industrial area was recovering from a tragedy where an explosion had happened a day prior in a nearby slum, so things were slow and sombre. After taking care of some business there it was back to the Westlands to finalize the order. From there I left for the bus station and caught a matatu back home.

Coperaizione Internazionale (COOPI)

On Thursday I made another trip to Kisumu to visit the SWAP headquarters. I was also able to pick up my new Kenyan ID. Only they misspelled my name pretty terribly, Grany Harmony Crawford (its Harmon, not Harmony). My place of residence is also listed as Pathlinder Academy.

Friday we made a trip to Pokot which is about 40kms from where we stay. The trip was to collect a type of clay called Kaolin. On the way back there was some rain so Sammy and Collins who were in the back of the truck got a little wet, so we stopped for lunch and waited for the rain to pass.

Sammy digs Kaolin

And then on Saturday I realized a whole week had passed, already I’m down to about a month and two weeks remaining here in Kenya…

Sunsets, Suam Sales, and Smiling Cows

As things have continued to grow for the Kenya Ceramic Project and more people have started to recognize the product, our operations have continued to expand. At the beginning of September we welcomed a new Marketing Manager, Stepehn Karanja, to take the lead in our marketing campaigns in Kitale and beyond. Things have been very busy, we’ve been continuing to work with Supermarkets, running promotions, as well as visiting local shops and dukas, looking for the right people to partner with, as well as setting up an office in Kitale.

Shanna and Emmanuel

All this has kept me quite busy running around trying to set things up. We have also been collaborating with some partners to complete some bulk orders. We got a large order for our filters from Suam Supermarket who were planning on brining the filters for relief to Kakamenga. Things in Kenya sometimes don’t run the smoothest,  a lot of the month was spent trying to get our box supplier in Nairobi to understand our order, and then in securing reliable (and affordable) transportation for our boxes back to Kitale. We also started working with Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI), the Italien aid agency who submitted an order which they plan on taking to Somalia, which is very exciting news, as we have buckets with the EU logo on them now.

Mount Elgon

Suam Delivery

It seems to be raining a little less frequently now, but when it rains, it can rain very hard. One day I was waiting to meet someone in the Coffee Shop when it started raining. Although it rains quite frequently umbrellas are simply not used by most people. So many people took shelter under the awning at the front of the Coffee Shop. Then very quickly one of the tree out front came crashing down, landing just between the awning where people were taking shelter, and a car, narrowly missing both. It the aftermath I found a guy wearing an “Ford World Mens Curling Championship Edmonton 2007” jacket, so I got a picture of it. I also saw a guy wearing an Edmonton Eskimos Jacket in Khetias, but wasn’t able to get a picture.

Ford World Mens Curling Championship Edmonton 2007

Fallen tree at the Coffee Shop

A computer simulated image of me in 5 years

 

For the past three weeks Katya, a Village Volunteer, was also Staying at Common Ground, helping to make sure things stayed interesting. We climbed up on the school and great pictures of Mount Elgon at dawn. Katja mostly worked with the womens groups and taught at the school, there was one little girl in particular who would follow her around everywhere. For her last day Joshua took us to the Kitale Nature Conservancy (AKA Freak Farm) to experience what it had to offer. Mostly I think I’ll let the pictures talk for themselves. Originally it was built as a place to protect 40 of natural swampland habitat, but overtime it’s morphed into something more of a theme park.

There was a “nature walk” which at first was ok, but then we started coming up on a lot of animal cages, most of which were empty. At the end of that there was the freak farm, a refuge for mutated animals, which was mostly kind of depressing. They say they were there for research, but I think the only research they were doing was market research. The star of it was “The Ever-Smiling Cow” a cow with four horns, three eyes, and  cleft pallet.

The Eversmiling Cow!

This is a regular cow...

Katja also got some custom shirts made, and before she left, we got some pictures of myself wearing one of them.  I might have to think about upgrading my wardrobe.