Grant In Kenya: 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.