Morning Run & New Clay

You may know that Kenya produces some of the world’s best distance runners. Nearly all the world’s top marathon runners hail from in and around the town of Eldoret. One reason for this is that the elevation is quite high, something around 3000m above sea level. Kiminini is probably about 80km away from Eldoret, so I’ve taken up a bit of running in the mornings. The first rule is getting up early, the sun can be quite hot, so as it begins to rise, I’ll begin to run. It took a few times to get acclimatized but once I was able to catch my breath, everything was fine. There is nothing like running on a dirt road through the middle of farms as the sun rises and the fog lifts up over the fields so I tried to take a few pictures.

October means I have been here nearly five months which is quite incredible to find it’s already been that long. In many ways it still feels like I just got here. At the factory we’ve been doing a little bit of experimenting. While not too long ago we went and picked up some kaolin, recently we ventured to a village just outside of Kakamenga where we got a sample of some new clay. We also did some more upgrading to hydraulic presses, installing a brake and brace on the two of them so that they now work simply and effectively.

In town are marketing is starting to pick up. The marketing team made a trip to Bungoma, a town not far from Kitale, to start a promotion outside of the supermarkets there, including a Khetias where they were able to not only create awareness but sell filters as well. Of course marketing and sales work in Kenya poses its own unique challenges. One thing about Kenya is mobile banking, or banking on ones cell phone is quite popular here. The most popular service is safaricoms “m-pesa” which allows people to send money to one another via cellphone and will store deposited money. We’ve been working  on ways to try and incorporate such tools into our approach.

The hut with the thatch roof is where I stay

They narrowly beat out the Kiminini Hilton for the title of "Best"

One problem for us here has been inflation. Election tactics, a distracted government, recession, whatever the reason the shilling has been deflating against the dollar, and in the country prices for commodities, such as sugar have been rising. At the start of the month Safaricom changed their calling rates from 3/= a minute to Canada to 10/=. Which admittedly probably isn’t a terrible rate, but it was a surprise to me when I found my call was more than three times what I thought it had been.

Clay from near Kakamenga

The weather here has been quite irregular. While people tell me by this time of year it should be hot, and not raining, it’s still been raining fairly often as well. But it’s still been quite hot, if there is one thing I think I’m fearing it’s moving back to Canada just in time for winter.

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…