Trip to Eldoret

Hello Everyone! Sorry about the delay in blogs, we were experiencing some technical difficulties, which I guess was to be expected because, hey, we're in Kenya. So you will see many new postings today, because we are operating on all 6 cylinders here again, which in Kenya is akin to being back up on the bicycle. Happy reading...

In Nairobi, the team stayed at a place called the Mayfield House (pictured on the left). The Mayfield House is a missionary guest house set in the northern suburbs of Nairobi. Many missionaries stay here before trekking out to their various posts throughout Kenya. At the same time that EyeCare Kenya team was there, we met a team of ministers from North Carolina, a religious group from South Africa, and another family from Cedar Rapids who had come to Kenya to visit their two daughters that were interning at the ELI compound where the EyeCare Kenya team would also be staying.

Mayfield House was a lot like a sorority house…lots of couches in a few large common areas, a kitchen, large dining hall, dorm rooms with bunk beds and mosquito nets, flushing toilets, HOT showers, and temperamental email access. Sharon is modeling one of the lovely mosquito nets below.

We arrived to Mayfield House around midnight on Friday night, got up early the next morning, had breakfast—chai tea, bananas, peanut butter and honey, and cereal. Loaded the van and left for a small commuter airport in Nairobi, to board a prop-like plane that would take us to Eldoret.

Driving through Nairobi in the daylight was a very different experience. We passed a parking lot filled with people and short buses—about the size of hotel transport vans—that had wooden coffins tied to their roofs. (In Kenya, when family members die in the hospital, the remaining family must pool their money to buy back their beloved family member, so they can provide a proper wake and burial. That burial, incidentally, often takes place in the family’s yard.)

When we had all loaded onto the plane, the pilot turned around and gave us the safety speech usually reserved for American Airline stewardesses—emergency exits and all. Even though it was the same speech we had each heard a million times, I can tell you that when the pilot is pointing out the nearest exits, everyone pays attention. It was a smooth 40 minute flight—a hop, skip, and a jump from Nairobi to Eldoret.

Once we landed, we still had to travel about an hour-and-a-half to the ELI compound in Kipkaren, so we hopped into a van and set-off, yet again. A few sights to mention from the road:

1. Free-range livestock roams at will along the roadside, completely uncontained and only mildly tended. Animals we passed include: cows, lambs, goats, and chickens.
2. Charcoal is a product that people manufacture in Kenya. We saw families gathering sticks in a field. Then they pile the sticks together, set them on fire, cover them with dirt, and let them smolder for 1 week. When they return, they have charcoal to sell.
3. Bikes are used to transport almost everything. Milk, charcoal, and people and apparently, while women can take bike-taxis, you almost never see a woman actually riding a bike. There has been some broad speculation that the reason is that women here are required to wear skirts, which would make bike riding difficult. But I digress…The bike riders bravely share the road with cars and trucks that pass at will and are governed by loose speed and traffic etiquette laws, and on top that, there is livestock to avoid.

The van stopped in downtown Eldoret in order to pick up half of the Cedar Rapids family that had made it out on the first flight from Nairobi to Eldoret earlier that Saturday morning. The second half had landed with us.

Downtown Eldoret (pictured below) looked a lot like how I have always imagined Tijuana would look except instead of run down lime green and piñata pink stucco buildings set to salsa music, Eldoret was decorated in turquoise, purple, and red mud walls and dilapidated wooden structures squeezed so closely together it felt like the town was holding its breath.

Nairobi smelled like metal. Eldoret smelled like dust and dirt. People were everywhere. Teenage boys begged in the streets, their noses and upper lips coated in white from sniffing glue. Adele told us there were shelters they could go to for food, but they could not sniff glue at the shelters, so, instead, the boys sat in the dust and the dirt and they waited.

We, however, were not waiting, and quickly jumped back into the vans to continue on to our final destination: Kipkaren.