Saturday morning was a day with sunshine and high spirits. We had a breakfast buffet at the PCEA in Nairobi which most people didn't eat. One of my only dislikes on this trip was the very vocal, very consistent dislike of the food. I actually tried things I'd never tried before; some I liked, some I didn't but I didn't have anything that I thought was awful.
After loading our luggage on top of the buses, we headed out into the country. Once outside Nairobi, a city of almost 3 million people, we found the landscape pretty desolate and roads pretty bad. Kennedy's bus broke down - water hose burst. Our bus came up on them stopped on the side of the road. One of our guys had a pocket knife which Kennedy used to trim the hose. Fortunately we were close to a house (there were very few in the countryside) so Kennedy and Richard were able to get a bucket of water to put back in the bus to get us to a service station. The service stations were pretty modern looking and were in the most unexpected places.
After an hour or so we ran out of paved roads and began to rattle along on dusty, rocky roads that had lots of ruts. Being under British influence for so long, driving is on the left side of the road, sort of. When the roads got too bad, Richard would drive on the right side or in the ditch or sometimes off the road completely.
We finally reached Segera Mission, about 4 hours north of Nairobi. The building that houses the mission is really very nice and roomy - 2 story cement block with a bathroom. There is also a health clinic, a school and a chapel. Water for the toilets is pumped straight from the river so it is rather muddy looking. We met Lucy who is a nurse and leads the mission; Faith who is Josephine's mother and helps with the children and cooking and other chores; Chrisbo who is the mission pastor and a pretty young girl who hopes to go to college to study nursing. For the life of me I can't remember her name and I hate that. She has a beautiful voice and sings in the youth choir and also serves as a translator for the church services.
After some time at the mission we headed to Nanyuki to the Sportsman's Arms Hotel where we would spend the next 4 nights. The hotel was about an hour and a half from the mission. It was an attractive hotel with the same hard mattresses and pillows. Every hotel, school, church, organization is behind gated walls. Our hotel had barbed wire on top of the fence.
Once again no one liked the food. We had eggs, cereal, some kind of sausage (more like polish than our traditional breakfast sausage), potatoes, liver and onions, coffee, hot tea, and cocoa for breakfast. Lunch each day was a "take away" box with fruit juice, a sandwich, crackers, cheese and whatever was left over from breakfast. Dinner was rice, potatoes, lamb, soup, veggie stews, fried noodles and other things like meatballs in a tomato-ey sauce; steamed cabbage, spinach, steamed carrots, and desserts. I ate more in Kenya than I normally eat at home. My roommate didn't like anything they offered and lived almost exclusively on boiled eggs. The food was pretty bland but quite edible especially for the hard work we would be doing.
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