Kenya Log, Day Six

I’m pretty sure I’m missing a day or two here, but whatevs.

Woke up at 7.10am to the sound of people heading toward the restaurant to grab breakfast for the last time (!) in Bondo, and whereas I’d normally be distressed by the fact that I’m ten minutes behind schedule, I was too exahausted and too overwhelmed with everything that’s happened to really care and just made my way to the restaurant again.

The breakfast was the same as always: corn flakes, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs and toast; with thermos flasks of hot milk and hot water on the table for those people wanting to make instant cocoa or milk tea. One interesting thing I observed about the way Kenyan people drink tea, or milk tea to be more specific, is that whereas one’s impression of “milk tea” would be black/red tea with milk added after the tea was brewed in hot water, in Kenya they just dip a teabag into hot milk and actually flavor the milk; it’s probably more accurate to label this “flavored milk” as opposed to “milk tea” since the end product is probably lacking most of the benevolent substances of tea (I think I read somewhere that putting milk in coffee destroys most of the caffeine/polyphenol that’s inside the coffee) and is just a fattening lactose-based drink.

After breakfast, I went back into my hotel room for the last time to check if I left anything behind; luckily I was able to charge my mp3 player using the computer in the annex lobby so I was set for the long drive ahead to Nairobi. I don’t remember if I mentioned this on day two or not, but coming into Bondo by bus was actually a tricky endeavour; the main road leading into the hotel was blocked off for construction so we had to take a backdoor route through a very narrow unpaved road which was surrounded from all sides by trees: since the bus we were taking to Nairobi was substantially better than the bus we arrived in Bondo with, the bus driver decided that he didn’t want to take the risk of damaging/scratching the top and the sides of the bus so he stopped at some random point near the town centre. This meant we had to walk out of the hotel on foot and look for the bus which was fine, except that the bus driver gave us very ambiguous directions as to where he had actually parked the bus so we ended up circling around the town for quite some bit before we actually found the bus and hopped onboard.

The bus ride from Bondo to Kisumu was only about 75 minutes, most of which was spent listening to music and ignoring the people singing in the bus in “noise-cancelling mode”; it’s actually a pretty nifty function where the earphones emit some sort of a vacuous sound in the background so it cancels out any noise that’s coming from outside–it actually feels like you’re on an airplane or some very high building at first, but then you get used to the sound and the feeling and tend to appreciate the fact that you’re not being disturbed by any outside noise.

One good thing about long bus trips is that you tend not to be so picky about the music in your playlist since you know you’re going to be strapped down for a long time with nothing else to do but listen to music so you don’t skip around trying to single out specific songs you want to listen to; I ended up recycling through about 5-6 years of music that I’ve been neglecting since I pretty much had nothing else to do but listen to music on the bus.

We stopped in Kisumu to visit an orphanage that was apparently established and funded by Medical Ambassadors International (yet another NGO that Parent 2 used to work for) where I had to play interpretor yet again while touring the facility. One interesting thing about Kenya I learned while we were in the orphanage was that children often leave home or go out to live in the street as a result of polygamic marriages. Whereas polygamy is discouraged by religion and the state itself, it’s apparently a big part of Kenyan culture; there are apparently many cases where children are simply abandoned as a result of polygamic marriages, especially since a polygamic marriage is discouraged by the state and none of these marriages are usually considered “official.” As a result of having no legal obligation to stay with their families, people tend to informally “end” marriages when they see fit, most of the times resulting in families being split up and whatnot.

About an hour later we hopped back on the bus and headed to Kericho which was about an hour away where we had lunch at this place called “Tea Hotel” which used to be some sort of a manor built by the British during their occupation of Kenya; the menu here was the same as anywhere else we ate at: Ugali, Steamed Kale, some sort of meat stew, Potatoes, Cabbages.

After lunch we hopped on the bus once again on our merry way back to Nairobi; we briefly stopped in Nakuru (the place where our bus broke down on day two) to refuel at the same place our bus broke down and saw a family of baboons on our way into Nairobi–the bus driver actually stopped for the baboons and we threw potato chips and dried bananas at them to draw them in closer to take pictures–hit a huge traffic jam after we got into the city of Nairobi at around 8.00PM, had a few “inspectors” board our bus who were promptly shooed off the bus by Parent 2 being paranoid, and finally arrived at my new resting place for the next 10 days or so: the Bible Translation and Literacy Centre (or BTL for short), which is also home to the SIL’s African Division; they have “satelite internet” here so hopefully I’ll be able to update with more frequency than I’ve been doing for the past few days or so.