Out visiting
on Kenya VSO (Kenya), 28/Sep/2009 10:36, 34 days ago
A while back we had a public holiday to mark the end of Ramadan, most of the Muslims in Kenya live near the coast although of course there are Muslim communities in Nairobi. A Dutch VSO volunteer, her partner and me decided to visit an Indian VSO volunteer whose placement is with a technical school near Mwanga, about eighty kilometres from Nairobi.The first challenge was finding where the matatu left from, central Nairobi can be a confusing, crowded and noisy place, so even with better instructions we might still have had difficulty. The next challenge was where to get off, we overshot and had to get another matatu from Mwanga town before we finally met our friend.From the matatu stop it was a thirty minute walk along dusty unsurfaced tracks and paths, apparently staying on the unsurfaced local‘road’ takes twice as long. However, we were lucky enough to see a train on the railway line, stop to let some folk jump off. Railways in Kenya are narrow gauge, so it all seems rather small to me. Trains are slow, infrequent and not very reliable, so luck was with us that day.The countryside between Thika to Mwanga is rolling hills with trees mixed with small farm plots growing maize, coffee, bananas and beans. The farms were getting ready for planting the years second crop of maize At our in country training VSO gave us language classes in kiswahili, most of which I have forgotten as I do not need to use it in Nairobi but in this area the local people speak Kikyiu.After the walk in we had the promised authentic Indian meal, a tour of his house (similar to mine but without the benefit of plumbing) and the school plus a sight of his motorbike. The motorbike has not seen as much use as it might because of punctures, trouble getting spare parts and that using it raises so much dust ,I have remarked that I am not a big city boy but this was well and truly rural, we had a good day and were made very welcome, the first visitors to make the trek out to see him. We are both doing VSO in Kenya but it is a very different experience depending on where you are.