The road .......... oh, the ROAD !!!

Day 21       5th November

I have made several passing comments on the back shattering, boob bouncing, bum bruising road we travel each day  in a tuk-tuk !!  

I'm not sure if pictures can convey the full horrors of it, but I'll add a few.   The government of Kenya has a multi-billion contract or arrangement with the Chinese government for road building.   There seems to be a special way to do this here; first you import many Chinese engineers and give them all identical wide brimmed straw hats.  They order the stripping off of the old tarmac, thus revealing the murram underneath.  Then you add water and allow traffic to use the stripped off road for weeks, months .... until it has worn into pits, ridges, corrugations ... and then, only then, do you dig it up, and divert the traffic to the edges which resemble ploughed fields !   

Next, culverts and drains are concreted in here and there (needed as the road from town to Nyamasaria crosses a swamp).   Add structures to eventually support bridges for new roads going who knows where.

Lastly, persuade people that something IS happening by building new stretches of road, complete with several layers of tarmac .... but only a few hundred yards of new road here and there (will they ever actually join up ?)   And this process is going to be repeated for hundreds of miles, as far as the Uganda border.  But in the meantime, some of the fuel lorries supplying Uganda and Rwanda are still using the road .... and the coaches, and buses, and other lorries, and cars, and piki-piki, and tuk-tuks ..... 

I must make an appointment with the osteopath for when I get back to straighten out and put back all the bones shaken out of line travelling this road daily .... 

HATW Prayer Prompt for November, and A.S.B. !!

Day 20      4th November

I have produced the 'Prayer Prompt' for this month here in Kenya.   I have been searching for some inspiration for a few days, when it came from Father Hans book I was re-reading !   Here it is ......

November Prayer Prompt

I'm in Kenya at the moment, working on a HATW building project in Kisumu. Its very hot and humid, and we spend some afternoons lazing around outside our rooms, watching the world go by and doing nothing much at all, (only please don't tell David !)     (The head of HATW)

So I've been re-reading a book written by one of the Mill Hill missionaries here – 'Words of Passage' by Father Hans Burgman, which is a record of his pilgrimage and his return journey, from his native Holland to Compostella, on foot, all the way. Its full of philosophical wisdom, humour and Biblical knowledge.

It suddenly struck me that working for HATW is a sort of pilgrimage. We decide to help on a project in India or Africa, really knowing very little about what to expect. We are taken out of our 'comfort zone' and put into a strange place, in a strange country, among people we don't know, not really knowing what to expect along the way, despite advice given before we leave home.

So this is good stuff !  It forces us to make new relationships with our fellow volunteers, and more importantly, with the people we meet in the new country. We have to cope, we gain new knowledge and insight about ourselves, we are cut down to size and have to reconstruct ourselves to fit into the new country.

And like travelling on a successful religious pilgrimage, we never know how it will end and how we will think on it in the future, but of one thing we can be sure; we won't be the same person that started off on this journey with a phone call to David ….....

Wherever you are, please pray for the success of the Paluoc workshop in Kisumu …. and all the other ongoing HATW projects in Africa and India.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

I went with Wendy to try and buy some maps of Nyanza from the Survey of Kenya, which I discovered no longer exists.   They used to produce excellent Ordinance Survey type maps back in the 1960's and 70's, and I wanted some of my favourite areas of Nyanza.

So we went instead to the Land Registry offices.   We hung around for a bit until someone appeared to ask what we wanted, and took us upstairs from office to office, until she found someone who could help, a young lady called Teffy !   She wasn't sure she could help, but took us to another room where we were shown a huge map of Kenya divided into little squares (like the back of an OS map in UK).   I picked out four that might be what I wanted and said I'd like to buy copies.   40 years ago the whole process would have taken perhaps ten minutes ?

Oh dear !   A.S.B. .... or 'Africa Strikes Back' as we say here when things don't turn out as we expect !!    The maps weren't actually for sale ... they had to be ordered from Nairobi, when they would be sent in a .pdf format to my email address !    Teffy said they could be sent to her office via the phone ... and she proceeded to request this.   An hour later, they came .... but no-one had a memory stick with enough space for the .pdf files to be saved on !   I whipped out my camera and removed the card, which I put in the computer there and had the files saved on it (just in case that email never arrived !)

But Teffy managed to get them saved on another memory stick.   Oh no, they couldn't actually print them for me there .... that had to be done in a shop down the road !    So we followed Teffy, and went up some stairs into a room with a huge printer that could print large maps !   And three of the maps printed OK; the fourth had been sent as only HALF a map !    

All this took over three hours ........ and I go back to the Land Registry tomorrow, to see if Nairobi have sent the whole map, and go through the process again !    .......... A.S.B.

Something pretty and calming to the nerves to end with  ....... 

A visit to the Northern Hemisphere and to Pauls Mum

Day 20    3rd November

Paul hired a mini-bus to take us, his wife Lucy, and sons Graham and the twins (who to my shame I still can't differentiate or name) to visit his Mum and family up in Sega, which is north-west of Kisumu in Western Province and near the border with Uganda.

Of course we had to stop at Maseno (where I once lived) for the usual photos .... 

(Photos courtesy of Wendy)

We made a detour to Yala Falls, which look more spectacular on a little video I made, but here they are .... 

.... and then drove on to Sega where we were greeted by Pauls family, and especially his mother ... 

On from there to visit Lucy's mother .... 

Both these ladies are around the same age as Wendy and myself, and both are widows.

Finally back to Kisumu in time for supper !   I have over 100 photos of our day out with Paul, and Wendy has even more, so I'll post some more another day.

The roof, the roof ........

Day 18      2nd November 2013

At last, the roof timbers are in place and we get an idea of what it will be like, though as we leave here Wednesday, I suspect we won't see it with the mabati on (corrugated iron).   

We took the bubble machine to the workshop today, and the kids loved it !    Bubbles everywhere, the children (and their mums) chasing them to pop them !

(Bubble pictures courtesy of Wendy)

We also took along a large bag of childrens clothes, and gave each child who lives around the workshop a  t-shirt, or shorts, or dress, and vest and pants !   It was a bit of a scrum, but Paul was on hand to maintain order !!!   Some of the kids insisted on wearing their new clothes on top of their old !

A special thank you to all our friends who donated the over 50 kg of childrens clothes and ladies bra's we brought out !   Most of the clothes have gone to Pandipieri centre where they will be distributed to the women and new mothers who use the medical facilities there .... the baby clinic, the HIV clinic, etc.   The rest of the larger clothes and knitted jumpers we are taking on to Maua when we go there next week.

Terrifying roofing, widows and more ants !

Day 17.      All Saints.    1st November.

To the workshop, where there wasn't anything for Wendy and I to do in our usual (female) capacity as carriers of bricks, bearers of water cans and mortar mixers !    The brickies have left; the carpenters are here now starting to construct the roof.   It is TERRIFYING watching them walking along the top of the walls, which are one brick wide and over 20 feet above the ground. Paul has got the carpentry students to assist in the construction work.   Jonathan was observing and advising.

So Wendy and I went for a wander round the neighbourhood of Nyamasaria chatting to the locals.   Remember Milly, the little girl whose twin sister was run over ?   Her mother, Mary, seems to have a Friday meeting at her house of local widows, a sort of support group.   Its a very positive development for that family.

Its been stiflingly hot and humid today .... temperature was 31.5 C  by mid afternoon, and very sticky.   We had a nap !

Then I photographed a different lot of smaller ants on biscuit crumbs.   I put some crumbs on a £1 coin, to show the size of the ants, but they didn't like the coin and only tackled the crumbs that had fallen off the edge.  

If you look at the dots around the edge of a £1 coin, the ants are between two and three dots in length !   (I haven't got anything else to measure them with !)