September, 1968 ....yes, sixty-eight !

This is the month I had hoped to return to Kenya for a 'swan song' visit, but that's not to be.  It would have marked the fifty year anniversary of my first setting foot in Africa on 12th September 1968.

So what were we doing in the weeks before we left what a friend of mine so charmingly calls 'Blighty' ?   Well, we had been living in a two roomed rented flat on the second floor in a tower block in Selly Oak, Birmingham.   

   

(Goodness me, what a dreary looking building it was !)

We had given up our teaching jobs and were ready to go off on an adventure !!  Teaching contracts with the Kenyan Government were organised through the Ministry of Overseas Development; I vaguely remember that they organised a sort of induction weekend for new ex-pat teachers going out to Africa, somewhere in Surrey ?   We didn't go on it as we had already booked a camping trip to France before we left for Africa.

We had furniture, books, kitchen equipment, etc. etc. to dispose of before we left.  Some things we sold, and then took our furniture and 'stuff' to my mothers for her to store in a spare room in her Norfolk cottage, assuming we'd be back in 21 months and would need furniture, etc.  Then, we never assumed it would be nearly 11 years before we were back living in the UK.  We packed various things we thought would be useful to have in Kenya, to be shipped out.   (Here I need to check the archive of letters I've mentioned before, to see if we sent sea luggage in advance .... those letters are proving to be very useful !)   I know some things went air freight.  

During our last six weeks in Birmingham we had masses of 'jabs', against yellow fever, cholera, hepatitis of two types, tetanus, polio, typhoid, etc.   And then ordered anti-malarial tablets; we started our time in Kenya taking paludrine every day, but after a few years, it was thought to be no longer effective, so we switched to another anti-malarial.   

The UK government provided ex-pats going to the tropics with a little book called 'The Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates' .... with enough gory details to put anyone off actually going !   It came complete with photographs of tse-tse flies, anopheles mosquitoes, bed-bugs, jigger sores, head lice and ticks ... and diagrams as to the correct and incorrect way of hanging a mosquito net.    We read up on sleeping sickness, typhus, bilharzia and plague; leprosy, rabies and syphilis ... snake bites .... scorpions .......... 

But we went ...........  read on .........