Some photos

I've been busy this last week, sorting out 'stuff', washing clothes, and have at last got to finding photos of my journey.

To start with, here are some of the children who live around the site ...

Baby in a bath ... he lives with his parents and brother

in a house made of corrugated iron sheets !

Beautiful children, despite the circumstances they live in.

Blog on a plane !

BLOG 17 … back to England.

Breakfast after an interesting night; my bed was against the wall, the other side of which was the next door rooms loo … I heard every pee during the night from whoever. 

Breakfast … I had a substantial one with omelette and toast and cereal and juice and toast and tea … and I noticed the Swedish ladies were passing round a big pot of pills … presumably their anti-malarials.   They drink coffee out of soup bowls … interesting.

Peterson took me to JKI airport, and I wandered around the duty frees for something to do for a couple of hours.   Had iced coffee and my soluble aspirin.  Does it do any good, I wonder ?  Had a look in the book stalls and decided that a few I fancied were priced in dollars and my mental arithmetic made them very expensive so I noted the titles and authors and will look on Amazon.

Flight on time; I'm sitting next to a youth who sleeps all the time; he awoke for lunch (it was awful  greasy food) and is asleep beside me again. 

Have I said that I've at last observed a use for the Kindle ?  People like NC who live in Eldoret, and the fathers at Mill Hill, can't get books via Amazon like I do (parcels never arrive), BUT … they can download them from the internet onto their e-readers.   Better than no books at all.   When we lived here I used to get book society books sent out, but one can't do that now.   I've still got some of the Folio Society and other books I bought in the 60's and 70's !

It looks like the flight will be on time or even a bit early.  I have the skymap on, and we are over southern Egypt as I type this.   I wonder if Jan and the others are SkyRadaring me ?!  It gives our altitude and distances and right now we are just north of Abu Simbel, having crossed the Nile, and have 2613 miles to go.   We are due to land in 6 and a half hours.    1718 miles from Nairobi, speed 504 mph and altitude 36000 feet and outside temp -56 F.  Isn't technology wonderful … even me using a laptop up here in the sky …

I watched the spoof on James Bond film with Rowan Atkinson, and a film about dinosaurs, and an episode of some not very funny comedy about a supermarket … it passed the time.

Later … we reached the sky over London half an hour early … then circled Bromley in Kent … twice, and then central London … once, and finally got into Heathrow at the scheduled time, so weren't early at all.   I texted daughter that I had arrived, and got several texts from friends who had been radar tracking my flight !   Daughter and her husband were there to meet me and drive me home.

Good to be back, even if it is B. cold !

I'll have to sort lots of pictures to put up next ….

Ignore the automatic dating

BLOG 16,   23^rd Feb.     Back to Nairobi.

Up betimes to complete my packing; then the last service in the little chapel, Alois presiding.  This joining the catholic fathers has made this trip so special.

Morris was due at 8.15; he came at 8.30 which panicked me slightly, as I had no shillingi left, and needed to go to the ATM to get some money to pay Morris and give him a tip.   We made the bus in good time, and Paul was there to say a final goodbye. 

The bus left late, after a long discussion about a spare tyre with a large area of wire showing through the rubber.  However, they decided it was better than nothing … so I hoped they wouldn't have to use it !

Trip was the same as coming, only in reverse.  Very dusty and dry everywhere.  We stopped in Kericho for ten minutes, then went via Kabianga and Bomet to Narok.  I remembered our trip from Kabianga when it was a bumpy murram road, back to Kericho with Lizzie aged about 4 or 5, with a broken collar bone, and then when we got to the Tea Hospital, how she thought they were going to chop her hair off, because in order to put her in a figure of 8 strapping, the nurse had to lift up her pigtails out of the way ! 

Twenty minute stop in Narok.   Just time for the 10 bob high-type, surprisingly clean, but I still gave it the baby wipe treatment.

Going across the Maasai plains again, the wheat had all been harvested, and I noticed that vast areas have been ploughed, where once was dry bush.   With it being so dry and windy, I wonder if the powers that be, the agricultural experts, have remembered what happened in the US in the 1930's, when dry, windy weather blew away millions of tons of topsoil, creating the dust-bowl ?   Lots of spiralling columns of dust are going up and up into the sky, some carrying plastic rubbish several hundred feet into the sky.   Plastic bags and plastic bottles are everywhere, especially in and near the towns; if only Kenya had continued to use paper bags, and newspaper to wrap things, and glass bottles to collect liquids like milk, which is now sold in thin plastic bags.  The mobile phone has transformed Kenya; the plastic bag is destroying it.

A few animals once past the farm area; impala and Grants gazelles, lots of baboons and a solitary zebra.  I suspect in a few years, even these will disappear. 

Into the outskirts of Nairobi, once climbed up the escarpment and the wonderful views across the Rift Valley, but with a brown haze of dust.    Rush hour, and the bus driver had to reverse the bus and try to find a way to Fire Station Lane (bus depot off River Road) as several roads were being repaired and rebuilt, causing chaos and traffic jams.   Nairobi has over 4,000,000 people living in it; and most of them seem to be moving around the congested city in rush hour.   One day, everything will come to a standstill !

Peterson met me from the bus, and took me back to the ASK guest house, where I had a really grotty room this time.  They need to upgrade seriously.  No lamp-shades, no bed side lamp, cold shower, a bathroom that needed the door opening outwards so one could sit on the loo with the door shut, and as for the loo … it had been installed tipping backwards, so what one did, didn't drop into the water … 

Food was OK; I enjoyed myself Swede watching … a group of ten Swedish pensioners, all over-weight with bum-bags perched on their spare tyres (I can talk !), and who had obviously been to the Mara, for several of them were wearing Maasai necklaces which dangled in the soup.   Another Archbishop here, and an English ex-vicar from Worcester who had come for a three year stint to start a training centre and retreat house at Limuru.