Motorcycle Diaries

This last week I travelled upcountry with a friend from church, Deb, who has a small house in an area near to Matunda which is a market/town thing on the road between Eldoret and Kitale in Western Kenya. There is probably a way to put google earth on a blog but I don’t know how so you’ll have to use a good old fashioned map to see where it is.

We took a coach to Eldoret and stayed a night there before taking matatu (little Nissan vans with too many people crammed in) to Matunda. From Matunda we took motorbike boda bodas to the hut. It’s all fairly basic with no electricity or taps or toilets but the hut is really nice and cosy. We stayed there for maybe three days and visited various families. Deb’s ‘job’ in Kenya is just to befriend people, get alongside them and encourage them so we went and visited several of her friends.

Agnes and Charles are the poorest of the rural poor, they don’t own land but go round their neighbours asking for work weeding or planting or harvesting depending on the season. They have a few kids Pope, Adu, Dwayne and Zach. They had us round for dinner twice and cooked awesome if very chewy meat stew and perhaps the tastiest sweet potatoes in western Kenya. It seems if ugali is made from flour fresh from the posho mill instead of from a packet it tastes way nicer. So we hung out with them and they told us loads of stories. Charles and Agnes are a bit of a comedy duo bouncing off each other and interrupting each other telling the stories. Charles in particular has massive faith and ascribes every blessing, even the simplest things, to God. My favourite story was the one about Dwayne being born in the grass outside their door because Agnes got grumpy with the midwife refusing to come so she was going to walk to her house!!

We visited various other families in different situations, I won’t write about them all but I learnt loads from the trip, I think experiencing a bit of rural life has helped me to understand Kenyan culture a little more. Everyone in Nairobi has a ‘home place’ usually in a rural part of Kenya somewhere even if they were born in Nairobi and have always lived there the ties to rural areas are still super strong – in fact that’s what my dissertation was about. There are big differences in lifestyle and even mindset between the two places but they are still linked and affected by each other so if you only know urban Kenya you don’t really know Kenya.

On the compound where Deb’s hut is there is also a secondary school but it’s the start of term so they are a bit short on staff and students so one day Nathan a guy who is involved in the school came and asked if I could do some teaching for them. I ended up teaching for two hours having not prepared anything or really having a clue what they were expecting me to do. They just left me there with a class till the end of school! So we just played loads of games as I couldn’t think of anything to teach them, except how to take their pulse because a couple of them wanted to be doctors so I thought that might come in handy one day.

From Matunda we travelled up to Kitale for the last night, from there you can see Mount Elgon which is on the border with Uganda. We met more people there and huddled in a grubby hoteli (café) drinking chai to take shelter from the rain. Then we took the looooong coach ride back to Nairobi, we knocked a guy off his bike when we passed him on the road and the coach driver didn’t even notice - a fine example of Kenyan driving.