Gift of a week

Staying in one place and seeing the rhythm of life at Manor House has been a bonus. That may be a strange revelation for a traveler who has not exactly been rushing around. For two months now I’ve been acting less like a tourist than a relative who arrives and just moves in, or a migrant worker who finds a fitting job and claims it. Whatever I am, I’m grateful to have a week to finish some writing, to witness students going about their days, and to visit people I met during the conference who live here in Trans-Nzoia district.

The students start their day early. Some are down at the barns below the soccer field by 6:30 a.m., and later I see them in the classrooms or the gardens or the agra-forest area. Many have just returned from their three-month “attachments” – internships back in their communities or with agricultural NGOs. I’ve learned that the two-year certificate program is 40% theoretical and 60% practical, a combination that works very well.

My days have another kind of rhythm. Monday I spent with Esther and met her husband and two children. Esther is a graduate of the Manor House program and wants to establish a mini-center to train other farmers in biointensive agriculture. We decided to meet at the cybercafé and from there, she said, it would be just five minutes to her house. Apparently that’s in African time. But getting there was a treat. For the first leg we walked across a big open area and past some old rail tracks, then on a dirt route between stalls of vendors that you don’t see if you’re buzzing through town by car. That brought us close to the edge of Kitale town where taxis sit and wait. The driver Esther approached quoted a ridiculously high price (because of me, the muzungu) so I suggested we go by boda boda. So that’s how we traveled the last few kilometers. It was cheap, it was fun, and it was air conditioned. These boda bodas are not motorized mini-bikes like those back in Kampala. Here in Kitale a boda boda is a bicycle, with a big cushioned pad over the rear tire where a passenger sits and relaxes while the rider pedals like crazy up and down long hills.

Walking a kilometer or so down a dirt road after hopping off the bicycle bodas, we reached the quarter acre of land where Esther and her husband built their house just this past year. In front of the house is a large maize garden, and behind the house is a vegetable garden, carefully double dug and planted with sukuma wiki (kale) and onions and flower borders. We ate the delicious lunch Esther had made, and then we walked around her garden and took photos and talked agricultural talk. Kids from the neighborhood joined Esther’s nine-year-old Faith, who wore a Seattle Seahawks T-shirt, and four-year old Ian who ran back and forth in shyness and excitement.

Tuesday I visited Samuel’s farm but I’ll write about it later because there is only so much my heart can process at once. Wednesday I stayed “home” to get underway with the writing for Manor House. Yesterday a few details and a couple visitors punctuated my writing time, then I went into town with Emmanuel who is back from Nairobi, but we discovered that the internet was down (Kenya-wide, they told us) so we couldn’t send or receive any email. That part of the week’s pattern was already familiar.

I am back to running right at sunrise after several “lazy” mornings when I didn’t get out til 7 or so. It’s barely light at 6:30 a.m. but intensely bright by 7:30. The strange equator sun! Such a distant cousin to the northern latitude sun with its long, slow angle to the horizon. I’ve branched out from the soccer field and now run down the lane and out to the road. It’s fun to run a ways on that main dirt road and see people starting their day, on foot and on bicycle and occasionally by donkey cart or matatu.

The matatus – taxi vans – I first learned about when my daughter Heather lived in Kenya. Heather’s Nairobi mom owned one, in addition to her job with an eye care NGO. But experiencing a matatu ride is another “you haven’t lived until you’ve done it” thing. It costs 50 bob (that’s less than a U.S. dollar, let’s see, about 78 cents) for a matatu ride from Manor House into town. The ride takes fifteen minutes but the wait may be an hour or more. To maximize his income, the driver fits in as many people as possible, and that’s more than I previously imagined. Everyone squeezes even tighter to make room for one more person. Then you bump along together. As the guy next to me on one ride said, smiling, “This is Africa.”

The climate here, at least at this time of year, is incredibly nice. According to Don, who googled Kitale’s altitude for me from his computer in Kodiak, this part of Kenya is 6,200 feet above sea level. That would account for the cool mornings that lead into the deliciously warm afternoons followed by the early evening thunderclouds that build, drop rain, then disappear before the next sunrise.

It’s wet season now, a little early some people say. In fact, the rains have been so torrential not far from here that several people died when their homes were washed away. Landslides just west of us, drought to the north. This too is Africa.

A note to Jan about driving: You’re quite right about the clutch pedal. It does remain on the left, even in cars with the steering wheel on the right. Thank goodness for that! It’s surprisingly easy to steer on the right side of the car and drive on the left side of the road even after a lifetime of doing otherwise. But if the clutch and brake and gas pedals got changed around…Yikes! We would have disappeared into a pothole for sure.