On Monday we needed to go to Eldoret to take a dog to a new home, one of our students to his placement and also to look at one of our projects we did a couple of years ago.

While it seems straight forward, nothing here in Kenya is simple. Before we could go on our trip we had a meeting, which meant a pickup at the airport at 6.30am. Of course, the flight was delayed by 90 minutes. The only way to tell was because I could find it online. At the airport the only flights up on the screen were those from Kenya Airways and our guy was coming in on Jet Airways.

The plan was to go and have breakfast with a businessman to discuss whether a project we’re working on will be possible. But when we got there, plans had changed and we had a meeting and THEN the breakfast, at around 10am. We ended up going to a lovely hotel called Ole Sereni. Apparently this is where the US set up their embassy when theirs was bombed in 1998. It also backs onto the Nairobi National Park, although we didn’t see any animals!

We then had very little time to get our Aussie mate back to the airport for his ongoing flight. At JKIA security checks can take up to 30 minutes. You wait in your car, then you have to get out (except the driver), go line up (ladies with a female security guard), show your ID and then they pat you down to make sure you’re not carrying a bomb. Of course, they never check under the seats where you could easily hide a bomb.

The next part of our trip was to travel out to Kiserian where the training farm is that Pete assists with. It was the total opposite direction from where we wanted to end up but we had to go and pick up ‘Kiwi’ a dog who was travelling the 6 hours with us to Eldoret. We spent a whopping 15 minutes there before we started on our real trip.

It was just over an hour to Nairobi and by then I was snoozing and the dog was throwing up. I can do dislocations, broken bones and blood, but I don’t do vomit. When my kids chucked up Pete was on cleanup duty. Thankfully we always have baby wipes in the car.

Ninety minutes later we arrived in Naivasha to pick up the student. We then spent 45 minutes looking for him. There are no big meetup points in Naivasha. He told us to ‘meet him at the bridge’. Well, there are two bridges outside of Naivasha and he wasn’t at either. Eventually I sent him a text message to say if he wasn’t there in 10 minutes we were going without him. Surprise, surprise he turned up.

By then we were starving so only an hour later we stopped at Java House in Nakuru. Java is a place we go to in Nairobi for a small meal, it’s relatively cheap and the food tastes good. The student we were taking had never been there before in his life. For him, to spend $6 on a meal was not even thinkable. It was really nice to be able to take him out somewhere he’d never been before in a town only an hour from him, but he’d never had the money to travel there.

Our Golden Rule is that we don’t drive long distance at night – we broke it. The roads are too dangerous, the truck drivers crazy and it is just not a good idea. Thankfully Pete was driving but it was pretty stressful.

We left home at 6am and got to Eldoret at 9.15pm. Of course, we then went to a hotel for a cup of tea and our student got to order sausages and chips for the second time in the day. I think he thought he was in food heaven. It was midnight by the time we got to bed because we had to introduce Kiwi to the other dogs. He wasn’t going to have a bar of it and kept trying to jump back into the car. It was pretty sad really but after 30 minutes he was okay and locked into the garage.

 

The next morning Kiwi was best mates with the other two dogs. We headed into town to do some shopping for our student. I quite like country towns, they’re more intimate than Nairobi and a lot cheaper. Prices in Nairobi are sky rocketing but prices in Eldoret were awesome. We bought a few things for our student to help him set up his room. He won’t get paid for another month so needed some bits and pieces and food.

We really wanted to head out of Eldoret by 12. It wasn’t going to happen. Firstly we had to go to the farm to make sure everything was okay for our student. Next, we headed to the place we had done a toilet block project in. Sadly the kids were on holidays but we got lots of filming done for future videos. We were pretty pleased that 2 years later they were still in good condition. Just as well one was unlocked as we needed to use it.

The drive home was long, really long. We stopped off in Nakuru again, at Java again and headed back to Nairobi, again. By the time we got home we were all sick and tired of sitting down and over dodging in between trucks.

On the flip side we managed to pick up super cheap veges and fruit on the side of the road. I made sure we got lots of rhubarb to go into the freezer.

We were glad we got to go even though it was a really long trip. We got to see what our students need to start in a job. We could tell that our projects are still working. We got to give a dog a home.