The park drive

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While in a van with a pop-up roof, we watched the baboons play, nurse their babies, and mate. The gazelles were amazingly graceful and beautiful. Giraffes look as if they can’t possibly be real. Each time we saw an animal for the first time, we’d all take pictures, then we’d drive a little further and we’d see more and they’d be closer, often causing the driver, Steve, to just stop.

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Being a tourist

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Saturday morning at 6:45 am, we leave our hotel (the Chester) for the five-minute drive to the Nakuru National Park for a five-hour drive through a spacious park that is exactly what I expected in Africa. Animals included baboons, water buff, rhino, hippo, gazelles, zebra, giraffes, lions, monkey, and lots of gorgeous birds, such as marabou storks, heron, pelicans, cormorants, and blue starlings, which were iridescent.

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Flat tire on the road to Nakuru

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On the 5-hour ride from Kakamega to Nakuru, mostly tremendously bumpy of course, we got a flat tire. While Ray changed it, Lucy walked up a side path and encountered a family surrounding a man picking tea leaves. We learned that the plants had been planted in 1962 and that they can live 100 years.

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Claire improves!

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After two nights in the hospital, Claire is greatly improved. The full hospital bill is 16,000 Kenyan shillings = $210. Here is a pic of Claire on the veranda outside her room, hoping that her Scrabble score is better than her mom’s.

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Preview

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It’s Wednesday night. All of the children have left the care centre, so the on,y voices belong to the trippers and to Kenyan staff. This time next week, I’ll be back to school. How can that be possible? I still have this jumble of experiences to absorb, trying to make sense of the disparities in the world, how to live in the wholeness of it.

Tomorrow, we make the last regional trip, tie up loose ends, and end the day with a dinner out with the Kenyan staff, about 25 of us in all. I hope that Claire will feel well enough, so she and Lucy can go.

Friday morning, several of us will leave Kakamega, drive to Nakuru to spend a night and go to a game park, then have two nights in Nairobi before flying to London, then Boston. I am so ready to be home again.