April Part Deux

April Trip Part deux

So the night of Easter Sunday I talked to Professor Grace Msangi on the phone. We decide that I should leave with her handyman Albert the next morning to go to Usangi, Tanzania. This is her home village and where we are trying to start a resource center. This means that I must wake up at 4:30 a.m. in order for her to pick me up at 5:00 and catch the bus. So I wake up and walk the ten minutes to the pick up point. The sun is not yet up so I spend the time waiting making up songs in my head. After an hour or waiting and a few unanswered calls to Grace I almost give up and head back towards my bed. Thats when I see her old yellow VW bug pull up. I quickly get in, but upon arrival at the depot we of course were too late. Grace had just overslept. Fortunately I had not bought my bus ticket in advance. Unfortunately Albert had. Some others had also missed the bus, so they put us in a little van that took us to another van that took us to the border. The plan was to catch up to the big bus because our bus was supposedly faster. We arrived at Namanga to find that yes our bus had arrived, and yes it had already gone on. I got my passport stamped, exchanged some money, and put my thinking cap on. We found a shared car going to Arusha. We stuffed ourselves in and were off again. Vehicles around here don't exactly go for the one person per seatbelt plan. I was maneuvered between the driver and shotgun in a position in which I was forced lift my whole self up every time the driver had to shift gears. After a few hours of this we switched to a bus from Arusha to Moshi. From there another bus up the mountain to Usangi. Finally we arrive at Grace's house late in the evening. I still don't understand why sitting in a bus all day wears me out so much. I just wanted to get inside and rest, but of course it was not to be.We put the key that Grace gave us into the padlock on the front door and.....nothing. We try all the other doors.....nothing. Plan B, we turn around and go twelve hours back home. Plan C, we have got to break in. I find a window I can open a little bit, but both of us are too big to fit through. Albert ends up using a panga(machete like tool) to remove some wood around a glass pane in the back door. We remove the glass and reach in to unlcock the door from the inside. Finally we were in. But the rest of my time in Usangi I had to squeeze through a two foot square hole in a wall and walk around the house just to get in or out of the house. Already I knew that this trip would be an adventure.

Stay tuned for more of the April Adventure.

Hell's Gate

April "The Beginning"

I had a very interesting April break. The schools in Kenya are year round, so they have month long breaks to separate the terms. As soon as school was over all of the teachers had a celebratory outing where we went to an awesome restaurant called the Chicken Palace and stuffed ourselves and just relaxed after a long term of work. The next day Jacob and I went to Hell’s Gate National Park for our first safari. One of our friends is a former Park Ranger so he went with us as a tour guide. We first rode around in a mini-bus and saw a lot of gazelle, hartebeest, impala, zebra, a bustard, baboons, and warthogs. Later we let our tour guide go rest and Jacob and I rented some bicycles and went on our own adventure. It rained every other day that week, but somehow it never did that day. We ended up riding for about five hours. I think they need to hire a new cartographer and sign-maker for the park. We weren’t lost per say, but we couldn’t find where we were for awhile. We did get pretty close to some eland, hartebeests, zebras, giraffes, and finally buffalo. This was going up and down some pretty massive inclines on some pretty janky bikes. At one point we ended up in the middle of a Massai herd of cattle going down the same mountain path. We were supposed to have the bikes back before sunset, but we didn’t quite make it. It was pretty exhilarating riding in the dark in a National Park with who-knows-what animals all around us. We slept quite well that night in a YMCA thatched roof hut. The next day Ranger Gitau(our friend) took us to his former office. We then went down to the lake where I saw my first wild hippos. Very cool. They were just hanging out in the water with their heads sticking out. We then took a little boat to a place with Gnus a.k.a. wildebeests, zebras, and waterbucks. Gnus are very bizarre looking creatures. We then headed back to Gatundu to pack and then Nairobi for Easter. The next day I went to the International Lutheran Church for Easter Service. A few of us YAVs then went to lunch with some amazing friends of ours, Lyle and Terry Dykstra and Cal Brand. I got some awesome lasagna with lots of cheese, finished up with some delicious chocolate cake. The next day I began “The Journey”. Stay tuned for Part II of my April experience coming soon.