July 12  We're here!

The Mennonite Guest House

It's Thursday evening about 7:30 here in Nairobi.  We arrived in Kenya yesterday evening about 9:30 after  23 hours of travelling  All went rather smoothly, though despite a 1 1/2 hour delay in Amsterdam, 3 of our 5 bags did not make it from there to Nairobi  Thankfully, they were all delivered to us today.  We are staying at the Mennonite Guest House in Western Nairobi until Saturday, when we will fly northwest to Kitale, and from there drive to Kimilili.   It is winter here in Kenya, so for them it is very cold.  It was about 13 degrees this morning, and we saw an occasional person in a light winter jacket.


Nairobi is a huge city - the streets are congested and full of Toyota's of every kind.  There are few sidewalks, mostly dirt trails along the roads.  The soil here is very red, so a dusting of red earth covers everything alongside the streets.  We see many armed guards wherever we drive.


This morning we were woken by the sounds of many birds singing outside our windows.  The Guest house is surrounded by a beautiful spacious garden boarded by tall bushes, fences, and guarded 24/7. We were called to breakfast at 7:30 by a staff member playing the xylophone through the hallways.  We shared our table with a very interesting man from Minneapolis.  He is almost 84 years old, and just retired from his work as a pathologist 2 years ago.  He now spends much of his time travelling around the world volunteering his expertise at various hospitals.


Though we were tired and jet lagged, we wanted to see something of Nairobi today. We stopped by the CRWRC office, which is a 5 minute walk away, to say hello to the people who helped us so much with local arrangements.  They called our driver from last night, Allan, who came and drove us to the Elephant orphanage and the Kenyan Animal Orphanage.  There were about 20 baby elephants at the first place- all covered in the red dust they fling over themselves.  At the Animal Orphanage there were many interesting animals, and numerous groups of uniformed school children on field trips.  We were almost the only white people there and we were so stared at by the children that were were tempted to stand in a cage and label it "white Canadian family".  It was fun.  The really brave children would come and and stand very close and we would say hello to them and ask their name.  Some would answer shyly, others would just giggle and smile.  Overall we find the Kenyans we have me to be very friendly, beautiful people.

 Tomorrow Nema, from the CRWRC office plans to show us some local projects as well as a bit of a tour. 

Some of the orphaned elephants