Saturday, December 02, 2006

Hello from Kijabe Station! It's 0937 Kenya time, Saturday morning. We left Miami Wednesday evening about 1730 Miami time. I have no idea what happened to Thursday. I remember sitting on an airplane, and that's about it. We arrived at Niarobi in the wee hours of Friday morning, got a few hours of sleep at the AIM guest house called "Mayfield" and spent most of yesterday at two shopping centers in the city. About 1730, driven by Mary's new friend Jill Wilson, we arrived at the station, 48 hours (plus 8 for the time difference) after we left Miami.

How shall I describe this place? It is as if a piece of South Florida were moved up to gentler parts of the Blue Rige. From a perspective up on a ridge (about 9000 feet) we look out upon a wide valley, and see mountains in the near distance. The flora is lush, and there are bouganvilla and other subtropical plants. There are pine trees of some sort marching up to the top of the ridge. The weather is cool and there are fireplaces alive among the little homes at the school where Mary lives and works.

The trip to Kijabe went though rural regions that seemed too busy to be rural, too full of people, these the black Africans.
There were sheep and goats in places by the roads (which were narrow and two laned, with a good bit of traffic, pedestrians along the side, some bicyclists, donkey carts, and motor vehicles of all sorts, many of them a sort of passenger
jitney called matatus, whose drivers somehow missed the drivers' ed program at their local high school.) Very much the third world, yet I did not get a sense of oppressive poverty. (Mary said that the slums of Nairobi are another matter.)

Today is an unplanned day (How I love those!) where we will just walk around the station and then down to the town to the "dukas". "Duka" is the word for store. Mary said that there is a "superduka" there, a grocery store run by an elder in the Afican Inland Church. The store, she said, is about the size of her living room.

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