Meru and Environs

Beth and the rest of the medical team had a long day because they saw many, many people at the medical clinic they conducted about 20 minutes or so outside of Meru and did not get back to the hotel until after dark. She and some of the other team members will run the clinic again tomorrow, while the rest of the medical team will go to St Lucy's School for the Blind, which educates children with serious vision impairments who have been abandoned by their families. Many of the children are albino.

I spent my day at the Ruana Secondary School. Eric, one of my volunteer buddies, and I had the task of building shelves for the school's new library. The library team meanwhile spent the day teaching people the basics of organizing and running a school library.

Eric and I had a somewhat frustrating day trying to figure out how to assemble the shelves without instructions or the right tools. Eventually however, we figured out how to put the shelves together and actually managed to assemble one using the screwdriver on Eric's knife and a hunk of wood as a hammer.

At one point during the shelf assembly process, we had a large audience watching us. Boys from the school were lined up in front of each of the windows at the back of the library building and about 25 girls were inside. I think they were less interested in the shelf building than they were in watching two white people, especially one with blond curly hair -- a rare sight for sure in Kenya.

The school served us chai and sandwiches in the AM and traditional Kenyan food for lunch. Lunch was pretty much the standard Kenyan fare -- rice, a stew with vegetables and grisly meat, a mixture of potatoes, peas and spinach, all mashed together -- naan and soda. It was my first opportunity to drink chai in Kenya. I had heard about it from Beth, who drank it all of the time when she was in the country 30 plus years ago and had raved about it to me. It is not anything like what is sold as chai in this country. I liked it a lot.

The education team spent the day observing classes at the Ruana Secondary School. This is the first time that AFK has worked with a Kenyan secondary school so the organization was anxious to see what kind of education the students were receiving. Everyone came away quite impressed. The teachers appeared to be doing a good job of engaging the students and the students were paying attention. More than can be said about many classrooms in this country! (By the way, the textbooks at the school are in such bad shape that students cannot take them home to study.)

The medical team also noted that the teachers are beginning to think, "What now?" given that they will soon have a library full of books. The books will allow them to move away from an emphasis on rote learning and toward self-learning through research projects. It will be a big step for the teachers and the students. Very exciting.

The drive to and from the school took us along part of the road that we had travelled to get to Meru from Nairobi so we got to enjoy more of the beautiful scenery. We also passed by countless school children walking along the road headed home from school, men pushing bicycles piled high with heavy bags or plastic crates full of stuff up long, hills (on the way down the hills, the men essentially function as human bike brakes.), and women walking up steep well-worn red dirt paths bent over under the weight of the bundles of banana leaves or stacks of branches on their backs.

Forgot to mention something in my previous post. On the drive from Nairobi to Meru, we passed over the Equator. Today we passed over it twice.

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