September 29, 2008; Nairobi, Kenya — Last week we ventured outside of Nairobi as a group for the first time since our arrival in Kenya nearly a month ago. Our excursion, which lasted three days, took us around Mt. Kenya and to four different towns in the Eastern Highlands. The trip proved to be an excellent introduction to the beauty and ecological diversity of central Kenya as well as providing an informative—albeit at times disturbing—view of the realities of life in the country’s rural areas and small towns.
Our first stop on the road leading out of Nairobi was in the town of Thika. In the days of the first colonial settlements, Thika was the furthest one could reach by oxcart in a day’s travel from Nairobi. Settlers heading into the Eastern Highlands stopped for the night at the Blue Post Inn before continuing onward. The inn is still there and we were able to enjoy some refreshments there as well as a view of the nearby waterfall. Thika is also famous for being the childhood home of the writer Elspeth Huxley, who chronicled her early years in her memoir The Flame Trees of Thika. After Thika we continued until we reached the town of Embu, the headquarters of the Eastern Province and located southeast of Mt. Kenya. Embu strikes one as a rather unremarkable town, but typical of a reasonably prosperous regional hub in the agricultural center of Kenya. Like many of the towns in the Eastern Highlands, it began as a supply center and market for the European settlers.
The next morning we left for the town of Meru and traveled along a winding road into the heart of Kikuyuland. The landscape is extraordinarily beautiful: lush green hills and valleys dotted with terraced banana farms and tea plantations. Since it is now the beginning of spring in the Southern hemisphere all the flowers are in bloom. Lavender Jacaranda trees line the roads and the bright red “flame trees” can occasionally be seen as well. It is like a paradise. En route to Meru we stopped in Chogoria, the village of a former student of David Sperling who now works for the Clinton Foundation in Nairobi. We visited the primary and secondary schools there and were able to meet the students. After a series of awkward introductions our group spent nearly two hours playing sports with them—mostly volleyball and Frisbee.
After our visit to Chogoria we continued toward Meru. Shortly before entering the town we passed a small, partially obscured, and barely noticeable sign on the side of the road informing motorists that they are crossing the Equator. Very anticlimactic, really. I had expected a bit more fanfare (back home the sign inside the Holland Tunnel marking the crossing from NJ to NY is a bigger deal). We arrived at our hotel in Meru and the next morning I taught my class after nearly a week’s hiatus. Meru is a curious place, but rather unpleasant compared to Embu and, especially, to our adoptive home in Riruta back in Nairobi. The poverty is evident and our busload of western students immediately attracted unwanted attention. As soon as we stopped, several touts and street kids approached us to beg or try to hustle us. The most disturbing were street children addicted to glue and other industrial solvents. They sniff these highly toxic fumes almost continuously and as a consequence have suffered irreversible damage to their brains and nervous systems. They wander around in rags like zombies, with glassy eyes and hands outstretched, incapable even of forming speech. A few of the ones who confronted us actually had the bottles of glue clenched in their mouths as they staggered around. It was a horrible sight and I am certain it left a strong impression on the students. I have lived and traveled for years in the developing world and never encountered anything quite like it.
After Meru we left the lushness of the Eastern Highlands to head off to the frontier town of Isiolo. The terrain changed very quickly and the verdant farms and hills of Kikuyuland gave way to the flat, dry, and barren scrub of northern Kenya. Isiolo is a frontier post and is the last town for over 200 miles as the road continues northward. Unlike in the Eastern Highlands, most of the residents here are Muslims. Many are Somali migrants and most are extremely poor. There is a beautiful mosque at the entrance to the town, but not much else to recommend the place. To say it is a frontier town is no exaggeration. It looked like the set of a Spaghetti Western: dry, dusty, and with a slightly menacing air to it (ala “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”). Sergio Leone and a young Clint Eastwood would have loved the place. We spent 45 long and uncomfortable minutes there, had a surprisingly good lunch at a local restaurant, and quickly boarded our bus amid a throng of aggressive souvenir vendors and glue-addicted street kids.
Our final evening was spent in the pleasant settler town of Nanyuki. Along the road there the scrub and dust of Isiolo ended and we found ourselves cruising through rolling grain fields that could have been right out of Eastern Oregon or Northern California. Once we arrived in Nanyuki we stayed at the Equator Chalet which offered a comfortable and relaxing end to a long and stressful day. We ate dinner together and the next morning a few of us woke up at dawn to see the sun rise over Mt. Kenya. Later in the morning we visited a veterans’ cemetery maintained by Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The cemetery contains nearly 200 graves of servicemen killed in the Second World War. These include British, South African, and Rhodesian officers attached to RAF squadrons in East Africa and well as East and West Africans who served in the King’s African Rifles and various labor and auxiliary corps. The headstones were engraved in English, Afrikaans, Arabic, and Hebrew. The cemetery was a fascinating and out-of-the-way remnant of the British Empire and one that we happened on quite by accident. Afterwards we headed to the Mt. Kenya Safari Club—East Africa’s most posh and exclusive resort. After some artful persuasion by David Sperling, the management allowed us onto the grounds. The club was founded in the 1950s by the American movie star William Holden and continues to cater to very high-end clientele. The cheapest rooms start at US $900 per night while the priciest drinks on the menu include a martini for around $2100 (it has gems in it instead of olives). There is a helipad and landing strip for guests who can’t be bothered to drive the potholed and congested road from Nairobi. It was certainly interesting to see how the other side lives, and offered a stark contrast to the poverty and desperation we had seen in Meru and Isiolo a mere 24 hours earlier.
On Friday we returned to Nairobi and caught the brunt of the evening rush hour traffic at we entered the city. It was a relief to return to Riruta and our familiar environs. I am now much more appreciative of how much a community Riruta really is. Despite the urban squalor, it is clear that the schools, churches, and shops here do give the neighborhood an unusual degree of security and cohesiveness. Vagrancy and panhandling are not tolerated (in fact, I am much more likely to be approached for a handout on the streets of Portland than in Nairobi) and children are well looked after. That is not to say that what we encountered in the towns of the Eastern Highlands does not exist in Nairobi. It does in slums like Kibera and to a much greater degree. Yet life in Riruta and with our home stay families has insulated us from this reality. It was good for our group to get of a view of the beauty and ugliness of Kenya outside of our little oasis in Nairobi.
On the road between Embu and Meru in the Eastern Highlands of Kenya
24 September 2008
Our first stop on the road leading out of Nairobi was in the town of Thika. In the days of the first colonial settlements, Thika was the furthest one could reach by oxcart in a day’s travel from Nairobi. Settlers heading into the Eastern Highlands stopped for the night at the Blue Post Inn before continuing onward. The inn is still there and we were able to enjoy some refreshments there as well as a view of the nearby waterfall. Thika is also famous for being the childhood home of the writer Elspeth Huxley, who chronicled her early years in her memoir The Flame Trees of Thika. After Thika we continued until we reached the town of Embu, the headquarters of the Eastern Province and located southeast of Mt. Kenya. Embu strikes one as a rather unremarkable town, but typical of a reasonably prosperous regional hub in the agricultural center of Kenya. Like many of the towns in the Eastern Highlands, it began as a supply center and market for the European settlers.
The next morning we left for the town of Meru and traveled along a winding road into the heart of Kikuyuland. The landscape is extraordinarily beautiful: lush green hills and valleys dotted with terraced banana farms and tea plantations. Since it is now the beginning of spring in the Southern hemisphere all the flowers are in bloom. Lavender Jacaranda trees line the roads and the bright red “flame trees” can occasionally be seen as well. It is like a paradise. En route to Meru we stopped in Chogoria, the village of a former student of David Sperling who now works for the Clinton Foundation in Nairobi. We visited the primary and secondary schools there and were able to meet the students. After a series of awkward introductions our group spent nearly two hours playing sports with them—mostly volleyball and Frisbee.
After our visit to Chogoria we continued toward Meru. Shortly before entering the town we passed a small, partially obscured, and barely noticeable sign on the side of the road informing motorists that they are crossing the Equator. Very anticlimactic, really. I had expected a bit more fanfare (back home the sign inside the Holland Tunnel marking the crossing from NJ to NY is a bigger deal). We arrived at our hotel in Meru and the next morning I taught my class after nearly a week’s hiatus. Meru is a curious place, but rather unpleasant compared to Embu and, especially, to our adoptive home in Riruta back in Nairobi. The poverty is evident and our busload of western students immediately attracted unwanted attention. As soon as we stopped, several touts and street kids approached us to beg or try to hustle us. The most disturbing were street children addicted to glue and other industrial solvents. They sniff these highly toxic fumes almost continuously and as a consequence have suffered irreversible damage to their brains and nervous systems. They wander around in rags like zombies, with glassy eyes and hands outstretched, incapable even of forming speech. A few of the ones who confronted us actually had the bottles of glue clenched in their mouths as they staggered around. It was a horrible sight and I am certain it left a strong impression on the students. I have lived and traveled for years in the developing world and never encountered anything quite like it.
After Meru we left the lushness of the Eastern Highlands to head off to the frontier town of Isiolo. The terrain changed very quickly and the verdant farms and hills of Kikuyuland gave way to the flat, dry, and barren scrub of northern Kenya. Isiolo is a frontier post and is the last town for over 200 miles as the road continues northward. Unlike in the Eastern Highlands, most of the residents here are Muslims. Many are Somali migrants and most are extremely poor. There is a beautiful mosque at the entrance to the town, but not much else to recommend the place. To say it is a frontier town is no exaggeration. It looked like the set of a Spaghetti Western: dry, dusty, and with a slightly menacing air to it (ala “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”). Sergio Leone and a young Clint Eastwood would have loved the place. We spent 45 long and uncomfortable minutes there, had a surprisingly good lunch at a local restaurant, and quickly boarded our bus amid a throng of aggressive souvenir vendors and glue-addicted street kids.
Our final evening was spent in the pleasant settler town of Nanyuki. Along the road there the scrub and dust of Isiolo ended and we found ourselves cruising through rolling grain fields that could have been right out of Eastern Oregon or Northern California. Once we arrived in Nanyuki we stayed at the Equator Chalet which offered a comfortable and relaxing end to a long and stressful day. We ate dinner together and the next morning a few of us woke up at dawn to see the sun rise over Mt. Kenya. Later in the morning we visited a veterans’ cemetery maintained by Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The cemetery contains nearly 200 graves of servicemen killed in the Second World War. These include British, South African, and Rhodesian officers attached to RAF squadrons in East Africa and well as East and West Africans who served in the King’s African Rifles and various labor and auxiliary corps. The headstones were engraved in English, Afrikaans, Arabic, and Hebrew. The cemetery was a fascinating and out-of-the-way remnant of the British Empire and one that we happened on quite by accident. Afterwards we headed to the Mt. Kenya Safari Club—East Africa’s most posh and exclusive resort. After some artful persuasion by David Sperling, the management allowed us onto the grounds. The club was founded in the 1950s by the American movie star William Holden and continues to cater to very high-end clientele. The cheapest rooms start at US $900 per night while the priciest drinks on the menu include a martini for around $2100 (it has gems in it instead of olives). There is a helipad and landing strip for guests who can’t be bothered to drive the potholed and congested road from Nairobi. It was certainly interesting to see how the other side lives, and offered a stark contrast to the poverty and desperation we had seen in Meru and Isiolo a mere 24 hours earlier.
On Friday we returned to Nairobi and caught the brunt of the evening rush hour traffic at we entered the city. It was a relief to return to Riruta and our familiar environs. I am now much more appreciative of how much a community Riruta really is. Despite the urban squalor, it is clear that the schools, churches, and shops here do give the neighborhood an unusual degree of security and cohesiveness. Vagrancy and panhandling are not tolerated (in fact, I am much more likely to be approached for a handout on the streets of Portland than in Nairobi) and children are well looked after. That is not to say that what we encountered in the towns of the Eastern Highlands does not exist in Nairobi. It does in slums like Kibera and to a much greater degree. Yet life in Riruta and with our home stay families has insulated us from this reality. It was good for our group to get of a view of the beauty and ugliness of Kenya outside of our little oasis in Nairobi.
24 September 2008