On to Kisii

After a quick, missed meeting at Gertrude's Children's Hospital, we wound our way out of Nairobi, past the U.S. Embassy, it's flag at half-mast for Congresswoman Giffords. The houses quickly thinned and the roadside woodworkers gave way to rows of plant starts, neatly lined along the shoulder, providing a surprisingly manicured beginning to a stunning, six-hour drive west. We rounded out of the lush green canyons of Nairobi's suburbs and crested a hill overlooking the Great Rift Valley. Before descending, we passed two baboons on the roadside, one faced forward, like a ticket-taker, the other turned to the side, ponderous, its chin resting on a closed fist.

The road was good, but the ground was dusty and dry. Despite our vigilance, we spotted only a few groupings of impalas roaming the valley. Every fifteen minutes or so, though, we'd pass through another town, consisting of a few hundred meters of strip-mall like dukas with a glut of people outside. After the fifteenth town or so it dawned on me that Kisii may not look much different: hardened dirt as the de facto sidewalk along a two lane highway; a deep ditch (to collect/manage water?) giving way to a long narrow parking lot; and then rows and rows of leaning shops, the bright colors faded by the African sun, topped with roofs of corrugated tin, sporting names like Chemistry Enterprises International and Obama's Pentagon Cafe.

And we saw cattle. Herds taken out to graze by lone Maasai, their slender bodies wrapped in red fabric. Herds grouped around a small, stagnant pond, lapping up the water. Herds led along the roadside by eight year old boys with a switch in their hand. And if it wasn't cows, it was goats. Everywhere were signs of subsistence farming as women walked along the roadside with barrels of water balanced atop their heads and men hugged the shoulder pushing bicycles with bundles of wide, dry grasses fastened to the frame.

We stopped in Narok for nyama choma (roast meat) and sukuma wiki (sauteed collard greens) and experienced our first, pelting rainstorm, coming down like machine fire on the tin roof, quickly turning the red-brown roads into a clay-like mess. The storm soon passed and with renewed visibility the scenery turned a lush green as we gained elevation and neared the rolling, green hills of Kisii. The open, arid lands and rare signs of life that dominated our early afternoon had given way to fields of tea and maize, covered by the sprawling, cut-up leaves of banana trees.

It was hard to get a real sense of the layout as we arrived after dark, but Kisii was bigger than any town we had passed through. The streets were filled with people and there were lights (electricity!) dotting the landscape. A meal of "wet" Tilapia, sukuma wiki, chapati, and rice with vegetables was more than enough as we quickly scanned our surroundings and passed out, exhausted, from the drive toward Kenya's western border.