21 January 2006

I’m on the first leg of a very long flight. Just after four this morning Greg picked me up and we headed to the San Francisco airport. It didn’t exactly seem early to me since I hadn’t made it to bed last night. I was busy packing my life into a refrigerator-sized rolling suitcase and a duffle bag so big you could crawl in and take a nap, if you had the time, which I didn’t. To round it out, I loaded a wheeled carry on bag. My only brush with moderation was my shoulder bag — plenty of breathing room in there.

Check in.

The luggage allowance for international travel is two fifty pound bags, a forty pound carry on and a brief case. Seemed generous. I was pretty sure I had made it…
Is eighty seven pounds a single bag record? Does a $150 weight penalty seem excessive? A few minutes later after my whining about orphanage project literature to deaf ears one of the ticket agents let out that the fine was $25 if the bag is under seventy pounds. Seventeen pounds of books stacks about a foot and a half high. Right there on the terminal floor. Don Quixote, Discoveries by Alan Lightman, The Fall of Baghdad, A Poet’s Dictionary, etc., etc., you get the picture. Minus the stack, fatty was a trim 70.5 pounds. Close enough.
Greg and I retired to an uncrowded seating are and crammed all but three of the books and a still-boxed camera into the unweighed rolling carry on and my now very chubby shoulder bag.

On the plane.

I’ve traveled a couple of hours now and the only things missing are my favorite water bottle and the carrot juice I guess I left in Stockton. Not bad.

In the Amsterdam airport looking at the departure board, I asked the man standing next to me what time it was here.
8 o’clock, he said.
A.M.? I asked.
Yes. Where are you going?
Nairobi.
Ah, India! he said.
I nodded.

Amsterdam to Nairobi.

KLM. Better food, more attentive staff, bigger blankets, and an open invitation to come to the galley for whatever you might need. I slept deeply and often.

In Nairobi.

Tony met me at the airport. A breeze through customs, and a forty kilometer drive to my new home in Lukenya. I have a very functional, clean room in a quiet place. It’s 2:30 a.m. Nairobi time and I can’t quite calculate how long I have been traveling anymore. But I’m here now.

22 January 2006

I am at my new home, for now the main the main house at Lukenya. Later I will move to one of the cottages. I have electricity and outlets, but the wrong voltage for all of my stuff. I will need to get this sorted out.

24 January 2006

It has taken me until now to solve the power problem. So now I can begin to post journal entries.

This morning I met Wilson, tall slender, soft spoken in the manner of nearly all Kenyans. He tends one of the nine individual acre plots at here at Lukenya. His plot is right behind my room. He is growing bananas, passion fruit, onions, some thing I didn’t recognize and a large field of beans. The rains which should have come in November and December were largely absent, and so the field of beans is mostly dried up. He has two water sources, the pipeline from from Kilimanjaro, and the well at Lukenya. In spite of this he is facing a real shortage as the drought comes into its second year. He carries large plastic containers from the well to water the fruit trees, both of which grow very small here. They look out of place in this dry landscape. We would think of this land as high desert. Scrub brush, small tough trees, some cacti and the ground cover which should be green and plentiful at this time is sparse and mostly brown.

I walked down the dirt road toward the Athi River and a small herd of Masai cattle grazing there found an opening in the fence surrounding the cultivated plots. A few of them made their way in before the young Masai herdsman came running to bring them back. He scolding them, rapping them with his long, slender stick, his short just visible under his thin blanket wrap.

Posted on January 24th, 2006 by david
Filed under: David's Journal