Globetrotters

Hello all from the IU House in Eldoret, Kenya. We’ve actually been here for right at 1 day now.

Our travel to Kenya went smoothly, though the Indianpolis to Nairobi portion (through Chicago and London) ended up being 26-27 solid hours in either an airport or on a plane. Yuck! Even in coach, British Airways was pretty comfortable. Service was excellent, food was decent, and each seat had its own small video monitor choosing which movie(s) you wanted to watch. On both long flights we got a in 2-3 hr nap…

Though everything went according to plan and on schedule, the most bizarre travel story involves our car ride from the Nairobi airport to the hotel we stayed at. We had a driver waiting for us with a sign “Dr. Allison and Dr. Bethany”. Which is good and all… until it became quite apparent that he wasn’t expecting to have to haul so much cargo! His car was something like a 4 door Corolla—small. And between Allison/Bethany/myself, we had 2 med school trunks, 3 big suitcases, 2 small/medium suitcases, 3 backpacks, and a duffel bag. Needless to say, we and our bags were really crammed into the car, but we made it!

The hotel we stayed at in Nairobi was very nice, it would have been a good place to enjoy a lazy morning, but we weren’t there even 7 hrs. A good shower and a bed sure was welcome! Though we could only sleep a few hrs until we were wide awake in bed 2 hrs before the alarm was going to sound. Curses—jet lag!

I was a little leery about our intra-Kenya flight from Nairobi to Eldoret, but the “Jetlink" flight really was a jet! It was a small Canadair regional jet that made for a smooth 30 minute flight. And the 1 hr delay gave me a chance to meet and visit with a Christian missionary named Mark Grossman who is from the states but has been in Kenya for 15 years. Real nice guy, and it was interesting to get his view on issues in Kenya (HIV/AIDS, the awful post election violence a year ago, the Christian church, etc) from somebody who has been in the Kenyan culture for a long time but isn’t of it.

The suprise about the regional jet service was there is a 20 kg limit for checked luggage per person that we weren’t warned about beforehand. Allison and I together were 29 kgs over, so our per-kilo heavy bag fee came to 1450 Kenyan shillings (about $20 US). Fortunately we changed some money in the airport the night before so we had no problems.

Our room at the IU house is quite comfortable, its very much like a university dorm room. I’ll describe more about it in a later post.

And yes, our body clocks are still way off. You’d think when you’re tired and its dark out you would be able to sleep. But we both woke up at 3 or 3:30am and couldn’t sleep. We got to listen to dogs barking and roosters crowing. Until we turned on the iPod in an attempt to lull us to sleep. Oh well, hopefully tonight we’ll get in a better block of sleep.