Kisumu

My alarm started blabbering away at 4:30am and I wanted to squash it. I pushed snooze a couple of times and then finally got up at some ridiculous hour that was before 5am. I forced myself to eat a couple pieces of chapati even though my stomach wasn’t ready to function, because I didn’t know when we would be eating lunch. Gershom and Monica (the manager and chaplain of the orphanage) picked Dane, Trudy, Nancy, David and me up at 5:30am and we drove out to Mercy Home to meet the chartered bus that would take us, 12 teachers, and about 50 or so kids to Kisumu.
Kisumu is the third largest city in Kenya, and it is situated the shore of Lake Victoria, in the western part of the country. Our team decided that it would be a worthwhile investment to take the standard 6&7’s on a field trip there so they could get out of Mercy Home for a while and see a bit of the area.
It was a 3 hour bus trip along a decent road. (“decent” is in Kenyan road standards...) Our first stop was the post office. I personally wasn’t exactly stoked to see it...but I guess when you are confined to a compound most days, even something like that is exciting. They got a tour, and got to go in the back rooms, and then we moved on to the courthouse. That was a bit more interesting than the post office, but it dragged on for too long. We sat in the courtroom for over an hour and a half while the kids asked questions about law.
I was feeling a little more than 12 o’clockish by the time that we got out of there, but we checked in to the place where we were planning to have lunch, and they told us that it would be more than an hour until our food was ready. We bought sodas for everyone, and then decided to head out to the airport. That stop was probably the most educational for the kids, because they got to have a tour of all the weather instruments, see a plane from Nairobi land on the runway, and even go up into the air traffic control tower.
The kids’ reaction to seeing Lake Victoria for the first time was funny. They started pointing and gasping when all we could see at that point was a body of water that resembled a large pond with vegetation floating in it. Eventually we were able to go to the shore and get a good look at it. It’s quite impressive. It was grey and choppy and looked remarkably like the ocean. We couldn’t see the other side, and we were only looking at the ‘small’ bay. It made me miss the real ocean, but at the same time it was comforting because I could almost imagine that I was home.
By 6:00pm we finally had 'lunch'. At around 3pm my stomach had forgotten that it was hungry, but when they put a plate of Tilapia, ugali and sakumawiki (sp?) in front of me...it remembered. Chapati and Fanta is really not enough to get you through a day of walking around a strange city.
I was so tired by the time that we got back into the bus to go home that the whole ride seemed almost surreal. After the long awaited meal, the kids perked up again, and sang beautifully as the bus bounced through potholes and over unmarked speed bumps. The lights of Kisumu disappeared into the distance as we drove back towards Kitale under a vast and intricate covering of African stars. I nodded in and out of sleep the whole ride home and felt thoroughly at peace.