The End of a Long Journey (for some...)

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This is a Day of Lasts, for Heather

We're up early again and head down to breakfast. This is a day of lasts, for Heather. She flies out tonight so this is her last breakfast in Africa, her last hotel room, her last view of the Kenyan landscape, and her last goodbyes. We realize that Jennifer is probably now in Amsterdam as she left last night from Nairobi.

The ride back to Nairobi from Embu seemed long, although the highway was quite smooth. I have been developing a unique new model in my head of how to implement an interest-free micro-financing program for widows and grandmothers. The idea is ripe now and I spent the entire ride back to Nairobi writing the utlines of it in my notebook.

As we neared Nairobi on the highway, traffic suddenly slows to a crawl. After some time we come upon a large truck hauling lumber overturned across the road. The truck fully blocks the lanes and we are forced to cross the median, onto the other lanes of the twinned highway, to pass by. This is a rural area but people are pouring out of the brushes from every direction, hundreds of them in fact, and running on foot to the accident scene. They are not coming to help the diriver, however. They are coming to steal the precious cargo of lumber that is scattered across the pavement. It is impossibe to see the condition of the driver through the things of people mulling about as we pass by at a snail's pace. But we see that a policeman is already at the scene directing things. The crowd is swarming over the site like ants on an anthill, probing, touching, pointing and just generally adding to the confusion of the situation.

Eventually, we make our way back to the Hotel Boulevard and I check in for 4 more day's stay. We get or bags out of storage and Heather uses my room to re-pack her bags for the long journey home. I assume that Jennifer has taken off from Amsterdam by now and is winging her way to her next stop - Minneapolis. She has a long journey home with many more legs to stop at than Heather. In fact, Heather leaves a full 24 later than Jennifer but will beat her home to Edmonton by an hour or two.

The bags go back in storage for her evening flight and we head off to the Sarit Center mall for a little last minute shopping for Heather, and some more education supplies for me. There was a huge African book fair at the Sarit Center so we went in and looked at all the resources there. We purchased a few great little books, and I was able to get 12 posters for the Bumala school that had such colourful images on them explaining numbers, the alphabet, animals, vegetables, colours, and more.

We have a last meal at the Sarit Center, in a nice little cafe. Also, one last Tusker for Heather. Within a half hour from finishing our meal, Heather begins to feel a little queasy. We have all been fortunate enough not to get sick on this trip from the food, but it seems that this last day may have marked the end of that winning streak. We head back to the hotel and Heather weighs the merits of starting herself on the antibiotics that she brought along (somethign every traveller MUST have on a trip like this). She decides to wait and over the course of another couple of hours things seem to settle down and sort themselves out.

The rest of the afternoon and into the evening is lazy. The driver comes for Heather at 8:00 pm and we say our goodbyes. She heads to the airport for an 11:45pm flight, and I return to do some computer work and type out my hand written notes into an electronic document. I have many meetings tomorrow and need to be ready for that....

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