Arrival etcetera

After a long debate on whether to go or not, I decided to ignore all parental and governmental advice, and didn't cancel my ticket to Kenya. And what a good decision it was!

The burning buildings outside Nairobi were already visible from the plane, and the airport terminal was filled with cranky tourists waiting for their plane home. Of course all of this wasn't exactly adding to my comfort level. Luckily Maggie (CIVS) and one of her family members were there for me the minute I stepped outside so I immediately felt in safe hands.

First mistake during the cab ride:

Daniel: What's this area?
Maggie: It's a residential district.
Daniel: Oh, are these the slums?
Maggie: Uhm, no this is just a residential area.
Daniel: ...

Oops. In my defence: Four metal plates attached to a fence, with the words 'Sunrise Hotel' written on it, didn't exactly qualify as upper class in my frame of reference.Of course my frame of reference changed by now.

Buruburu, where I live, is relatively safe. Walking after nightfall is never a good idea, but during daytime everything is just fine. There is a nice big supermarket around the corner, and a long market extending all the way over the rail road track (and by 'over' I mean 'over including the tracks themselves'. It looks like they have some rebuilding to do every time the Mombasa-bound train departs from Nairobi.)

Of course the office is in this area as well. Everyone is very nice, and gave me their own introduction of their work in person. (Please visit the CIVS website for more details on persons & task descriptions). I will give a more accurate description of my own work once I know what I am going to to. For now, I am still trying to find my way through the tons of documents on our internal network.

For all of those who tried to contact me: Image that on this blog it takes about 5 days between clicking the post button and the actual posting, and you will have a pretty good idea of how fast our internet actually is. I hope you understand that I will not be able to email much with this 0.0056k0.006 modem of ours, so please understand if I do not reply to your messages. You can, however, text message me! Please try:

xxx

Lastly, I have the nicest host family. I'm not exactly sure how many family members live with me, but I estimate the number to be somewhere in the 10^23 order of magnitude. Nice as they are, I think they already gave up training me to be an efficient bargainer at the market:

Daniel: Mama, look at these pants I bought!
Mama: How much?
Daniel: I got 'em down to 1000 Ksh.! (10 euros)
Mama lauging for approx. 15 minutes.

More details follow once I am able to zip some pictures in 1/2 kB files for uploading.

Everyone thank you for your concerns and please keep following this blog and posting comments!

Daniel

PS. I lost all my hair. Literally.