Day trip to Mombasa

Yesterday, I decided to go to Mombasa to see if it makes sense to try to make the roundtrip in one day.

I left at sunrise, and had some matatu delays getting to Voi. I grabbed a quick breakfast before heading to Mombasa. We hit some traffic, but I managed to make it to my meeting only somewhat late. This was my follow-up with the blind group that I met last week. They're office turned out to be a room made out of corrugated iron sheets in one of the poorer areas of Mombasa. I spoke with three of the officers for a long time. Initially, they were saying that their biggest problems were financial, however I made it abundantly clear that I was living on a volunteer salary. We brainstormed a bit about some things that I could do to help them and then we sat talking for a while. They had lots of questions for me on all topics ranging from Kenya's education system to my travels to general culture. I learned a lot of interesting things from them too. The chairman plays bass guitar in a band, while i member who is only blind in one eye works as a cameraman. They explained to me the rules of goalball, which is a popular sport in the blind community and sounds like a lot of fun. I told them that they could blindfold me and I would play with them sometime. It even sounded like a fun game to try at my school some day. It really amazed me how much they do in spite of the fact that most of their materials are printed and they don't have any equipment for writing in Braille other than a stylus. They also don't have a computer, which could really make a huge difference in some of their projects. The conversation was very nice, but I realized that I was already running late for my next appointment.

I arrived to find that the man with whom I was meeting was even later than I was, so I read a bit. This meeting was with an NGO that works on HIV-related projects, and he had agreed to meet with me about the hotline project (we should probably come up with a catchy name for this). I gave him a general outline of our thought process and asked him some questions. He seemed impressed with our current direction and provided a lot of useful information and some important tasks, then he encouraged us to follow up with him. I guess we're doing something right.

I had to cut our meeting short to catch a matatu in time. I managed to make it just in time for a terribly unpleasant journey. As we were leaving Mombasa, the other passengers were speculating whether the blood spattered on the asphalt in front of a truck where a crowd had gathered was that of a person or a cow. Alas, I'm pretty sure that it was the former, I can only hope that it was quick and painless :-(. We drove on without event for a ways before we arrived at a poorly marked police checkpoint. Many vehicles were trying to figure out which lane was correct, and just as we approached the checkpoint a car drove into us. No one was injured (it looked like mostly superficial damage to the vehicles), but the police found it necessary to keep us sitting there for an inordinate amount of time. We weren't sure why we had to wait, and the police seemed completely indifferent to the children in
the matatu who were hungry and just wanted to go home and eat. We were all relieved when we were released to hail another vehicle back home, and I was just grateful to make it home in time.

In conclusion, making a day trip to Mombasa may be more hassle than it's worth. Still, I am very glad that I had those two meetings.

Also, my apologies for the erratic blogging. I think that I should be
able to post a bit more regularly for the foreseeable future. I posted Books 7.0 and I finished all the posts from my training last week (there's also a new section at the end of Training Day 1) and I added a comment to A New Project with one part of that post that I had missed. Lastly, I've added a few frills to the sidebar on the blog, and I hope to update them a bit more. You can check out other volunteer blogs as well as my friend Jackie. This has sadly attacked the formatting a bit. Apologies.