Here is an entry I wrote while in Ngurunit last week.  Will post it now and put today's current thoughts on a following post.  Enjoy....

16 March 2017

I am sitting here in Ngurunit watching the sun drop behind the mountains I can gaze at from my front patio.  It is incredibly hot and incredibly dry here.  Mouse (my little dog) and I arrived yesterday and while I love being here, we have been melting into puddles of inactivity barely able to move around until after 4 pm when it starts to cool off a bit.  There is a brisk breeze going at the moment, which helps amazingly.   I have come this trip for basket business.  This morning I packed up the latest basket order to be ready to take it to Nairobi for shipment.  Tomorrow, Leslie, Camilla and Goodie are to arrive in Korr by airplane to meet the weavers for the first time.  Excitement.  Goodie is one of the shop owners in Nairobi for which I supply baskets to sell locally.  Having her come with Leslie and Camilla is an extra bonus.  So cool all three of them can make it.  I was just at network tree, a place about 6 km from my house here, to make phone calls and assure everyone I had made it safely to Ngurunit.  No car problems so far (knock on wood).  And to confirm the plan still on for Korr tomorrow!  It is!  Wonderful!

I thought this would be a good time to describe my world in terms of places, distances, roads and means of travel.  I throw out a lot of place names but unless one has either been to Kenya, or read some of my earlier blogs, maybe one would be confused as to what all the fuss is about in terms of traveling so far and having so many car issues.  I have two main places in Samburu County, which is located in Northern Kenya, a semi-arid place.  Ngurunit is my village home.  The place where husband Reuben grew up, most of my in-laws live, we have our livestock and our family home.  I also do most of my ‘work’ in this area and it is the home and base of the Ngurunit Basket Group weavers.  It is located on the very north edge of Samburu County, in Samburu North sub-county, bordering Marsabit County.  It is around 600 km away from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, a long way directly South from here.  From Ngurunit one can get to Nairobi two main ways.  One way is through Maralal, which is my other ‘home’ in Samburu.  Maralal is 200 km southeast from Ngurunit.  I came from Maralal yesterday, which is where we live mainly for work.  It has all the modern conveniences of electricity and network.  Ngurunit has solar only. And the network tree.  Maralal is the County Headquarters of Samburu and is where Reuben’s and my main offices are located.  That is from where I usually travel back and forth to Nairobi from – about 370 km away from Maralal, depending on exactly which road I take.  Nanyuki, Nyahururu, Gilgil, Naivasha and Nakuru are all towns I pass through from time to time on my way back and forth.  These are the main places that feature in a lot of my writing.  The roads around Samburu County and going south from Maralal are very very rough.  Bumpy, full of corrugation, lots of gullies.  Dry and dusty or full of mud, depending on the season.  They are almost entirely dirt roads, marram roads, as they are called here.  Just one trip between Maralal and Ngurunit, on which I pass through Baragoi (half way point) can cause loads of car problems from things shaking off or getting lose.  Just this trip, my nice Pajero now has a back door that doesn’t shut tight enough to keep the warning light and beeper off.  I had just fixed that same problem in January.  Now, one 200 km journey over the corrugation and the beeping is back on.  So annoying.  Will have to fix it again when I go to Nairobi with the visitors this coming week. 

There are a few other towns around the North that I have been traveling to.  Korr, to which I am going tomorrow, is a bleak place in the Kaisuk desert of Marsabit County.  It is 43 Km from here, Ngurunit.  There is a good airstrip so that is where the ‘big’ planes from MAF (Medical Aviation Fellowship) can land.  Then there is South Horr, a town directly West from Ngurunit about 80 km away.  That is the base for accessing the towns and groups with which I have worked in the past around Mt Nyiro, the holy mountain of the Samburu.  I haven’t been there for a while, but Reuben still goes there a lot for his work. 

On Sunday, I am going to take the visitors to Nairobi by the good road, the other way I can get from Ngurunit to Nairobi these days.  It has only 20 km of rocks, bumps and corrugation from Ngurunit to Namare (also go through here on way to Korr) where one picks up the wind power road.  It is also marram, but made very well due to the need of the Lake Turkana Wind Power project to get parts and pieces of over 350 huge wind turbines up to Northern Kenya.  We will take this road East for another 50 km, instead of West and North like I did to Loiyangilani in February, and it comes out to tarmac (paved) road in Laisamis.  From there it is tarmac all the way to Nairobi passing via Nanyuki and Mt Kenya straight south for around 500 km.  This way one can do Ngurunit to Nairobi in one day, which is amazing to me.  It used to be a 2 or 3 day journey on horrible bumpy roads.  In the rainy season most of them were impassable.  This way I do not go through Maralal so eventually from Nairobi will head back via a straighter road to Maralal through Nyahururu.  Basically making a huge circle around Kenya.  I will have traveled around 1200 km in one week by the time I get back to Maralal next week. Come to think of it, that’s like driving from Wisconsin to Colorado as I used to do so long ago – wow.  I used to think that was so far!  Now it is a normal regular trip in the course of my days.  Hopefully with this description of my world one can have a bit of an idea where I actually am in all my travels in terms of the relationship of one place to another and the types of roads I travel.  Basically I am driving around in circles, up and down the country.  Like a yo-yo or a top.  Spinning endlessly as I go about life and work in Northern Kenya.