I was watching a CNN special on Putin when the power suddenly went off.  I’ve waited awhile but other than a few flashes, the power has stayed off.  Maybe related to the dark storm clouds that seem to be rolling in?  Guess I won’t get to see all the scary details and facts that have been gathered to prove that Putin is a dangerous man in a dangerous world.  So instead of watching depressing TV shows, I decided to use what power I still have on my computer to continue the last ‘chapter’ of my latest epic journey which I had left hanging in my last post.

I left you with my arrival in Nairobi from Ngurunit.  On the way down, Leslie and Goodie invited me to join them on a work trip to see Kenana Weavers in Njoro, about 3 hours drive Northwest of Nairobi (near Nakuru) not so far out of my way back North to Maralal.  I gladly grabbed this opportunity as I had met the founders of this business many years ago while selling my baskets at a parking lot craft fair at the US Embassy in Nairobi.  Their business of promoting knitted products, including stuffed animals and tree ornaments, thereby giving many women employment, intrigued me.  We have several of their animal head Christmas stocking that get hung up for Santa to fill every year!  Finally, I would get the chance of seeing their work on the ground and seeing what lessons I could learn to apply to the Ngurunit Basket Weavers business.  Before heading there Tuesday morning, Monday in Nairobi was a very busy day with some fun thrown in.  I had brought the finished basket order for Swahili Imports down with me from Ngurunit so a good part of the day was used collecting packing materials, printing out lists and labels and stuffing all the baskets into boxes.  I had the advantage of my friend Candace’s big front entry to spread out and pack up.  I also got a break for a walk with Candace and Mouse around her neighborhood.  Then back to work and by 8:00 pm I got the job done, with a little help from Candace, just in time for her friend and dinner guest Susie, a colleague from work, to show up for a lovely dinner and wine on Candace’s back garden veranda.  It is beautiful there in a different way than Ngurunit.  Green and full of flowers and definitely cooler!!  We had a lovely evening.

Then early Tuesday morning I was up and out the door for my adventure to Njoro and Kenana Weavers.  Of course, I rushed out the door to get an early start and then spent 1 hour stuck in stop and go traffic on my way to pick up Leslie and Goodie.  Typical of Nairobi.  We finally got on the open road by 9:00 am.  The drive itself is beautiful.  The Nairobi – Nakuru road goes up over the top of the Rift Valley escarpment at 8000 feet and looks out over Mt Longonot and Lake Naivasha.  Then one weaves down to the floor of the Rift Valley and heads north towards Nakuru with beautiful views of Lake Elementita and Lake Nakuru along the way.  We arrived in Njoro at the farm where Kenana Weavers is located just in time for lunch.  The biggest excitement there was getting little dog Mouse introduced calmly to the 2 huge St Bernard mixed breed dogs and the Great Dane that live there.  Their heads are bigger than she is in her entirety!  She got along fine with the big boys but found a 4^th dog, a little local breed female, the most annoying. Being very pushy about being her friend.  But they eventually sorted things out. 

After lunch, I had an amazing time meeting the knitters, the managers and the founders of the business.  I learned so much about inventory, supplies, orders, pricing, payments and a ton of other things that go into a community business.  Some things I know well, but some ways of organizing it all very new.  I am still assimilating all the information and working out how to apply to the baskets for scaling up and improving the weavers’ income through more sales and marketing.  In addition to the knitting operation, I was given the chance to tour the whole farm, which as a livestock scientist, that is my first and foremost love in my life.  So much was going on.  It is one of the biggest dairy operations in Kenya, which, I learned, is actually not an advantage.  They are planning to close down the dairy side of the farm within the next 3 or 4 years. The milk processing plants pay too little for milk to take into account all the equipment needs on a big dairy.  The price works for the small-scale Kenyan farms with a few hand milked cows and that is what operations the dairy plants aim at.  So, all the big operations in the county are gone already or are going out of business.  I found this interesting as it had been just the opposite in my homeland of Wisconsin.  There, all the small dairy operations were hard pressed to stay in business as the dairy industry went more and more mechanized and only bigger and bigger farms with thousands of cows (especially like those in California) were able to stay in the black.  Different part of the world, different dynamics.

Anyway, I’ve digressed.  Back to the farm.  The best part of the whole trip for me was the thoroughbred horse breeding operation for racing and steeplechase eventing mounts.  I was taken to a field of 8-month-old recently weaned colts.  Lovely.  The horses were very friendly and I spent quite a while giving them love.  So different from the camels of my desert home.  Horses are the love of my youth and I will always adore them.  Just the smell of a horse and the feel of their soft nose brings me peace.  After that, the evening was spent in a wild spot of the farm watching hundreds of white throated bee eater birds coming in to roost for the night.  Their nest holes were dug into a layer of volcanic ash in stacks of little caves that looked like miniature replicas of the cave pueblos found in Southeast USA.  Amazing.  Leslie and Goodies joined me with their hosts for watching this natural wonder.  As it got darker, other flocks of different birds also came to roost in the area.  So beautiful. 

The last wonderful thing about the trip was the night spent in the Kemu cottages, another business located on the farm.   It has camping grounds, tented areas and different cottages for visitors and tourists.  There was a group of Waldorf school kids camping also that night. They were having so much fun! We were put in Beryl cottage which had been the actual cottage, with a little remodeling, of the Kenyan historical female pilot Beryl Markham.  Her book, West with the Night, was one of the first books about the colorful Kenyan settler personalities that I read when I first came to Kenya in 1994/5.  It was so cool to stay in the cottage that she lived in as a young lady.  It had been located on a nearby farm and instead of risking it being destroyed, this bit of history was saved and moved board by board to Kemu cottages.  After a lovely comfortable night and a delicious breakfast accompanied by orphaned roe bucks that were being raised in the courtyard, Mouse and I jumped into our car and headed back to Maralal.  We arrived back late afternoon on 22^nd March 2017 after an amazing journey with good friends having traveled far and wide, meeting many more new friends also, both furry and human.  Now I am still in Maralal catching up on all the paperwork, yard work and house organization that has been piling up as I travel up and down the length and breadth of Kenya these last months.  Still no electricity, but it is raining now, finally, so that is a blessing.  Let pour, let it pour!!!  Till next time….