Flo left on Thursday morning to head back to Nairobi, but in typical Kenyan form leaving Thursday morning turned into leaving Thursday at 1 pm. Allan and I went with her to see her off. I'm not jealous of her sitting in the shuttle for the next 8 hours or whatever it takes to get to Nairobi, because the shuttle is really just like a matatu van except not as crowded, like the one we took from Kisumu to Eldoret. Flo was somewhat worried about leaving me with Allan and Roger, but I was very much looking forward to getting to spend some time with them. I've been spending more time with female relatives than I think is really healthy, so hanging out with Allan and Roger and their friends will be a welcome change I think. After Flo left Allan showed me around town. Like I said before, the downtown of Eldoret is pretty compact, with all the streets laid out in a grid. I consider Allan, despite his objections, to be a pretty darn popular guy, judging from the number of people we stopped to say hi to on the street and the number of shops we ducked into to talk to the owners. We stopped to talk to the guy who Allan said does his dreds. He explained to me that having dreds was still something that a lot of older people looked down on because they were associated with an extremely dangerous gang/militia that originally had been fighting for independence, but after the country gained independence turned into more of a gang, terrorizing and often killing people. He told me some funny stories about people not messing with him because of them, even though he's otherwise a pretty unintimidating guy. He said his dad was fine with it, but that he's more understanding of the changing times than a lot of adults. He had actually been pretty reluctant to go the farm, and explained to me that Grandy had told him that if he got dreds or did anything to his hair that she would bury him alive, which isn't as empty of a threat from her as it is from most people. He just covered them up with a bandana and a stocking hat though and, I'm happy to say, didn't get buried alive.
Eldoret has more a feel like Missoula, even smaller than Missoula, in that lots of people know each other and if you go into town you're bound to run into somebody you know, which I really enjoy. An interesting thing about Eldoret is that the buildings are pretty old, and Allan explained to me that in Nairobi they had finally just insisted on tearing down old building to replace them with more modern ones despite the objections of the people in the buildings, and said he wished they would do the same thing here. Note though that we're not talking about old like historically old buildings, just building that were built in maybe the mid 1900s that are showing their age. I was glad to get to head through town, and because of the pretty simple layout of it I think I could probably make my way around Eldoret without getting too terribly lost. It's a place where you can use the surrounding geography to tell where you are, which is my preference because that's what I grew up with. As were walking back there was fire-and-brimstone street preacher with a megaphone preaching to anyone who would listen and a lot of people who wouldn't. I'd seen a couple in Nairobi too, and to me that was a funny connection to be able to make at home. It was in a different language, but by the character and tone you could tell it was about the same message. We got to talking about churches, and I told Allan I felt like there were a lot more churches here than the US and that I think a lot more people go to church here. He said that was true, but that you had to be careful here because a lot of the churches were fraudulent, just trying to get money. On our way back from town we took bike taxis, which are pretty darn cheap, but that's because they don't move you along all that fast or comfortably, but I enjoyed it.
On my run I explored running toward the other side of town. There is a small river that runs on along the south side of downtown, and there are only a couple bridges across the creek, so those form a pair of bottlenecks that people must cross as they walk from town across the ravine the river runs through to the houses and part of town on the other side. It doesn't get too crowded but looking across the ravine to the hillside riddled with dirt trails and roads populated with people walking along, it strongly reminded me of a huge anthill. It's so impressive to me to watch how much people walk here, especially during "rush hour" when the roads and fields are filled with people walking from place to place. Like in Nairobi, it seems to me like more of a mass of humanity, almost like an army marching somewhere or a big migration. There were more people around for this run than my other couple in Eldoret, I think partly because of the time and partly because I ran toward a busier area, but I think I had more people outright laugh at me on this run than others, and I was surprised with how much it bugged me. I thought I was getting used to people's reactions but I think maybe that was because most of the reactions were still positive even if they treated me as an exotic attraction (which is fair because I guess that's pretty attraction). I coming back I noticed what I thought looked like minarets poking up above the buildings, and later heard what I thought might be an evening call to prayer, and in subsequent days I found that there is a mosque nearby and now hear the calls to prayer semi-regularly. Actually probably my favorite part of the day so far is sitting in the grass outside the house at dusk stretching after a run, listening to the evening call to prayer and watching the sun go down and the stars come out.
I was supposed to make dinner that night because of a bet I lost with Allan shooting hoops, but I was incompetent enough that Allan helped me anyway, and by help I mean he made most everything and I struggled through a little bit of making the ugali. It surprised me how simple it was, maybe because all things cooking seem mysterious and somewhat magical to me. All you have to do is boil some water, add the proper amount of flour, and then stir it around, which actually is really hard because as the stuff mixes it gets harder to stir and my arms just aren't conditioned for that kind of work.
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