The plan for Saturday was to take off camping, which I was super stoked for. I really like camping and I was looking forward to having some time to hang out with Roger, but also I really couldn't see this not being a valuable experience as far as seeing Kenya. I hadn't been out of the cities so far other than travel, so I'm pretty eager to get out and see what the remote areas are like. I headed out for a run at about 10:00, and the way every excursion so far in Kenya has worked I wasn't too worried about holding up the show because the standard so far has been that I get ready for something and wait at least an hour for other people to be ready. I thought about heading up to see if I could meet David, but I'd ran that route a lot this week and it didn't seem it was worth it to me to go hunting for him when there was such a small chance of finding him. I didn't even know where to look other than to run past that junction. Also, I was actually getting kind of tired of running with the kids. I decided to run up past the field where the high schoolers play football and run along the road that way, because that way was less hilly, didn't involve running along the main road at all, and didn't involve going past the garbage heaps. Plus, I hadn't played with the guys since Monday and I wanted to get up there with at least some regularity to be able to build some relationships with them.
As I got to the end of the run my stomach indicated to me that to try to make it home before taking a dump would be foolish and only end in agony and embarrassment (You know how some movies and TV shows are for mature audiences only? Well I should warn you that some of this content is for immature audiences only. Mature audiences might need to skip this paragraph. Another friendly mature audiences notification: from what I know of myself, my lifestyle, and my increasingly comfortable relationship with this country it is doubtful this is the last story of its type that is included on this blog. Please tread carefully. And to those of you johnny rainclouds out there who would say that these stories are childish and inappropriate, I would raise two points. First, if anyone told you that this blog doesn't contain childish material then that person misled you and you should take that up with them. Second, squatting in someone's corn field twenty feet from the road on one side and their pen of cows watching you apathetically on another side, you learn some valuable things about a country that you just can't experience by watching a national geographic special (Note within a note: I believe this might be the longest parentheses tangent I've gone on, and if you think that's unrelated to this being the first woods potty story, I think you're mistaken. For whatever reason talking about going to the bathroom out in the wild really gets the creative juices flowing for me, if you know what I mean)). The most inviting prospect was a corn field next to the road which actually provides pretty solid cover because you go about five rows deep and you can be twenty feet from the road taking care of business and people pass by on the road a short corn cob throw away blissfully ignorant (until you throw the corn cob). I was somewhat wary of picking leaves, since I had no knowledge of the local botany. This proved fortunate, because the first promising leafy plant turned out to have some subtle thorns along the center of the leaf. International disaster averted.
I took care of business and when I popped out of the corn, a guy in a track suit was just coming jogging along the road back toward town, the direction I would be headed. I asked if I could join him, to which he timidly consented. I don't know if I've addressed the Kenyan obsession with track suits, but matching waterproof jackets and pants are considered to be pretty standard running apparel. I was still a little surprised because it was probably at least 75 degrees, which is pretty solidly into the temperature range where I run shirtless, but Kenyans' idea of what's hot and what's cold has definitely proven to be significantly different from mine. He was running at a slow jog, much slower than I would have preferred to run, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk with a runner, given how rare those opportunities had proven to be. His name was Manuel, and he said he had been running since nine, and would run to town then head back. I figured that would be at least a three hour run, which I would have doubted in the US, but here I couldn't rule it out, and his pace suggested that he could very well be on a three-plus hour run. I would have guessed him be a little older than me but not much. He said he was just starting training and would be taking for something in February, it sounded like out of the country but I couldn't really figure out what it was he was talking about. He seemed pretty reluctant to talk though, so once he'd answered a couple of questions I stopped asking questions and we lapsed into silence until we got to the field, where I saw the guys were playing so I split off and told him I was glad to have met him. Probably at least half the guys there had been there on Monday when I'd come to play, and they allowed me to enter the game without any introductions, which I appreciated considering the number of introduction I'd had since I'd been here it was good to just join the group with a couple of head nods. I played much better than I had on Monday and, while my ball handling skills still clearly weren't on the same level as the other guys, I held my own and didn't make any major mistakes, and actually made a couple decent plays. Between the heat and the speed of the game I got tired out quicker than I thought I would, and since we were planning on taking off for camping after about half an hour I thanked the guys and took off. One, who I don't think had been there on Monday, asked if I could come tomorrow, which I said I couldn't but that I would be around for a little while and would try to come again. It encouraged me to be asked to play again, and I wonder if they were surprised that the random mzungu that came to play was able to keep up. I still wish I was better than I am, but it felt good to be able to play. I wondered if I kept playing with them if I would actually really improve my soccer skills by the time I left.
Jogging back down to town a man on the road flagged me down more aggressively than the average passerby saying hi. I stopped to talk with him, and he asked me where I was running and if I wanted to train with him. He was pretty talkative, and quickly listed off his PR's: 13:05 for 5k, under 28:10 for 10k (I can't remember the exact time, but between 28:00 and 28:10), and 2:07 for the marathon. If someone had said that in the US I would have been pretty skeptical, because I think I know the 2:07 marathoners in the US (mostly because there aren't very many), but here it could really be true, and even if it wasn't I'd still be excited to have someone to train with, and if he was that fast then it would be all the more exciting. His name was Kemboi Maratona, which didn't ring any bells for me but very few Kenyan names would. When I said I was from the US, he exclaimed that he was good friends with Bernard Lagat, which I wasn't sure to be more impressed or more skeptical about. Since I couldn't remember my phone number we went to a nearby phone shack and he wrote down his number for me. I barely did any talking as he talked about how we could train and I would become very strong. I promised to text him when I got home, which I did, and I was pretty excited about having a regular training partner here.
I was more right then I knew about us leaving late for camping. We actually didn't leave until about 3:00 I think. Roger and his friend Allen (not to be confused with his son) were doing a team building exercise with the staff from a couple branches of a local bank, so they were taking all sorts of balls and games and other stuff for the team building activities they were planning on doing. For one of the first times since I had been in Kenya it looked like they were actually in a hurry and worried about being late. We headed out of town and quickly got out into the country, on the opposite side of Eldoret from everywhere I had explored out running. On our way we passed the Kip Keino altitude training school, which I don't really know any more about other than to say that they have a bunch of fast runners train there. We were moving right toward a big storm cloud and it looked likely we would get dumped on.
The place we headed to was a resort up in the hills that was used as a stop on overland trips of foreigners taking organized trips across Africa. All the buildings had grass roofs and a rustic look, but otherwise reminded me something of a nicer version of a KOA campground. There were a bunch of uniform dome tents set up when we got there, and there was white people milling around, showering and settling in. It looked like they had just gotten in. In the time we were at the resort, and maybe even just that night, I saw more white people than I had seen my whole time in Kenya. I realized that I was starting to stare at them the way people stared at me. I also had to fight the feeling of condescension and elitism that they weren't seeing the real Africa like I was, they were just going on a trip where they stayed at nice resorts like this one. As I thought about it, apart from it being a pretty immature, inappropriately competitive attitude, I couldn't take any credit for the situation I was in anyway. The only reason I was in the unique situation I was in was that Heather and Patrick had gotten married and that Patrick's family had encouraged me to come here, so there wasn't any reason at all to look down on people that were taking more initiative than me to come see this area. The skies remained pretty dark as we headed down to the lower part of the resort. We set up four tents of various sizes on one of several very broad terraces heading down toward a river at the bottom side of the campground. It was a really nice location, and they clearly did a good job of making sure it looked nice and pretty "African". The worries about being late were gone, I found out because the group themselves were also late. They came late enough that they didn't do any activities but rather we just headed to the hut down by the pool (and a pretty darn nice pool I must say) to hang out and eat dinner. Several of Allen and Roger's other friends, including one of the teachers at Angela's school, Mr. Mayaka, came up to camp with us, so we all hung out together, which was pretty fun because this was my first time seeing Roger hanging out with a bunch of his friends, and they're a pretty hilarious group. There were two guys from Rwanda who were in Eldoret for a workshop that I think came up with Mr. Mayaka, and they were pretty funny guys to hang out with. They thought the term "OK" was pretty funny, and through the night they and Mr. Mayaka would abruptly ask each other or me, "Are you OK?" They also told us about the term "bad goat" to refer to a friend who is a bad influence. Through the evening Roger and Allen alternately accused each other of being a bad goat.
As usual dinner came much later than I was used to and I was famished. We had ugali and chicken, similar to what we often eat at home. I had expected something different, I'm not sure why, but it seemed strange to eat the same thing we would eat at home. I ate more than anyone else, but when we got done, one of the ladies that was with us asked me if I had eaten any of my chicken. I looked at the pile of bones on my plate and said that I had, somewhat puzzled. She replied that half the meat was still sitting on my plate and proceeded to talk me through stripping all the meat off the bones by sticking the bones in my mouth and picking and sucking the meat off of them. At the end I had a pile of bones that looked more like everyone else's. I was pretty happy with my performance in stripping the bones and felt like that was a good thing to have learned. After dinner people were getting pretty cold so we headed up to the main lodge. The hut where we had eaten dinner was open, and we were sitting out on the deck that would have a nice view over the river if it was light out. The main lodge, though a pretty subtle building on the outside, was pretty luxurious inside. There was a small stream running through the middle with a bridge over it that was oversized for emphasis. There was also a big fireplace, which we went to go sit around to warm up. I was pretty tired and in the comfortable chairs next to the fire and fell asleep pretty quickly. After a while I woke up and went down to the tent to go to bed. The last couple summers I haven't gotten in as much camping as I'd like to, and it was fun to sleep in a tent, although this was still a long way off from camping as far as I'm concerned.
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