Sunday morning I woke up early again to head out for an actual long run. Running along the main road outside of town had been gorgeous as the sun was rising so I decided to head that direction again. My legs were as dead as I feared they would be, and I plodded along slowly. It was hard to enjoy the view quite as much when my legs felt so bad, but on the other hand I didn't have to be focused on staying with the group which left me more opportunity to look around. The view of the mountains to the East was stunning and in the pleasant cool of the morning it was a great time to be running. I explored some side roads, but didn't get all that much farther than the day before considering I ran an extra half hour, but that's an indicator of both how fast I had been going the day before and how slow I was going today.
Part of my reason for running that early was to be ready to go to church whenever people were going. I hadn't been going to church very much, and it was something I really wanted to do because I thought it would be pretty interesting to see what some of the Kenyan churches were like and what the church crowd and culture was like here. Elijah was going to church so I got ready and took off with him. We flagged down a couple motorcycles and rode them through town. This was my first time riding through town on one of them, and it was super fun. Maybe the novelty is just from riding a motorcycle since I haven't done that much, but I'm sure that riding the bus back in Seattle is going to seem downright boring now.
The church was off the road and unless you knew where it was it would be pretty hard to find. It was a small building packed with wooden pews, with maybe 150 people or so inside. Elijah had told me we might take off early, and I wondered how long of a service we were going to be dealing with. The service had already started I thought we would just pop in and grab a seat at the back, which I think was Elijah's plan, but the proactive usher was a hawk for people like us and, well, ushered us up to the front and pointed us to seats in about the third row. I could feel a lot of eyes on me as I walked to the front, but no one said anything. Apparently I sat right next to Lois and Kevin, but I didn't even notice. The pastor was a loud, animated man that was accompanied by a much more reserved, younger man that followed him around the stage translating the message into Swahili. It was entertaining to watch, not just because of the differences in stage presence, but because the pastor was so excited about his message that a lot of times he didn't give the translator enough time, and there was a significant portion of time that they were talking at the same time. I took me a while to really pay attention to anything they said because it was so entertaining just watching them. The message was interesting to me because the pastor used the national debate over importing GMO's to deal with the famine that is plaguing some parts of Kenya as an illustration for deciphering what things we hear are in line with God or not, saying that things from God are life giving (like natural crops and animals) and things that aren't can't produce life (like GMO's). After what Allan had said about corruption in the church, it was encouraging to me to hear, at least from this pulpit, that the people of the church should check everything the pastor says against the same standards as anything else to see if it matches with God's word. The part that seemed weird to me was that they had a separate book written by Brennam, the man who had founded the church, and referenced it more often than the Bible through the sermon. He made some pretty socially conservative comments about what clothes to wear and disapproving of braiding hair, but it didn't sound to me terribly different from a sermon I might hear at home, just much more animated and entertaining. The denomination still seemed a little weird to me because of the emphasis they put on the teachings of Brennam, but who am I to judge which denomination is more correct than another? As long as they love God and serve him, in my opinion almost all other differences should be overlooked if they get in the way of being unified in that basic purpose.
The sermon wasn't as long as I feared, maybe slightly longer than most sermons I've heard in the US, but definitely not interminably long. When we stood up to sing, Elijah gave me the signal and we made our escape. I asked him how much longer they would go and he said only about 15 minutes, so I wonder if his motivation in getting out early was just to escape the after church interrogations from the old ladies. If this church was as socially conservative as it appeared to me, I guessed those would be worse than any I'd ever had to endure, which had never been all that bad for me. We walked home from church, heading through some pretty crowded, dirty neighborhoods. I hadn't actually gotten to see very much of Kisumu in my time there, so it was a valuable experience. Where Peter and Leah lived was in a one of the nicer areas of Kisumu, so it was interesting to see a poorer area. This poor neighborhood ran right up to the back of one of the nicer malls in Kisumu, which we went into to get drinks.
As Elijah and I walked home we talked mostly about sports, and the differences between the US and Kenya as far as athletics go. The more we talked I got the feeling that Elijah was similar to me in that he was a general sports enthusiast who would play whatever was being played and wanted to try a lot of different sports. We walked through a major park where there were a couple soccer fields and basketball, all full of kids playing. Basketball is a bigger deal here than in many parts of the country, and he said most of the good basketball players in the country came from the Kisumu area. From what I saw in Nairobi soccer was far and away the dominant sport, and in Eldoret too, although there distance running was more influential than elsewhere. Overall Kenya doesn't have internationally successful basketball players, and Elijah attributed that mostly to size. It's rare to see a Kenyan that's more than 6-2 or 6-3, and he spoke with some measure of awe about the size of basketball players in the US and said he could never make it there because he's too short (he's about 5-10). During the conversation it surfaced that Patrick had been a pretty phenomenal basketball player back in the day, which was easy to picture because of his overall athleticism. He said this was where he would often come to play basketball, and it was one of the few public courts where anyone could come to play. Most were at private schools where use was restricted. I sheepishly told him that within a mile of the home where I grew up there were probably at least ten courts (if you count Playfair, Washington, and Lewis & Clark) where anyone could come play. What was heartbreaking as we talked, and even a little bit embarrassing for me, was how many more opportunities I had to play and try different sports in my childhood than he did. As we were talking it struck me what a good neighborhood I grew up in, especially as far as sports go, even by American standards I think. Elijah was awestruck by the variety and number of playing fields and buildings that I had access to. I loved growing up in Missoula, but I had never thought of it as giving me so many sports opportunities. Elijah seemed quietly envious as I told him about the variety of sports I had been able to play, all with completely adequate equipment and facilities: baseball, basketball, track, football, soccer and wrestling, as well as others I had just played casually without actually being on a team. He had only played soccer and basketball growing up, and both with limited facilities, mostly just street games. We talked about how talent wasn't developed very well in Kenya because of corruption in the governing bodies, particularly with soccer. Elijah said he wanted to try boxing, but that was something that would certainly have to wait because the number of places where boxing equipment is so limited. It set my mind going on what I could possibly do to help the situation. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Roger when he had told me about a sports clinic he went to in the Czech Republic about how to teach sports to kids. They were talking about basketball drills you could do with kids and gave everyone a ball, to which Roger responded that in his area it would be rare to find a school with more than one or two ball for the whole school. Indeed, at Kip Keino, which is one of the better schools in the area, they only have two soccer balls and two volleyballs, and no basketball court or balls to speak of. What drove me crazy thinking about it was that it would take so little investment to make a difference. Particularly with soccer, nothing more was needed than a ball, and one ball would provide access to the game to 10 or 20 kids at a time, or even more. I had seen the same with running, and wondered if we would see even more fast Kenyan runners if kids had access to proper (or any) running shoes.
Sunday afternoon Flo informed me that we would be taking off that evening. I was surprised and annoyed, protesting that we had spent a whole week in Kisumu and now we couldn't take a day trip so I could see the route? Plus, the stated reason for coming to Kisumu in the first place was that Flo didn't want to arrive in Nairobi late at night, and now we were going to show up at about 4 am. I'd made very few demands and had pretty much gone with the flow of what other people were doing, so it annoyed me that one of that I had repeated several times was now being so flippantly disregarded. I also couldn't figure out why we were leaving so suddenly when Flo had clearly been avoiding going back to Nairobi. She told me that Heather and Patrick were already there so we needed to hurry back, but I told her if she was going to lie to me she would have to come up with something better than that. I bugged me that Flo refused to give me any straight answer on why we were heading back, and that annoyed me a lot more than that we were traveling at night. That evening was a fun time of messing around with Atieno, the oldest sister of the family who, to put it diplomatically, is a confident, resourceful young woman. To put it less diplomatically, she's the kind of woman that I picture being able to unhinge her jaw to swallow men whole. To be fair when I had carried some groceries into the kitchen earlier I hid her purse and waited until she was sufficiently worried about it to reveal the location. Let's just say the evening ended with her stealing my phone and me marching around the house in a pair of her high heels until I found where she had hidden my shoes. It was a good time though, and another occasion that made me feel a little bit like one of the cousins because it was the kind of horsing around that I would do with my own cousins.
I couldn't believe my good luck in the bus that the whole back row was empty for the first leg of the trip, so I laid down, only to find that the ride was so bumpy that at times I came completely off the seat and overall slept very little. I had to move back to my seat when we reached the stop in the middle of the trip and took on more passengers, but was able to sleep the whole way back to Nairobi in my seat. When we arrived we grabbed a taxi home, and when I pulled out 1000 schillings from my backpack to pay the driver I found, to my great displeasure, that it was the last of my money. I had pulled out money right before I left in Eldoret and hadn't spent that much except for travel expenses, so the rest of the money I'd pulled should have just been sitting in my backpack for the whole time I was in Kisumu. When I recapped with Flo the next day on where it could have gone missing, the best we could figure is that it must have gotten picked out of the backpack when we were walking from the shuttle in Kisumu, which was very feasible because we ended up walking for several blocks through the very crowded area around the bus station. It had only been 4000 schillings though, which is the equivalent of about $45, so it wasn't as if I had lost my life savings. Still, I went to bed pretty grumpy.
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