Ammu in Kenya: Kitale & Kakamega

It seems as though no friendship in Kenya gets an official stamp of approval until you have visited your friend's home. Not just their house, but their real home, where their family lives. So it was almost a given that I would go and visit Jackie's home in Kitale and Noela's home in Kakamega while I was in Kisii.

Kitale is a small town northwest of Kisii near Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano on the border with Uganda. Jackie's grew up on her family's farm in a village near Kitale and her parents still live there. She and her husband have a farm of their own in a village called Kiminini just outside Kitale. This was our destination when Noela and I set out early one Saturday morning.

We started out from Kisii at 8am and went to the matatu station. Matatus, as I mentioned earlier, are 14 seat minivans that criss-cross the Kenyan roadways and are the most common form of transportation available. They're cheap and efficient but they have a lot of quirks. First off, there is no set schedule and they won't leave the station until they're full. There's heavy competition between matatu companies to fill their vans and they're not afraid to play dirty. This includes grabbing passengers' luggage and holding it hostage and hiring fake passengers to sit in their matatus to trick people into thinking that the van is almost full and ready to leave.

After some minor shenanigans, our matatu finally set off for Kisumu at around 8:45am. It was a really bumpy ride because most of the matatu drivers get paid for speed rather than how well they treat the vehicles. In Kisumu we switched to a bus which took us through Kakamega and up to Kitale. The bus ride was full of entertainment, like a woman who carried on chickens wearing plastic bags for diapers and a guy selling herbal medicines whose sales pitch claimed that his cream would cure "asthma, arthritis, bone cancer, baldness" and about 20 other ailments!

The bus trip was pretty grueling and we arrived in Kitale 6 hours later, grungy and exhausted. But Jackie was waiting for us at the station, and welcomed us into her lovely home with hot tea and snacks. We spent the weekend stuffing ourselves with food from her farm, especially maize and mango smoothies. We also visited her family's other farms and went to Kitale to visit the museum. Here are a few pictures from our trip...

This is Noela, Jackie, Jackie's husband Patrick, and Patrick's brother David at their farm:

This is me & Noela with Patrick:

This is a hilarious sign at the Kitale museum next to their snake exhibit:

These are some adorable kids at the church in Kiminini who wanted me to take their picture:

The following weekend, Noela and I ventured out again - this time to Kakamega to visit Noela's family. Kakamega is about halfway between Kisii and Kitale, and you might remember it from my earlier post about the Kakamega Rainforest. Noela's mom and most of her seven (that's right 7!) siblings live there.

We hung out with Noela's nephews and watched the Smurf movie, which they were crazy about although they kept calling the smurfs "smoothies". =) And stuffing ourselves with lots of tea and delicious food was happily a recurring theme.

Here I am with Noela and her family: