Crossing the Great Rift

I chose to take the bus… Usually people in my position are in a hurry and opt to spend the extra money and take the one hour flight from Kisumu to Nairobi. However, I had no real reason to be in Nairobi, so I opted to take the bus. I had never been on this particular route (from Kisumu through Kericho to Nakuru; usually I go through Eldoret), and Dr. Serem in Lugulu (who is from that area) had told me I “had to see” this very beautiful part of the country.

The seven hour trip is dominated by crossing the Great Rift Valley, which is one of the few places where one can see the effects of two of earth’s tectonic plates drifting apart, creating over the past several million years the geological uplift and volcanic activity that makes the Rift ever-wider and deeper. (Usually this process takes place under the sea.) Coming out of Kisumu, for twenty miles or so the land is flat, wet and fertile, but then begins the slow steady assent up to 8000 feet. At the top of the escarpment, around Kericho, there are enormous tea plantations, with rolling hills and the verdant green of the tea plants stretching as far as the eye can see. Then the long descent to the bottom of Rift Valley, usually dry and dusty, but with the recent rains, uncharacteristically green. Then the whole process in reverse, the slow climb up the eastern escarpment, with breathtaking views of Mount Longonot (a dormant volcano I had climbed with our boys in 1997), then through torrential rains down into Nairobi. Once again, crossing the Great Rift evokes a feeling of reverence; this is the place where humankind first emerged, and deep within me I experience it as a kind of homecoming.

I chose to take the bus partly to save money, but mostly because I wanted to fully experience the vastness of Kenya and the Great Rift one more time. The Great Rift Valley has come to symbolize in my mind the huge divide between rural western Kenya and the rest of my life, and so to cross slowly seems to help me make the shift from one world to the other. When we lived in Kenya in the 1990’s, we would come into Nairobi only a couple times a year, and we always said that the divide between western Kenya and Nairobi was bigger than the divide between Nairobi and home. Like the Great Rift Valley itself, that divide seems to be getting gradually deeper and wider. As I turn toward home, I find myself wondering how the readjustment will be this time. I have never found it easy; even as the intensity of this time fades and I re-enter my American routine, I will feel, as I have in the past, that part of me remains here in Kenya.

Nairobi is a city: six-lane roads and shopping malls, coffee houses and skyscrapers. To be sure, it is a third world city. The traffic is chaotic; poverty is everywhere visible alongside great wealth. At an intersection down the hill from where we are staying, as traffic slows to a crawl during rush hour, hawkers appear, walking up and down between the lines of idle cars, selling everything from bananas to puppies and TV antenna. Everyone is hustling, on the make, trying to find a way to make a little money. Capitalism in its most pure form… X-capitalism.

I don’t have much to show for my two days here. I did take two hot showers, go to an internet café, do some half-hearted looking at local crafts, read a book, and spent the morning with Liz at the National l Museum, with its magnificent collection of ancestral human fossils. Today I had lunch with my hospice colleagues at KEHPCA, debriefing last week’s training. The best part has been staying with Donald and Ruth Thomas, with leisurely meals, stimulating conversations, benefitting from their 50-year perspective on Kenya. Tonight we fly out at 11 p.m.; we will be in Philadelphia by 3 p.m. tomorrow, God (and the volcano) willing.