This post is a few days old from when the students first arrived to Meru.
I am writing this a day late. Yesterday was an incredible journey as we drove 7 hours north to Meru. The drive was filled with new landscapes and new (to me) ways of life. Driving started promptly at 7:00 after a 6:30 breakfast, and a 5:30 wake-up call (fluffy bread and Greta banging on the door).
Getting out of Nairobi took an hour. Dense traffic played a small role, while the sheer size of Nairobi is what delayed our journey the most. There were many dramatic changes within the city limits. Skyscrapers turned into sheet metal huts and gleaming billboards turned into piles of trash due to a lack of infrastructure.
That is not to say there wasn’t any beauty within the outskirts, bright, colorful fruits lined the
streets as well as carved wooden furniture. Chickens (some chickens were for sale, some not), geese, goats, cats, and dogs ran through each alley, eating the small crumbs left behind.
Deeper into the drive the land became greener, and some of the dust settled. Inside the bus,
there was tired chatter mixed in with lots of laughs. I dozed off trying to ignore the prevalent motion sickness that I couldn’t seem to shake (yay dramamine)! Soon, the bus went quiet, and we started gaining altitude, climbing towards the mountains. As the ride came to an end, we reached Triji, our final destination.