farmersown

The Vision: Poverty alleviation to wealth creation Within 5 years 40,000 farmers will be out of poverty by growing and trading food crops selected and marketed by Farmers Own. Expansion into fruit and other crops plus processing of produce will bring further major income benefits to poor rural communities. Farmers will build their own businesses with help in organisation, management and marketing see www.farmersown.com

Sunday, October 09, 2005

The Journey to Kakamega Tuesday 4 October

The Journey to Kakamega Tuesday 4 October
After the horrendous experience with the Awasi to Kisumu road we flew from Nairobi to Kisumo on the morning Kenyan Air flight which was delayed 2 hours because one of the crew was sick. Just as we descended into Kisumo there was a violent bump as the plane flew through some different air, I turned to Laban and said wryly that we had just flown over Awasi !!
We hired a Toyota taxi with a driver called Eliga to take us to Kakamega. As usual he first drove into the petrol station to take on fuel but only just enough for the journey, if you look at the petrol gauge it is usually hovering just above empty. On the way the taxi suddenly started to hiccup and stopped, the driver started cursing the guys who had put in the fuel saying that they had swindled him by not putting in enough, then he got some passers by to push the car to a petrol pump which was fortunately nearby. We set off but then the same thing soon happened again, fortunately we were able to coast downhill to some fundis who set about dismantling the fuel line. The line has a filter, which turned out to be completely blocked; also the air filter was badly blocked so both were cleared by the fundis. It seemed that the taxi driver who did own the vehicle had not carried out any maintenance since he got the car, in fact the leader of the maintenance team gave Eliga a talking to about maintenance. Maintenance has always been a big problem here, there is no word for it in Swahili, traditionally if something breaks (the house falls down) then they just build another one.
Finally we arrived in Kakamega; it felt like we had climbed a big mountain to get here after the adventures of the previous week.
An other notable event happened to us during our stay, a thief came into the Golf hotel at 5 in the morning, he came into my room but I was awake because of the muscular pain from the crash so he quickly went out but someone called the police and he was caught, he had taken something from another room. There was a conference involving government officials and I spoke to several and we talked about the security situation in the country and why it is bad compared with Tanzania and Uganda. In Dar the Indian women wear their jewellery in the street, you will never see that in Nairobi. It seems that during the Moi era the police were not paid so they had to resort to crime to live. Now things have improved but it takes time, the Government have initiated professional training for policemen to try to have a more professional force as they have in Uganda. I met quite a number of policemen after the accident, including Boru who was such a help to us in Kisumu, the ones I met were very helpful and professional, but their salaries are not high, take home pay is about $ 100 per month for a police officer. They asked me if I could help them get funding for professional courses to help to increase their salaries, a course for becoming a CID officer costs about $1000.
One of the government officials told me how he had been carjacked earlier this year, he had been locked in his boot, driven to a remote location, they took his shoes and told him to get out, then they drove off and left him.
I should mention something about our return journey. On the last day of our trip to see the farmers we met Paul Mlulu and his Groups. We met him at the roadside and he put his bike in the back of the pickup and jumped in himself. We turned off the tarmac road into a series of murrum roads, I asked Paul how far is it, 5 km he says, one and a half hours later we are still driving on some quite bad roads with some deep ravines and holes. Eventually we get there, Paul says sorry but a bridge is broken so we had to go a long way round. I am worried that we may miss the flight back if we have to take so long to return. In the end it was OK, after the meeting Paul took us another way and we were able to arrive in Kakamega at 4.30 to meet Eliga our famous taxi man who assured us that he had maintained his vehicle as instructed by the fundi, we had no trouble in reaching Kisumu airport by 5.30 that afternoon.

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