Bitterjug’s blog

The new term for our IT students opened yesterday. Today there were about twenty students in the lab during the time when the server lets them browse. Who can blame them, they have not classes. Word is out that school doesn’t start when it says it will. So the staff don’t turn up, and don’t […]

Last night I watched another episode of Ali Mazuri’s The Africans documentary series on the TV at James and Pauline’s house. A fascinating series, I wish I could have seen all the episodes. Last night he was talking about the search for correct behaviour in Africa: religious, legal and moral issues concerning correct behaviour seen […]

Yesterday I went ro Ngluni on my recently refurbished bycicle. Bernard from Ngluni fixed the bike for me: he had to re-build both wheels with new local hubs and spokes to get them straight and to get spindles that local nuts would fit. The bike, a Shimano thing, has differently thread nuts from the […]

Then, somehow, on Sunday I found myself in a Kenyan home eating fish and green bananna and watching the Olimpics. The appartment was full of very smart (doctors and lawyers) Kenyan sisters and their partners and friends. They were so funny I kept wondering if I had strayed onto the set of a well-scripted […]

Saturday night’s party was great: bring and share nosh at the conspicuously luxuriou home of someone who works for DFID (so, as someone else noted, my taxes pay for it!). Just when I thought I’d had a good time, folk decided we should go out to a nightclub. We piled in the back of a […]

Philip cautiously cracks the small egg that had been sitting on the dining table all afternoon while he cooked the chicken he had slaughtered for me.

What treasures lay inside? …

Philip and Theresia’s daughter is keen to find out.
Philip insisted the egg was from a Cock. I’d never heard of such things before and […]

Came back from Nairobi yesterday after finally seeing off Will (one of the VSOs who is going back prematurely after only a year to do a PhD — odd symmetry with my own situation there — I wish him luck and preseverance) and drinking lots of fine Scotch with lovely friends Shelley and Paul.
I […]

I went for supper with colleagues last night, and to watch Ali Mazuri’s TV documentary The Africans. During the evening we talked of the new metal grilles that the builders are fitting to the windows of buildings on the college compound. All buildings in Kenya have such grilles. They are to keep out “thugs”: robbers […]

{{popup RiftValleyPanorama.jpg RiftValleyPanorama 1024×243}} The camel race was in the morning. In the afternoon a bunch of us piled into a Toyota Land Cruiser and set out for the edge of the Rift Valley. As you can tell from this pic (not the crappy little on on this page, the big panoramic one that it […]

More pics from the Maralal Camel Derby.
Sasha and Sheila battle for position! (or should I say struggle for balance?)Sheila deploys her secret weapon for greater speed.

Sasha crosses the finish line.

The local Samburu watch us Mzungus making fools of ourselves.

Meanwhile a local shows us how it’s supposed to be done.

Will crosses the line, with […]