Day 400: Big Cities Overwhelm Us

By lara, lara@trippingonwords.com

Well, it was my job to post yesterday and I blatantly forgot because I was in a blur of exhaustion. We had to go to Nairobi yesterday to pick up visitors. That was not the primary errand of the trip; that was the fun part, so that is the part I will highlight. As a result, for the last day or so, we have been hanging out with people other than each other and Tumaini residents and staff. Claire’s bro “Tone Bone” arrived, as did the Claire and Tony family friend Lauren. We also picked up the friend of a friend of a friend, yet another “Chaos” (read: sha-os ie charles), name of all Tumaini watchmen, and at least three urphans.

We actually went to Nairobi to run approximately one million errands. It was actually only 5, but in Kenya it took an entire day and most of a night.

We had to find Chaos at a hotel that he was not in. With no phone number, and no idea what he looks like, we shockingly couldn’t find him anywhere until we returned to the van to find that our driver had walked up to the white kid he saw with a suitcase to ask if he knew Claire and Lara. Chaos said yes, though of course he hadn’t actually met these crazy girls before, and got into the van for us to find him.

And so our merry little crew moved along. We have finally decided the lucky 21 urphans who will be running the marathon with us. All this after having to exclude some of the ones who have been training “regularly” based on their age (too young) and their own volition (too bored with running) in order to keep the numbers within the restrictions given to us by the kinda unhelpful (yet officially helpful!) organizers.

So we registered them. Then we went to buy t-shirts, where we made one of the urphans stand in as a representative of finances that he was entirely unprepared to handle. It is hard for Claire and I to keep up with all the white lies we have to tell to manipulate situations to our benefit, so with a language barrier and no context at all for bargaining with t-shirt manufacturers, poor James had a hard time of it, though he did quite well, and we were proud.

We also went grocery shopping where we met up with our driver’s niece, though he had not known she worked there; picked up Tony and Lauren; dropped off passport photos at a Christian-Muslim relations office; discussed hair extensions with our hotel-owning friend in Nairobi; and got stuck in a 3 hour traffic jam during which I fell asleep and woke from a dream of my computer speaking as a Kenyan to find myself in mid-conversation with the driver.

All in all, an entirely exhausting day, perhaps even more so than today, though we technically ran 18 miles. But that is a story for another day.