Arrival in Nairobi

Our KLM 747 touched down at precisely 8 pm Nairobi time.  We took a while to taxi to near the terminal and two doors were opened so that we could deplane, walk down some steps and then take a bus to the immigration and baggage handling area.  The new arrivals terminal is not ready yet, they have only recently bulldozed the original one that burned down some time ago.  As we walked into the receiving area, they were scanning everybody on the walkway for fever, still taking precautions against ebola and other infectious diseases that could destroy their tourism business.

I headed for the line that was handling people who already had their evisa in hand.  Pastor Kevin went to a regular line, expecting to pay $50 to manually get a visa.  But when he showed his receipt for the evisa system, he was told to proceed to a different line and he returned shortly, whereupon they issued his visa promptly at no charge.  Meanwhile, one person after another went right through the manual process, while those who had the evisa, like me, took much more time to get through the system.  When it was finally my turn, the lady at the counter looked through my passport to find a place to stamp it and kept thumbing one page after another, most of which proudly stated Kenya.  She finally looked at me and said "Just who are you?"  I said, "Someone who loves Kenya, maybe I can become a citizen." She said, "To do that, you need to marry a Kenyan."  She was playing along, so I asked if she were available for marriage.  She sadly told me no, she was already taken.  We got a good laugh out of it and I joined Kevin in the baggage claim area.  Three of our four footlockers were already there, but it took about 40 minutes for the last one to finally show up.  We only could find one cart, so we precariously stacked all the footlockers on it and headed for the final customs inspection.  We had to open and explain every item we had, but we got through OK after we mentioned that we worked through the Ministry of Health.  Those apparently are the magic words, I'll try to remember them for our next trip.

After we got outside, there were about 100 drivers with signs with the names of the passengers they were to pick up.  I had looked through about 20 of them when I heard someone call out "Dave!"  It was Henry, a driver we had worked with several times before.  We had to roll the top heavy cart through a bunch of pedestrians, across a busy street, load up the vehicle and then fight a traffic jam to get to our lodgings across town.

We arrived at the Little Daughters of St.Joseph compound where the other teams were already staying, unloaded our footlockers, checked into our rooms and I was heading for the only thing I wanted, a hot shower at 11:30 pm.  It was not to be.  All the hot water was gone and, ulnike the other places we stay, they have a central hot water system, not the individual electric heaters on each shower head like Europe has. I got a cold shower, but at least it was wet.  I got about 6 hours of good sleep, a rarity for the first night, but Kevin and I were completely exhausted after our travel extravaganza.  This marks the end of the travel reporting.