7/5/10 Ride from Nairobi to Shirati

We had a 10 hour ride from Nairobi, the last third of the trip consisted of large pot holes in the road which shook our van like a mechanical bull haha. It was pretty amazing to see 5 giraffes roaming around 1 hour outside of Nairobi. We made a quick stop overlooking a mountain peak. There was one local man that that was wearing a Lycoming Warriors sweatshirt! How random is that, a Lyco sweatshirt on another continent…my undergrad consists of 1,500 people total and a lot of people in PA don’t even know of the college!! The village of Shirati has about 5,200 people. The main road is a dirt one and all of the stores are kind of like shanty shops. An amazing thing about Tanzania, like Kenya is that there are cell phone provider signs virtually everywhere. The main ones are Zain, Safaricom, and Vodafone. The long ride also taught me some lessons. When we stopped at the border, some of the med students were handing out stickers to children. Once you hand out something, not only do the kids want more, but they also bring their friends so you always have to be wary of how many items you have and that you have enough to give out to everyone fairly. The next thing we kind of observed was sad. I did not personally witness it, but a car had hit a woman and she died. Her village members were surrounding her dead body lamenting and waiting for a police report. This tragic event reminds me of Dr. Paul Farmer’s accounts in Haiti. Before I traveled internationally, I never realized that systems such as efficient law enforcement and traffic regulations could prevent so many deaths and that poorer nations did not have this luxury.