Second week in Kenya

Times flies and 2nd week of our stay went very fast. We in team Twiga had a very tight schedule.
Monday was another presentation meeting this time for the Permanent Secretary Professor Kiamba at MoHest. Despite a very stress morning getting up at 5.00 with traffic and everything, the meeting went very well and we got engaged with the PS and got some good feedback. Coming back to traffic as said we left  at 5.30 in order for us to be ready for our meeting at 8.30 in Nairobi. That's three hours to drive 70 km! And guess what? We arrived 15 minutes late.  Luckily, Professor Kiamba was on "Africa time" and  the meeting didn't start until  9:30. Presents were as usual given at the end of the meeting.   Remaining of the day was work in Machakos at the hotel.

Tuesday was yet another early morning and as we were almost late on Monday, we agreed to start even earlier. So we left at 5.00. We were in good shape until a puncturing took place. Rafael our driver was very efficient and with all our help it took less than 8 minutes to replace the tire. We arrived in time for for the first interview with the Principal from Univerisity of Nairobi. We stayed there all day doing interviews on Professors, lecturs, researchers and students for  our assignment. As we had so many interviews we agreed to divide the team into 2. So I had the interviews together with the 2 Richards.

Wednesday we slept longer as we were to make the interviews by phone. So the entire team was making phone calls to universities around Kenya.

 Conference calls is not something available here in Kenya and phone's with speaker neither. So we had to use our own cell phone. Some of the university only had a cell phone as they hadn't paid for their land line. Multiple call were cancelled at last minute, people not being in, people not there and everything seemed a bit unstructured. But we had some good interviews.And stayed tune in our hotel.  Look at my room with the mosquito net....

Thursday was another Nairobi interview day and yet another early day. But this time no challenges on the road, so we got into a nice breakfast before all day meeting.  Interviews were at the Kenya Poly technical University where Richard, Richard and I were in the Board room all day.
First came the Maasai Technical Training Institute coming all their way from Masai land, so they had to get up as early as we did. Good interviews and we learned about innovations to make clean water a
nd machines to make bricks for houses instead of the Maynattas they live in. As we saw it when we went to the Masai Mara village last weekend . All in favor of he health and future of the masai people. But they were all reluctant to use these great innovations. Again today meetings were cancelled, moved etc. So the afternoon ended up with working on our laptops and meeting the Principal of Kenya Poly technical University again being a courtesy call. After the work Richard and I went to the Post Office where sending letters home to Denmark turned out to be very cheap (less than 25 DKK).

All in all the working days demonstrated one of our initial our hypotheses was totally validated in each and every interview. Makes the report and further work much easier and valid..

Friday was our first social community day for whole CSC team Kenya 4. Visit to Daystar University nearby Machakos. Driving just the 15 km gave us meeting with  zebras, giraffes, welder beast etc - think about seeing such great animals on your way to work.We arrived at 8:45 am at the University and were warmly greeted and we did several presentations about IBM, what what's it like to work in an IT Company, good discussion about democracy and finally a speed mentoring. All the students were very engaged all through the day and very grateful for us being there . A very inspiring and good day.

Henriette
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