Monday, October 31, 2011

Oct 31 - Happy Halloween!

Halloween is not celebrated in Kenya, so I wish all of you at home in Canada, a very scary and
Happy Halloween!!
At dinner, I shared some foil-wrapped chocolate pumpkins with the team to celebrate the occasion. 

Today we finally met the Permanent Secretary Professor Kiamba at MoHEST. He is a very personable man and the meeting was very productive.He had previously been unavailable to meet with us, because he was traveling internationally. He fully supports our approach to the project and we felt really good afterwards. On another note, Dr. Nyangate who was on our team has been reassigned to another project, so we will not be seeing him again in the near future. We are still working with two staff from his office on a daily basis though.


Have I mentioned the traffic in Nairobi?  
Oh la la! 
We left Machakos at 5:30 a.m. in order to get to our meeting at 8:30 a.m. Yes, that's right - three hours to drive 70 kms! And guess what? We arrived 15 minutes late! Luckily, Professor Kiamba was on "Africa time" and the meeting didn't start until  9:30. In addition to the total congestion, the cars and trucks have no emissions requirements. They belch noxious fumes and black smoke. None of the cars use air-conditioning so we drive with all the windows open and breathe the fumes all the way! Yuck!


 
We spent the afternoon working in Machakos, which is lovely and green and the air quality is much better!




Tomorrow we start our interviews to talk about "innovations" at several Kenya universities and colleges. Looking forward to it!

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