LET'S GET IT STARTED!

After several travel related delays our grand adventure through Kenya and Tanzania finally began yesterday at our Nairobi hotel.  These intrepid travelers set off for a week of safaris parks, wildlife, and new experiences across the continent. 

We had a fairly tight itinerary set for the week.  But as I’ve learned through several trips to Africa, schedules have a tendency of not working out.  Africa will let you know what it wants you to see and things will go a lot more smoothly once you accept that fact.  That is definitely a lesson we learned today.

I have two general rules for travel in Africa – 1) Never drive at night, and 2) whatever amount of time you think it will take, allow for double that to avoid breaking rule number 1.  You just never know what will present itself on the highways and byways of African countries – road missing, bridge out, cow crossing, or riotous teenagers…

Our trip was going very smoothly coming out of Nairobi en route to Tanzania where we are spending the week.  Two hours out of the city we were on track to make our destination with time to spare.  That’s when Africa kicked in.  20 kilometers from the border near the Kenyan border town of Namanga, we started to see cars lining up on the sides of the road.  This is not unusual in Africa.  I have seen cars backed up for road blocks, missing roads, jack-knifed 18-wheelers, etc.  But as we inched our way past the parked cars on this otherwise normal 2-lane road, something felt strange about this.  We got curious looks from people standing along the roadway and there was no traffic coming from the opposite direction.  As we inched forward I could see several buses and an 18-wheelers all parked on the roadway about ¼ mile up and a crowd gathered.  Before we got there, though, we found a group of white people standing by the roadside and stopped there to find out what was going on before proceeding.

Before we could get out the question they anxiously explained that their tour bus had just been attacked not 10 minutes earlier by a mob of riotous teenagers.  Apparently the teenagers had taken to the streets to protest over unmet demands for a new school bus and more teachers at their high school.  At some point the teenagers marched out of their school and onto the main highway which connects Kenya, Tanzania, and much of East Africa, eventually drawing the police to disperse the 500 angry teenage boys. 

Unfortunately at some point the protest got out of hand and turned into a full on riot.  Riot police were called in and fired shots into the air to disperse the crowd, but there were not enough police on hand to control them.  The kids fired back with rocks and sticks and then began to attack the cars on the road.  A boy was shot, perhaps by a stray bullet, and the ire of the crowd grew and grew.  The children turned their frustrations on two tour buses filled with Australians, Europeans, and American on a month-long vacation in East Africa, breaking most of the windows with rocks and shaking the buses violently.  The buses tried to escape but were blocked by a truck which had jack-knifed itself trying to turn around.  At that point the buses were sitting ducks and the drivers sprinted away leaving the passengers defenseless and immobile. 

Eventually some kids in the crowd realized what had happened and helped the passengers in the bus walk away from the incident, even apologizing for what had happened.  That is when we drove up, just as they had reached a safe distance from the crowd.  The demonstration was still going strong and the injured boy on the street did not help matters.  Suddenly our African safari adventure had turned into so much more than we had bargained for.  As I said at the beginning of this blog, as much as you plan out a travel itinerary in Africa, ultimately Africa will make the final call on what you see that day.  And today Africa wanted us to see and feel the frustration of kids who are so desperate for a quality education that they feel their only option left is to take to the streets.  It is the frustration felt by hundreds of millions of Africans who grow up in poverty but see so much wealth in the hands of the few wealthy elites who run their countries.  How can you explain to these children that they cannot afford a few extra teachers and a school bus, while the capital city of Nairobi is exploding with new office buildings and 5 star hotels?  The same scenes are taking place in Brazil as that country hosts the World Cup.  Billions were spent on improvements for soccer stadiums, hotels, and under tourist investments, while children go to bed hungry and parents can’t afford health care…

As for our immediate situation, our lives were never in any real danger.  But the reality of the challenges facing Africa set in on all of us as we waited out a resolution to the fighting.  The broken down tour buses eventually guided its passengers to a roadside motel a few miles back where we were happy to tag along.  Perhaps miraculously nobody in the tour group was injured, but the same cannot be said for the two buses…

Eventually the local chiefs of the Maasai tribe were called in to quell the violence.  The road was cleared and we were once again on our way to the safari parks of Tanzania in our comfortable  4-wheel drive SUV.  As I write this I am sitting in a 5-star hotel in northern Tanzanian city of Arusha.  After a nice meal and a couple of Tuskers I could almost forget about the difficulties of the day.   

If only the Kenyan school children near Namanga could do the same.  But that is only for the privileged few and all I can do is be thankful for my gifts in life and carry their stories with me.  I like to think that one day I will come back to that village with donations for a new school bus and extra teachers.  I like to think that, but the reality is that it will probably not happen.  And even if it did, that would only solve the problem for one village in Africa, among the several hundred-thousand similar villages that dot the continent.  

So tomorrow we will once again leave our hotel to explore the continent.  We are scheduled to stay in the Ngorongoro Crater National Park for some once-in-a-lifetime sight-seeing.  But I will once again leave extra time in our itinerary in case Africa decides to show us a different part of her amazing story.