“Second time’s the charm” - Our Journey to Isibania
August 16, 2022
At 10 a.m our team met at JFK, excited to be the first Princeton Engineers Without Border chapter to travel to Kenya since 2019. We checked our bags, went through security, found our gate, and got some lunch. Everyone was as ready as can be for the 14 hour flight ahead! However, our boarding time came and passed. A dreaded announcement then sounded over the intercom: “Flight KQ003 to Nairobi is delayed”. There was nothing we could do but wait. Two hours later, the speaker sounded again: “Flight KQ003 has been canceled due to technical issues with the aircraft.” The flight was rescheduled to the next day, and passengers were instructed to get in line to receive a reservation for a hotel nearby. We rushed towards the gate agent and started messaging our partners in Kenya about the delay. Soon, we remembered Deniz - a member of our travel team who was flying out of Turkey and was supposed to meet us in Nairobi! We frantically messaged her not to get on her flight, as we didn’t want her to spend a night in a new country alone. Though she was already on her plane, she got our message just in time and was able to deboard. After handling these immediate crises, we picked up our bags and took a shuttle to the hotel. We ate dinner and then went to bed, prepared to start our journey from square one the next day.
August 17th, 2022
For us, the second time was the charm! Despite the recent trauma of leaving the airport without getting on a plane, everything went smoothly the next day. After a lot of deja vu going through baggage check and airport security again, we finally got on our plane. Fourteen hours later, we landed in Nairobi and met up with Deniz. After a three hour layover, we took our connecting flight to Kisumu, where a driver from Kisumu Hotel picked us up at the airport. We were one day behind schedule, but finally in Kenya. We had a fantastic dinner with delicious food, during which many of us tried Chapati - a Kenyan flatbread - for the first time. We planned our schedule for the next day and decided we would leave for Isibania at 8:30 a.m, hoping to make it to a meeting at 2 p.m.
August 18, 2020
Everyone woke up early and had a delicious breakfast at the hotel, complete with a custom omelette station! We bought SIM cards at a store nearby, stuffed our bags in the van, and left Kisumu. The first two hours of travel went smoothly: we played a bunch of games and laughed a ton. At around 11:30 a.m, however, we hit a “bump in the road”…..our van had a flat tire! Though we were barely halfway through our journey, we had to pull over. While the view was quite breathtaking, having a flat tire was definitely not in our itinerary! Everyone got out to check the damage. It was pretty bad… Kelly, one of our project managers, even said: "I've seen a flat tire before, but it's usually not this flat." We all laughed and waited for our driver, who had gone to find help. There was a spare tire in the van, but no jack. Some amazing local people came to help us. Thankfully, they had a jack, but it still took quite a while to lift the van up because the jack was small. They had to use rocks to get enough height to change the tire, but eventually, the spare tire was in place and the crisis was averted.
We arrived at Isibania at around 2:00 pm, the time our first meeting was supposed to start. We had asked our driver to bring us to Borderpoint Lodge, but something got lost in translation and he actually took us to the Kenya-Tanzania border, literally the "border point." We clarified the mix-up and he quickly took us to the lodge, or so we thought. We took all the bags out of the van and were ready to go inside, but the driver told us we were actually at the wrong spot. It turns out there were two Borderpoint lodges in the area, and apparently, we were at the wrong one! We put everything back in and headed to the right place. After driving for a few more blocks, we found the right hotel and met Tom Kiriga, a retired teacher from Kiburanga Primary School and one of our main supporters in the area. We were ready and excited to meet our partners and visit the projects. “Second time's the charm" was truly becoming our trip motto!
Swahili word of the day: Karibu (Welcome)