Our first full day in Kenya
Our first full day in Kenya was a wild, busy experience. After a full 16 hours of flying, we landed in Nairobi at 9 pm. I was exhausted, but stepping out of that airport into the fresh, cool Nairobi night air was invigorating. Once we were packed like sardines into a bus, we began driving to our hotel. Driving through the hectic streets of Nairobi in the dark was so exciting. Just minutes after my first steps on a completely unfamiliar continent, we were swerving and dodging pedestrians and other cars while taking in the lights of our new city.
The following morning was the first of two orientations. After breakfast, Dr. Wamai, the Dialogue leader, introduced us several Kenyans who were helping with the Dialogue and spoke briefly about our plan for today. The biggest part of our itinerary was a stop at the University of Nairobi, where we will be taking classes starting tomorrow. The driving during the day was similar to driving at night, just with even more traffic and even more people and motorcyclists weaving around the cars. There was an unmistakable control to the chaos though, as everyone seemed to get around so fluidly. Nairobi itself is such a green city, with parks, lawns, and open places seemingly everywhere. Gone were the skyscrapers that populate the Boston skyline, instead when I looked out from the bus window, I saw trees and lower standing buildings and people all well-dressed in suits and dresses.
At the University of Nairobi, we had the pleasure of meeting two faculty members there, Professor Oneombe and Professor Faith. They told us about themselves and the school. The University of Nairobi has 80,000 students according to Professor Faith, about 4 times as many as Northeastern’s population. We also learned that the school is ranked fourth on the continent and its public health school, which we are hosted by for our classes, is only a few years old, becoming an official school in the College of Health Sciences. After our brief orientation, it was off to do some grocery shopping for our apartments! I’ll say more about those in the next blog post!
