Millennium Village Project

Top: the lovely Mieka delivering a delicious birthday cake (cooked on a campfire!!)
Bottom: Back on the safari trucks just over the Uganda-Kenya border!

We left Jinja early in the morning and set off towards the Kenya-Uganda border. It is remarkable how the closer we got to Kenya, the drier and more dustier it became, and the sparse the vegetation became. It took us two mildly stressful hours to cross the border back into Kenya. We were greeted by our open, breezy safari trucks on the Kenyan side and as soon as we started driving I was happy to be back in them and not in the hot buses we drove around in in Uganda. We immediately drove to Sauri, the first ever Jeffery Sach Millenium Village Project. Despite the debate and controversy surrounding Sachs and his ideology, the visit was quite uplifting. We visited a school and a clinic and both were pristine. The school had a computer lab and a kitchen where they cook meals for their School Feeding program that ensures that students get a least one good meal per day. The terrain around Sauri is beautiful: rugged and mountainous.

We then hopped on the trucks again and headed off to our campsite on the banks of Lake Victoria. Our campsite was beautiful with a rocky cliffs and tall trees everywhere. The park has many Impala which are like the East Africa answer to the deer only with long horns and if possible, even more bold. The campsite was a stunning setting for a 21^st birthday!   

We also visited Kisumu during our stay here, the third largest city in Kenya. Kisumu is very nice and feels very safe. It is the Millennium Cities Project that accompanies Sauri.  We got to do some shopping at the Nakumatt- like an African Wal-Mart and so some people stocked up on supplies for the next few weeks in which we’ll be camping in very remote spaces. My friends also bought cake ingredients and birthday presents so you could say my birthday was “Brought to you by Nakumatt”. Some friends baked me a delicious and enormous birthday cake using the camp stove. I couldn’t have asked for a better birthday.