Chickens in the trunk

This week I traveled to Kisumu, in the Western part of Kenya, with Duncan to check up on our new CARE for AIDS operations. Though I'll describe the more meaningful parts of the trip later, I wanted to first tell you a story of the kind that definitely does not happen in America - not to me at least.

When one of our Kenyan Directors, Cornel, moved to Kisumu a month or so ago, he left behind or forgot all sorts of things, including a collection of chickens. Last week he called and asked us to bring him his chickens, so we rounded them up from different places and threw them all in the garage. On Wednesday morning, Opio opened the garage doors at about 6:30am and the chickens made their escape, scattering all over the yard. After rounding them up, tying their legs together, and carefully (or not so carefully) placing them in a cardboard box in the back of the car, we pulled out onto the road with 5 chickens in the trunk.

It's about a 4 hour drive to Kisumu, and for the most part Cornel's chickens were good passengers. Every once in a while I would slam on breaks, turn off to drive on the rutted dirt "diversions," or hit a random speed bump going 100 km/hr (it is driving in Kenya, after all), and the chickens would start squawking and clucking with a passion. A couple of times this caught me completely by surprise, but we all made it in one piece to the shore of Lake Victoria.

After running some errands and going to a seminar at the CFA center, we finally got to Cornel's house at around 3pm. Duncan opened the trunk and immediately yelled, with a laugh, "CORNEL, allllll your chickens are dead!" At first I thought he was kidding, but it turns out that leaving five chickens in a car when its 90-some degrees out side for a few hours will give you chickens that are not only dead, but probably partially baked already. Cornel was a little upset, but he was consoled by the fact that his family will be eating chicken (along with the single egg that one managed to lay in the box) for the next week or so!

All Kenyan, all the time...