Traveling to Homa Bay!

Today we set out early to head to Homa Bay with Pastor David, Elnora, Pastor Carol, Alice & Alphoncine. Steve, David & I had wanted to view Lake Victoria since we were so close to it. Today’s trip offered us all the opportunity to see the lake & take some time mid-way through our training to assess where we were & determine how to use the remaining 3 training days. It was a fun group to take a road trip with!

Our journey was quite the driving adventure for our driver… and us!! It’s hard to describe how different the roads are here, compared to the US. We left the hotel in Migori at 8:30 & made one stop of about 30 minutes at Carol’s shop along the way. It took us about 2.5 hours to travel the 37 miles to Homa Bay!! Between the construction, speed bumps & traffic stops at the county lines, it was a long journey!! After Homa Bay, we crossed the peninsula to Sori on one of the worst paved roads I have ever seen. Even our driver said it was the worst he had driven on. That took 1.5 hours to go 35 miles. I have never seen so many potholes on one stretch of road before. In places we had to drive off the road & alongside of it, because it was so hard to navigate. That lasted for about 19 miles, then thankfully the last 16 miles were on a beautifully smooth road! At the end of the day we did like the Wise Men and went home by another way :-). We came home on a dirt road for much of the way before we got pavement, but it was SO much better than the potholes & construction on the other roads! It took less than 2 hours to get back to Moheto & after dropping everyone off, another 30 minutes to get to our hotel in Migori.

We began our morning by stopping at Pastor Carol’s shop just outside of Migori. She is the youth pastor at Moheto First UMC & she has an interior design & fabric shop. With my love of fabrics & sewing, I was fascinated by all she sold in the store as well as hearing about what she sews to sell! She has electricity, so she can use electric sewing machines. She lives in the back of the shop with her child.

Homa Bay is a city of 900,000 people on one of the large bays in Lake Victoria. That bay has very good fishing. The tilapia that is served here at the hotel comes from there. Here are some of the scenes I saw at Homa Bay and Lake Victoria:

Once we got to Sori, we stopped at a hotel that had another beautiful view of a different bay on Lake Victoria. We gathered on the 3rd floor of the hotel to have our meeting and eat lunch. We placed our order for lunch as we arrived & proceeded to discuss our training. Three hours later our food finally arrived!! It turned out that they had to go to the market to get the food we ordered & then cook it! We all agreed that they needed some help with their business plan, because it certainly was not serving the customers well!! That being said, though, the food did taste good 🙂

As we were driving home we were blessed with the retelling of the stories of the day and laughter and an amazing sunset to end the day!!