Mater Heart Run

I was up at 6.10 this morning (a Saturday) for a 10km charity run which started at 7am. Obviously, this being Kenya, it didn't actually get going til well after 8. Fortunately, the people I was running with, having being in Kenya for longer than me, predicted this and we were there in perfect time.

The run itself went well enough, my careful preparations of getting ill on Thursday night then not eating anything all of Friday obviously paying off, but the whole thing epitomised so much of what can make living in Kenya difficult at times.

Firstly, there's the timing issue. That's to be expected by now, and if they had actually started on time there would have been outcry because nobody would have been ready (ourselves included). When everything is late on a regular basis, people assume everything else will be in the future - which makes it impossible to do anything on time.

Next, the route for the run had to be changed at the last minute because there was a demonstration planned in town. Kenya is currently debating a new constitution, which is proving reasonably divisive. It's nice to see that people are politically engaged (to the extent that, at the last election, some constituencies had electoral turnout of well over 100%), but it can get tiresome.

Finally, this run was in aid of a children's hospital in Nairobi. There were a few thousand people running, including many large groups of children, maybe 8 to 12 years old. Yet the roads weren't closed off. At one point, we were running down one of the main highways in town, with buses and lorries whizzing past us at 60 miles an hour. The pavement comes and goes and there's no hard shoulder. You're breathing in exhaust fumes (and believe me, some of the exhausts here have to be seen to be believed) and children are running round as the traffic goes by. Unless the hospital were specifically looking for new patients, it seems to show a shocking lack of preparation.

Anyway, we all made it through - in 47 minutes (as I said, there's no way it was actually 10km) - and it did make breakfast feel all the more deserved.