The city where we live, Nanyu­ki, is close to Mount Kenya. This is the sec­ond tallest moun­tain of Africa. We can even see it from our house. That is to say, we can see the clouds that are always block­ing the view. Dur­ing our first few days here, it would be the first thing in the morn­ing: see if we can see the moun­tain. But I have to admit that my faith in the moun­tain is slow­ly fad­ing. It is easy to imag­ine peo­ple think­ing this was where God lived; if you nev­er see some­thing, it becomes a myth.

On the oth­er hand, patience can get you some­where. The past weeks I was look­ing for a song of which I only remem­bered the melody. I could only wait for it to play on the radio (small chance as it was a rel­a­tive­ly new and west­ern song) and final­ly yes­ter­day it came: Pay­phone from Maroon 5. It turns out that those few bars of music that haunt­ed me for weeks say noth­ing else but “I’m at a payphone”.

Some­thing more easy was our trip to the equa­tor. It is a 10 minute walk from our house. We always cross it when we trav­el between Nairo­bi and Nanyu­ki. At the sign you see cups of water; those are used to ‘demon­strate’ that water at 2 sides of the equa­tor rotates to dif­fer­ent direc­tions. We skipped that one.

Wednes­day there was a huge fire at the air­port of Nairo­bi, you will have heard about this. I plan to fly to the Nether­lands for the wed­ding of Geert, so I hope every­thing will work by then. There have been some inter­na­tion­al flights now.

Well, that is it for the small news from the shad­ow of the moun­tain. The Kikuyu (peo­ple from this region) used to build their hous­es with the entrance direct­ed towards the moun­tain. Even though we have to go to the bal­cony, our bond with the moun­tain is also strong. We keep an eye on him!