orienteering without borders

English Version:

Friday, 28 September 2007
As expected a real portion of “coolness” was necessary in the beginning - and I am amazed at myself how easy I have managed to adapt to this. For example, when I arrived at dawn on 13 September at Nairobi airport and then had to wait more than an hour before finally a totally unknown, but extremely friendly Kenyan approached me and who it quickly emerged was an orienteer. Esther and Sammy were stuck at this time in the morning traffic chaos...
My rescuer is a taxi driver, who provided the comfort and convenience of a car to bring us to my future home near Nairobi (Dagoretti). The "house" that I share with Esther and Sammy (the organisational and sporting leader of the Kenyan orienteering club) is - for European standards - tiny and quite spartan, but it is at least not a corrugated iron hut that you can also find in the immediate neighbourhood. I can vaguely remember that everything in the beginning was somewhat of a shock for me – though since then I’ve got used to my surroundings and feel happy here to such a degree that I can hardly comprehend it.
We live in a rural area – and to get to town we use – if we don’t walk – the local means of transport which are the infamous (rightly so) Matatus (eccentric, rickety and at the same time extremely fast minibuses, but which I love so much) as well as other bus companies that naturally run without any timetable at all. The streets of Nairobi are always full of people - and so it is often the case that you have to expect to queue over an hour in the evening for a bus heading out of town...
The people here – at least in the countryside – are incredibly friendly and very communicative. And as a white person my very presence is almost a Sensation – above all for the children who often greet me from afar with "how are you" or similar, or something that sounds like that. But not just the children are please when they can shake my hand – I think Esther and Sammy have made on my account quite a lot of new acquaintances just in the last two and half weeks, in the course of which I have also acquired a few African names – such as Wairimu, Wanjiku or Nafula. Fortunately the Africans are very patient with me when it comes to me trying to understand their often quite strange English. Esther and Sammy however are also trying tirelessly to make a "Kenyan lady" out of me while they are teaching me Kiswahili – but it is not enough for more than a greeting or the appropriate reply yet.
Running training consists of a daily "morning run" (60-120 min) – the duration varies in order to get used to all the different temperatures - and around lunch time there is an optional short "hill work" or "speed work" session (fartlek and intervals) – these are restricted at the moment though to once or twice a week. There is also the opportunity for a 45 minute "evening run" for recovery, and sit-ups, press-ups and similar exercises are on the training programme at least every other day. Each running session ends with stretching and other exercises and there is also massage twice a week!
Recovery is generally given a lot of attention, and in addition African food is real power nutrition and it’s a tough job for me to cope with the huge portions that are put in front of me! So far I’ve only eaten meat three times, normal meals consist of largely cereals and vegetables fresh from the garden - and just as fresh is the milk that we need for the vast amount of tea that we drink every day. For this water, milk and tea are boiled together, only the (cane) sugar is added later (and not in short supply either).
Sunday is a training-free day – as orienteering does really count as running training. Last Sunday (the previous Sunday war regarded as just getting to know things) I got to enjoy a Kenyan orienteering training session for the first time, or rather I helped to organise it. There is quite a lot of work to do in this respect! This includes drawing a few more details outside of just the path network on the "Arboretum" o-map, a park in Nairobi (featured in the Austrian orienteering magazine ‘Orientierung’ issue 2/07). In the lack of other maps, they train almost always with this map – but despite this there is a degree of coarse orienteering difficulty. To make things a bit harder Sammy tends to hide the controls in the control circle (in a bush for example), so that it’s really like hunting for Easter eggs. One control was so well hidden that everyone though that it has been stolen – which is also not so seldom!
To finish with a few words about the children’s home that I, or we, visit roughly three times a week. It’s called "Children's Garden" and is run by a Kenyan and his wife with the financial support of a Canadian Sponsor, who we also got to meet. The home houses around 100 children (orphans), and about another 100 or so come there during the day to attend the school and make use of the playing facilities there.
For the moment it’s a question of getting to know the children a bit and to win their confidence while we devote time to them and play with them. It remains to be seen how I can actually make myself useful in terms of practical tasks too.