So last night we met at the Safari Park hotel on the other side of town, to welcome this delegation from Malawi. They are supposed to have come to Nairobi to look at the factory where their passports are made, but it in fact seems they came to have a bit of a jolly and go shopping...

They raised the issue that there has been a shortage of Malawian passports and they feel pressured because they have none to give out... this later turns out to be another flaw in organisation. Instead of reordering passports when they are down to their last 3,000 for example, they just let the stock completely run out and then panic order because they have none left! It's a totally different way of thinking, and is perhaps caused by the mentality that if there is still some stock left then why spend more precious money on passports. They do also order more passports, but fail to pay for them and then wonder why they don't get them. Very interesting drawing conclusions from that, and even more interesting to see that it is not just Kenya that lacks any sense of organisation skills, but indeed most of Africa.

Joseph junior has been off ill today and yesterday - Alison sent him to the doctors yesterday afternoon and it turns out he has typhoid. He should be fine as he is on a course of treatment that should hopefully sort it all out and Alison and Paul are paying. But at the high prices the doctors charge, many who aren't lucky enough to have someone pay their bill for them will just suffer in silence. On the Runda estate, Runda Water provides a drinking tap around the corner, where people have free access to drinking water. It turns out Joseph paid someone else for some water because he couldn't get to the tap or something, and the person selling the water clearly just fished it out of some stagnant pond and now he has Typhoid. How dreadful is that? It really brings home the danger of bad drinking water, and it is so cheap to fix up drinking water taps and wells etc. The old government of Moi seemed to just fritter all the money away on estates and backhanders that the Kibaki government is only just able to try and catch up on itself today.