When Dr Ndemo entered the room, we all wanted to stand up and modestly he stated that no need for us to stand up for his sake. Seeing him in person confirmed that despite his high profile position, he is sincere and very modest man. He is purely wanting to contribute Kenya to move forward and he is fully aware of all the problems there currently exist.
He spoke a lot about his view on the areas, where our teams' assignments are and he joked a lot. "If I had lots of money, I could be the president of this country", bringing us the view of current state of corruption existing in the country.
Things are very much working now on tribal basis, where as the constitution states that government should be issue based.
Dr Ndemo's session with us took about an hour and we had great interactive discussions not only of his visions for Kenya, but how things are in our countries concerning voting and government electronic services and people's trust to government.
When we walked out from the session we were all ready to rock the world, or Kenya at least. Such an inspirational person. In my personal opinion what crowns it all, is his personality; sincere, modest and with good sense of humor.
Dr Ndemo is the owner of the project which my sub-team is doing on e-voting and he solved nicely the concerns we had about possible duplication of work. When sharing his vision on e-voting and his main concerns, we were able to capture nicely the new scope for us on the area of e-voting and voting.
We went all full of inspirational energy to get our bags and packed ourselves and our bags to two matatus and started the journey to our permanent residence, Nakuru.
We took the old road to Nakuru, which took us bit over 2 h. Nakuru lies in the area of Rift Valley with over 400 000 inhabitants. Nakuru is surrounded with lovely places, which represent the African nature (Lake Nakuru, Lake Bogoria, Lake Baringo, Crater, Masai Mara nature park). On the way I spotted my side business ;o) One high-way "hotel" had Roos on it.
What makes Nakuru an interesting location to our team is that the Kenyan post-election clashes did the most damage in Nakuru. This is due to the fact that a variation of tribes live around Nakuru, this has been a safe haven to all tribes in the past. When we arrived here we went to meet the district commissioner. He shared history and current facts about Nakuru.
Wikipedia facts about Nakuru: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakuru
Sinde Wednesday we have been working at Nakuru on our assignments, gathering data and analyzing it. Internet connection comes and goes, so it makes the process bit slower.
To balance the days we have explored the local restaurants and yesterday we had dinner and dancing evening with the team at Taidy's. It was great fun, and despite the fact that Thursday is locally not a dance night...thanks to our team taking over the dance flow, the locals got into dancing too. While eating dinner at the restaurant from the local sports channel, they were showing document about Finnish football (interviewing among others Timo Marjamaa...whose facial expressions stayed unchanged from beginning to end of the interview)...I could not believe my eyes. Here I am in Kenya and they are broadcasting about Finnish football in the tv! ;o)
Waiting for the weekend and our day trips around Nakuru - Lake Nakuru, Lake Bogoria and Lake Baringo and the crater. So, latest on Sunday will revert with the weekend experiences. Happy weekend to one and all from Nakuru!
#ibmscs Kenya 3
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