October 19, 2012 Maralal

Greetings

Every other day seems to be about as well as I can do on this blog.  Yesterday Aaron and I met our pilot Tom Brown his wife Ally along with their two year old daughter Cresena for our one and a half hour journey to Maralal.  Weather was great as we flew around the clouds, over volcanos, lakes, mountain ridges, then over the bush to Maralal.  Finally after my fifth visit I was able to see some elephants grazing near a stream about 15 minutes from landing at the Kisima International airstrip.  There were about two dozen of them roaming around.  My batteries died in my camera about half way up the rift valley so I did not get any pictures of the elephants.

Ken was waiting at the Kisima International Airstrip to take us back to meet with Susan and have lunch.  After lunch we went to see the bore hole work at Lare Oibor.  Since my last visit the bore hole site had been moved from about a mile away to right in the church compound.  We met the Compassion director at the school and looked at the desks that had been constructed last summer.  The flanges that we had fabricated in town were not holding up too well to the weight of the school children.  Also some of the pipe threads are failing because we used thin walled pipe which was about all that was readily available at the time and the pipe threader we were using cut pretty deep.  I think we have a workable solution to repair the broken desks when the team arrives in December.

Today we took some medical supplies into town for the handicap school and the Catholic clinic.  We also went back out to the church to see the progress on the bore hole.  After this we returned to Ken and Susan’s to work on the Pajero.  We could see the oil dripping from under the car but it took a while to find where the leak was coming from.  It turned out that the leak was coming from a very small tube with a pin hole that happened to be under about 65 pounds of pressure.  The capillary tube was an addition to the Pajero for one of the gauges on the dash board.  What a relief for Ken that the repair will not be very costly.

Tomorrow we will go back out to the school to see the compassion program children and hopefully we will see them drill down to some water.

Take care and God bless

Dave