Tito has a European friend who has lived here for about 20 years and has a construction company near Mombasa. He has helped the project by providing a bulldozer and a huge grader at various points to clear the road and even create some degree of embankments and ditches so the road does not get washed out so quickly.
I was not expecting to see the type of machine that this grader is... it was a lot bigger than I expected, with tires that are about 5 feet in diameter. In addition to dragging the earth around and leveling the road, they used it to push over a couple trees rather than having the men I was helping cut them down with their machetes (see the photos).
If you recall Lucky, the chameleon we had for a couple days, that machine is what I saved him from! Once, after the grader passed by me, I hopped out into the forming road to move some stones as we were doing and then looked up to see if the grader was coming back yet, and I saw something small moving across the dirt about 10 meters away. When I went to look, I saw Lucky and the grader driving back towards us. The driver saw me looking at something (from a safe distance to the side of the approaching grader) and he slowed down just enough that the chameleon barely got out of the tire’s path – it would have definitely been crushed under there! I am not sure how it survived being tumbled through the brush and dirt in the first place, but I thought he was lucky I saw him.Here are a couple pictures of the transformation of the new road:
Here is the site of the first church and the cemetery:
Beyond there, the road weaves through a small forest that I think could be turned into a nature preserve. Here are a couple of the sights:
No comments:
Post a Comment