05.08.2024
Life in Gilgil.
A year ago we piled into Norm’s Aldbourne Taxi with eight holdalls and four passports and made our way to Gilgil, Nakuru County, to begin our new lives in Kenya.
I wrote a pretty off-the-cuff post about it and shared it on LinkedIn in the chaotic days leading up to our departure. We got an overwhelming response, read by, apparently, a staggering 67k people.
I have no doubt therefore, that there must be nearly 67k people waiting breathlessly to find out what happened next.
What followed has been a whirlwind 12 months that have taken us way out of our comfort zones, mixing stress, friendship, elation, frustration, success and growth in near equal measure.
First, the tangibles:
- We’ve lived in three houses (four, if we include the week we were kindly rescued from a long-time powercut by David and Millie)
- We’re onto our third car (who knew how expensive cars are in Kenya?!)
- We’ve got one dog (Sybil – she accounts for 86% of the chaos in our lives)
- We’ve got two leopard tortoises (Claire and Maxi)
- We’ve photographed 19 properties and a dhow
- We’ve launched 16 websites and two media portals
- We’ve taken on over 35 new clients across Africa and in the UK.
Our aim was to allow ourselves space to breathe again – to re-establish a balance in our lives and to spend more time in the wild and less time behind screens.
I’m not sure we’ve entirely succeeded. All of our planning was around leaving the UK; we gave very little thought to what we would do when we actually arrived in Kenya. We weren’t prepared for the tumult of establishing a new house, new friendships, new routines, and (predictably, I suppose) the cost of it all.
Maybe we’ve tried to do too much – maybe all this time away from home (and it does feel like home now) and from my desk has been at the expense of the calm we thought we needed. School is wonderfully all-consuming during term-time, and the time difference with our UK studio extends our working day more than is probably healthy. During the holidays we feel compelled to make the most of being in Kenya, so we immediately get into the bush, at the expense again, of routine.
We have thrown ourselves into everything and have taken literally every opportunity to travel and to explore. We’ve visited some of Kenya’s most breathtaking places, from deserts to the coast, savannah to great rifts, riverine forests to the top of mountains. We’ve seen natural beauty, and heart-wrenching poverty, met some of the friendliest people, and driven into protests of some of the angriest.
Are we less stressed? Probably not. Do we have more money? Definitely not. Do we have more down-time? Also no. Do we spend more time together as a family? A resounding yes.
And that’s really what I think it comes down to – we’re packing a huge amount into a short time and it’s tiring and full-on, but we’re spending it together. I don’t think we’ll ever look back and wished we’d taken the easy route.
“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal.”
Paulo Coelho
