Online Check-In

For several years now, I’ve checked in online prior to flights. This has several benefits:

• Being able to select my seat. I always opt for a window seat (generally a little bit more room for bags by my feet, as well as being able to lean against the side of the airplane, and the view of course on a daytime flight). I also generally go for one that at that point, hasn’t got anyone checked in the adjacent seat. A number of times this has still been the case on the flight itself, which means more room to spread out.
• Not needing to be at the airport quite so early before a flight. Nairobi airport (Jomo Kenyatta International) doesn’t have that much to do, so the shorter the time spent waiting there, the better.
• Usually (but not always) a much shorter queue at the bag-drop desk than the check-in desks.
However, a couple of weeks ago, this method completely backfired. I’d been in Yaounde, Cameroon for a week, working with the Finance staff there. My return flight was scheduled for 11:15pm on the Friday night. However, on the Thursday I received notice from our Nairobi office that the runway at JKIA (Jomo Kenyatta International Airport) was to undergo maintenance over a 24 hour period, leading to flight delays, so I contacted my travel agent to see how this would affect my flight. I hadn’t heard back from her before the time for online check-in, so did that, and printed off my boarding pass. On the Friday morning, I received an email from Carol telling me that the flight had been rescheduled to 3am on the Saturday morning, and sure enough, when I checked on Kenya Airway’s website, the 11:15pm flight was cancelled, and now showing was a 3am flight. So, again, I checked in online, and printed off the boarding pass.
The taxi showed up at 12:30am as arranged, and we had a traffic-free 25 minute drive to Nsimalen airport. (Part of the way we were following an open-sided truck full of plantain, evidently on its way to Equatorial Guinea, where, my taxi-driver told me, the price of plantain is three times that in Cameroon.) The Kenya Airways plane was already at the airport which was good, though it seemed a little strange that it was there already, given that the turnaround time is normally about an hour, and the time now was 1am, so 2 hours before the scheduled departure time. However, on entering the terminal building, I was told that that flight was in fact about to leave, and that I was too late! As a recap, it wasn’t meant (according to my travel agent, the website and my boarding pass) to leave until 3am, and this was 1am…..
Ironically, I’d been thankful that I’d heard of the change in departure time, thinking that I was saving myself a long wait at the airport in the middle of the night. Instead, had I been oblivious to the change, I’d actually have been better off! Clearly, Kenya Airways hadn’t anticipated that people would be using their online check-in system (there were in fact just 4 of us), and claimed that they hadn’t informed us, so were free to change it again. (Is their website not a means of communication?!)


From the inside of the Kenya Airways
office, in a deserted airport

Whilst they took no responsibility for their part in my missing the flight, they did at least book me onto the next flight – 36 hours later, on Sunday morning. What followed for me, was a 2+ hour wait in the Kenya Airways office, while the staff there finished work, so that I could get a ride back to the SIL centre with them, my taxi driver having left, claiming that this was KQ’s responsibility to sort out, which was fair enough. Thankfully, I’d got the location of the SIL centre from him before he left, as I'd had no clue otherwise how to find it! The dilemma that I then had was how to get back into my room, having dropped the key into the keybox, which requires a combination to open the padlock – a combination that I didn’t have…… The guard at the gate, thankfully had the phone number of the guesthouse manager, and let me use his phone (my Kenyan SIM just allowed incoming rather than outgoing calls and txts). So, by 4am I was back in my room, unpacking, remaking the bed, and sending txt messages via skype to our logistics person in Nairobi to tell her that the taxi wouldn’t be needed that morning after all.
So, will I checkin online next time (2 weeks from now)? Yes, though if there are any flight time changes, I may be a little bit more cautious!

Custom-Made

There are aspects of life here that become normal, and yet would be difficult to replicate at home in the UK, unless of course you happened to be wealthy. Having someone clean my house and do the ironing isn’t something that would ever have occurred to me in Horsham. Yet, here I am in Nairobi, living on a rather reduced income, and Esther comes to clean and iron 2 mornings a week. Having a househelp isn’t so much a luxury (though it is very nice indeed to have all that side of things done!), as an expectation, providing employment and therefore an income to someone, and thereby, to their family as well. Another aspect is having furniture custom-made. Again, not something I’d ever have contemplated in the UK. However, here, there aren’t the Ikeas, Homebases, John Lewis etc etc. What you do have however are lots of ‘jua kali’ (literally, hot sun, as the furniture is generally made on the side of the road) small businesses, with people making a living using their carpentry and / or metalwork skills. There are of course a range of standards, and getting what you want isn’t always a given, though I’ve so far at least, been happy with the various bookshelves, armchairs, chests of drawers and bedside tables that I’ve had made.
I wound up a couple of weeks before Christmas in need of a new guest bed, having purchased a nice new sprung mattress to replace the thin foam one I’d had, only to discover that it was 3” longer than the bedframe, and that the bed couldn’t quite tolerate those extra few inches – all the joints came apart! With all the rain that we’ve had, I didn’t quite fancy trudging through the mud looking at the various bedframes on display on Ngong Road, nor did I reckon much to their likely state, having been completely open to the elements. Instead, I went to Don Bosco Boys’ Town in Karen, as recommended by friends who live out that way. This is a centre that was set up in 1985 by the Salesians of Don Bosco, to train young people from poor areas in technical skills. These include welding, secretarial, motor vehicle mechanics, electrical, masonry, plumbing, and tailoring, as well as carpentry. All that I provided was a quick sketch of the sort of design I was looking for, the dimensions of the mattress (pretty important that this one was the right size!), and a choice of wood (cypress or mahogany was the choice). Just over 2 weeks later, I drove out to pick the bedframe up (which thankfully could be disassembled so that it fit in my car!), and that night I was sleeping in my new, very comfortable, bed (my parents being in my bed!).