Invited for dinner

Yesterday I was invited for dinner at the home of Ken Kibet and his family. Ken is the coach of the Run-Fast team and also owns the land on which the camp is built. He lives on a ten acre farm with his with (a 2.25 marathon runner!) and his four children, two boys and two girls.

Kens two boys

When I arrived at the farm I was given a guided tour by Ken, he grows a wide variety of crops that he uses for his family, the camp and also sells. He has a number of livestock included cattle, sheep, chicken and ducks. After the tour I was invited into his house which was very homely, a very large living room decorated mainly with trophies and medals from various marathons that his wife has had success in, including two world marathon championship team gold medals!

We sat down a delightful dinner of beef stew, rice and chapatis, which was all served and cleared away by his children who all did this without a word from their parents. It seems in Kenya that the whole family work together as a team to get things done. I was chatting with Ken about families and he was telling me that traditionally Kenyans have always had very large families as they needed the labourers to work the farm but now technology is improving etc, he thinks that in a few generations it will be more like western Europe where 2 or 3 children is the norm.

I was absolutely stuffed from dinner as I couldn't resist an extra chapatis as they were delicious. Ken told me that his two young boys had been excited all day about meeting the muzungu and they spent most of the evening either sitting with me or starring at me giggling! I think tomorrow at their school I will be the topic of conversation! After dinner Ken got me to sign his house visitors book then he took me back to the camp.

Monday morning and we either do a hill session or a 70min hardish run, as we did hills last week today was the 70min run which we do through a local forest. In this forest is a ridiculously steep hill that killed me although I managed to keep up with the second group today so I'm still improving. After the run (and after I had got my breath back) I bumped into Lee Merrion and John Beatie, good to see them and I will pop up to see them one day soon. Ken gave us a load of marathon videos to watch at camp so we will spend lots of time getting inspired by Haile, Paula and various ridiculously quick Kenyans!