Kingdom economics and the problem of growth - By Bethan

BMS produces a wonderful magazine called the Mission Catalyst that professes to be “intelligent comment on faith and culture”.  It never ceases to provoke my mind and stir up action in both my day-to-day life and my relationship with God.  The latest edition (issue 4, 2014) was about the economy.  Surely that’s nothing that Christians have to worry about?  That’s what I thought – well at least I assumed that I could never understand it so why bother? – but I was wrong and here’s a summary of the magazine for those of you who either didn’t receive it or didn’t read it thinking that it was not something you need to worry about.  It argues, very persuasively, that “the neglect of economics is a wound in the side of the church” (Canon Peter Challen).

The first article, “Creating Consumers”, sets the scene: an article about the man who changed the world of advertising from the mind-set of buying what we need that was durable and effective, to the age of brand identity, desire economy and disposable everything.  According to Jonathan Langley (author/editor) this change has not been a “calculated evolution instigated by big corporations, but largely the brainchild of one man.  Edward Bernays.”  Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s American nephew and he used psychology and clever wording to change ordinary peoples’ buying habits.  The advances made in manufacturing during WWI had created the danger of overproduction.  These ordinary buying habits could not keep up with the speed with which goods could be produced.  Advertising, under the tutelage of Bernays would turn into the science of making people desire things that were being produced!  Do we realise that we have been used to prop up an economic system that requires us to keep on purchasing things that we really do not need?  President Hoover even stated that Bernays had created “constantly moving happiness machines”!  In other words, slaves to production.

So that is potentially where the thirst for constant economic growth comes from.  But surely economic growth is a good thing?  Brian Czech, Founding President of the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, thinks not and I tend to agree with him.  “In textbook terms, economic growth is increasing production and consumption of goods and services in the aggregate.”  But let’s think back to where ‘things’ come from.  “To put it in the technical terms of ecological economics, as the human economy grows, natural capital is reallocated out of the economy of nature and is converted into consumer goods and manufactured capital.”  So everything we buy has been taken from nature.  That’s not too hard to believe considering we came to this world with nothing and everything we have been provided with for life on Earth has come from the natural environment around us.  So if we are constantly pushing for economic growth, God’s Earth and therefore his creatures who depend on the Earth’s resources are going to suffer.  Czech advocates a “steady state economy” that basically means stabilising population and per capita consumption.  In simple English that means having enough children to replace ourselves and not consuming everything you can but only consuming what is necessary (and this can be argued according to the living conditions in the place where you live but think like this, as Czech does: “Would anyone be driving a Hummer in the kingdom of God?  Or building a McMansion?”)

Another problem that consumerism and constant economic growth brings is that of debt.  “Countries have got themselves horribly into debt, individuals have got themselves horribly into debt and governments have often got themselves re-elected by promising more and more goods and services and by taking themselves more and more into debt…” (Interview with Michael Ramsden)  But I, for one, am confused about how many billions of pounds countries can be in debt for.  For example couldn’t the National Mint simply print more money?  That was my simplistic thinking anyway.  But Canon Peter Challen (Chairman of the Christian Council for Monetary Justice) explains: “money is created not by the state in a transparent way by a national treasury, as people’s money, created and lent out into the system free of interest.  What we have is the commercial banks, who, ever since 1695, have been allowed to create money.  They create credit, which goes out and generates economic activity, and the money associated with that.  But what they don’t create is the money that will pay the interest.  So in order to pay the interest on top of the capital, people have to borrow.  And so we get this incredible exponential growth of debt, slowly and insidiously at first, but then at an incredibly increasingly rapid rate in recent years.”  So this ‘invisible money’ circulates and doesn’t really exist except on paper (well, computers).  But then a rumour comes about and people want to withdraw their money but their money doesn’t really exist so banks go bankrupt so that no one has any chance of getting their money back (the most infamous bankrupting situation has to be the Wall Street crash in 1929).

So is this type of economics the only way to exist?  Canon Peter has a theory that goes against the flow of economic reality today.  When asked about what economics would look like in God’s Kingdom he replied:  “[Kingdom economics] … would have to have the issuance of credit and money as the responsibility of the state and not of commercial enterprises.  I think banks would have to return to their proper role of brokerage.  Of arranging, where there is saving, that that is lent on.  At that private level of lending on people’s savings, you could have interest as a private transaction.  But basically, the income for infrastructure, for schools, hospitals, roads, etc, should be created and lent into the system to generate productivity of goods and services that then repays that money into the treasury, either to be taken out of circulation or, if a new need arises, to be circulated again.  So that you have a reciprocal flow of money against real values.”

Finally, the problem that ever-growing economics has for the world as a whole cannot be ignored; especially not by an international mission agency such as BMS!  Herbert Anders (Editor and co-author of Equomanual: a handbook for a spirituality of economic justice) wrote a paper about neoliberal economics: “an economic approach where the private sector, rather than governments, controls economic life…  The underlying idea of neoliberal economics is to have a deregulated market where the most powerful win all.”  The basic idea being that everyone will profit from the enormous riches created by a small percentage of the world because the capital will be invested in the global market.  Unfortunately, “the wealth ‘trickling down’ to more than 80 percent of humanity from the riches and consumption of its richest 20 percent is more like the crumbs that fall down from the banquet than a fair participation in the meal.”  Anders believes that correcting this problem is not a question of collecting money to share with the poor; rather “it is a question of rules that can guarantee rights of participation in the global market for the more vulnerable players.”  Andy Flannagan (director of Christians on the Left) points out that “‘Free’ markets have led to the collapse of developing world economies.  As history has shown, the weakest are inevitably exploited when there are no laws.”  This explains why the term ‘fair trade’ is creeping into our vocabulary and is perhaps better than ‘free trade’ at creating an even international playing field.

When it comes to changing economics we might all say “but we are just one person/ one church/ one village, how can we change anything?” but Anders cites that there are Christian movements opposing the main financial players in financial activities in the US [and elsewhere].  He also suggests that “[churches] are creating awareness of economic injustice in a manner that could be described as ‘capillary’ – at the local, limited level.  From that consciousness-building grows alternative economic thought and action all over the world.  There is a saying that I have heard and is particularly poignant whilst living in Africa: “If you think you’re too small to make an impact you should try sharing a room with a mosquito!”  A constant buzzing in your local MP’s ear will make a difference.

I’m going to leave you with a very sobering thought from Joseph Stiglitz, an American economist: “The top one per cent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 per cent live.  Throughout history, this is something that the top one per cent eventually do learn.  Too late.”

If you want to subscribe to the quarterly Mission Catalyst for free please visit: bit.ly/catsubs or email catalyst@bmsworldmission.org for more information.

Solar Project - Completed

Last week I submitted the 30 page evaluation of the solar project which I've been working on with Isaiah, assisted by electrician Amisi, for over two years. We spent July and August travelling around all the project churches gathering data and conducting interviews of church pastors, church members, children who've attended the solar-lit homework clubs and locally elected community leaders.   Obviously some churches have done better than others, but on the whole we've been overwhelmed by the success of this project, not only in development terms through providing a community light source, reducing local dependence on kerosene, and providing income from phone charging; but even more so through its success as a missionary project bringing communities into their churches and helping those churches to reach out into their communities.

The whole evaluation is too long to include here, although if you want a copy then please email me at gshrubsole@yahoo.co.uk and I'll send it to you.  However, here is the "summary of achievements" page.  I offer a huge thank you to all who helped implement this project, and to those of you whose generosity helped fund it through BMS World Mission.  It has been so popular that Isaiah will be raising a proposal to extend it to another few churches in 2015, after we've left.

Summary of Achievements:

Despite these considerable challenges, this project has delivered successes in all five of its stated objectives.  Details for each church will follow, but as a whole the project has led directly to increased use of churches during weekdays for homework clubs, phone charging, and early morning and/or evening fellowships.  Although statistical evidence of educational impact is hard to obtain, the evidence of those interviewed is that providing free lighting for doing homework has caused the individuals who used it to improve their educational performance and save money on kerosene.  Over 7,800 mobile phones have been charged in these churches providing cost and time savings to those who previously struggled to charge their phones much further away.  This phone-charging has raised a total of over 2.1 Million Ugandan Shillings (£500) income for these churches, which is a huge amount of money for places where average Sunday collections often total only 3,000 Shs (£0.75).  The money has been used in different ways, which include: support to pastors, income for project supervisors, construction of church buildings or latrines, saving for replacing batteries or other project equipment, church furniture or musical instruments, transport for pastors or members to do evangelism or receive further training (including BMS’ Sunday school training programme), supporting a church nursery-school, hospitality to visitors (including ourselves), support for the sick/condolences for the bereaved, and investment in other income generating projects, including animal breeding, cabbage planting and bee-keeping.  The most exciting achievement of this project, however, is also the hardest to quantify and that is its missionary aspect.  Church membership has grown in all of the solar project churches, by an average of 88%, which is substantially higher than in other KBA churches without solar projects (which averaged 10% growth from Feb 2013 to Jun 2014).  Furthermore, this growth not only consists of Baptist churches attracting lapsed Catholics, bored Anglicans or other denomination-drifters.  It includes people of Muslim backgrounds, Jehovah’s Witnesses or of no faith at all; people who had never heard the Gospel before but have now thanks to charging their phone, doing their homework, seeing a strange new light in a dark place, or being touched by the compassion of receiving solar-funded “first aid” or condolences from a stranger.  God works in mysterious ways, and it is not for us to scientifically apportion credit for the workings of his grace in reaching new believers.  However, there is no doubt in our minds that the faithful evangelism of the dedicated pastors and members of most of these 8 churches has been significantly assisted by the outreach opportunities and income provided by this project.

Paying it Forward.

Have you seen “Pay it Forward”?  - If not then try looking up this Hollywood dramatization of the book by Catherine Ryan Hide, filmed in 2000.  The basic premise of the film is that the world will become a  better place if we pay our gratitude forwards, to others, even those we haven’t met.

Of course, it’s not an entirely new idea.  You might argue that a well-educated professional is already “paying forward” their gratitude to the state which supplied the services they depended upon to achieve success and prosperity (good education, health-care, decent roads, access to justice etc).  Their higher-rate income taxes will fund opportunities for the next generation to enjoy the same benefits.

But the principle of paying it forward is much older than that and can be found in the Bible.  Surely it underlies the whole concept of tithing? – Showing our gratitude for all the blessings we’ve had in life, by passing on a tenth of them in service of the God from whom all blessings flow.  However, for many of us who grew up going to ancient Anglican churches, the idea of tithing lost its appeal because it seemed people were being asked to sacrifice their income to pay for astronomic heating bills, fixing decrepit lead-roofs, Bishops’ palaces and the pensions of retired clergy.  Whilst some of these may be necessary, they don’t always sit well with the teachings of Jesus, the radical yet humble carpenter and preacher from Nazareth. 

Jesus himself criticised the Pharisees who obsessed about the legalistic details of tithing everything right down to their herbs  - “mint, dill and cumin”, but neglected “justice, mercy and faithfulness” Matt. 23.23.  Instead he drew our attention to the poor widow who gave “all that she had” (Luke 21.1-4).   Having grown up in a comfortable home in a rich country I’ve sometimes struggled with this verse, as well as wondering about what the widow did the following day? 

As a development worker I read books by Economists who tell us that people generally make decisions based on their rational self-interest.  To me it seems common sense that this is simplistic because people don’t always act rationally.  Furthermore, as a Christian, I know that this isn’t always true because I keep seeing people sacrifice their own interests in favour of others. 

This week I have been astounded and profoundly challenged by an example of this.  As many of you know, we started a Daycare for the vulnerable toddlers of Acholi Quarter, which is still running 9 months after its official funding finished, but which faces an increasingly unlikely future as its running costs (about £150 per month) currently far exceed its income from parental contributions. 

Some of you also know that Pastor Alfonse has been doing an excellent project with street children in Kasese.  With very few resources he has been helping these young boys to fry G-nits (pea-nuts) and sell them around town and also to farm a hired plot in order to sell beans and tomatoes.  Every week the boys meet to pool their earnings and then decide how to use them.  They’ve amazed us before with their generosity to each other, supporting a boy to resettle to his familial village, or chipping in for expensive medical bills for another. 

This week, however, Pr Aflonse announced at the monthly Development Committee meeting that the street boys had sold some crops and had decided to give 20,000 Shillings (£5) to Daycare.  He explained that many of them had previously lived in Acholi Quarter, before finding themselves on the streets, and they wanted to help the next generation of young children growing up there.

Let’s be clear about this.  We’re talking about children aged 8 – 15 who sleep in storm-drains, under bridges or trees or against the side of buildings, who eat whatever they can, and who rarely own more than the tattered clothes on their backs.  People with no social status, little or no education, and often with no family.  They haven’t just been moved into a shiny orphanage in Jinja and they haven’t been given Child-Sponsorship from a big American church.  They haven’t really been given anything.  Rather Pastor Alfonse has shown them respect, love, compassion, an excellent personal example, and the means to start making an income through their own hard-work.  But despite the countless things they could do for themselves with this small income, they chose to pay some of it forward to help other vulnerable children 5 – 10 years younger than themselves.

Is this an isolated case?  No it isn’t.  The three women at Jambo Café work long hours for a very modest income.  They all have their own children with school fees to pay, and yet as well as tithing their profits to the church they are also pooling their tips to give to other women who want to start their own businesses.  They are grateful that they were given an opportunity to start their own business (thanks to many of you!), and are paying that forward by helping other women.

Of course, £5 from the street boys will not keep Daycare running for more than a day, but that isn’t the point.  Jesus’ Ministry made it abundantly clear that whatever we can give or do on our own is never enough, and yet when we give freely and whole-heartedly it can still have a massive impact – an obvious example being the little boy who gave up his tuna sandwiches (well 5 loaves and 2 fish to be precise….), which fed five thousand.

I realise that charity fatigue is a growing problem, and many are tired of endless requests to send money to Africa or yet another place afflicted by war or flooding.  But paying it forward isn’t just about money.  It’s more personal than that.

I challenge all of us to look back over the last ten or twenty years and think about which people really made a difference to our lives.  Then think about what it was they did which made our lives better.  Now think of a way to provide that same benefit to someone else.  It might be financial – for example my Dad has spent 16 years using his garden model railway to raise money for Marie Curie Cancer care after their excellent nurses cared for my Mum in her last days.  So by all means do pay your taxes, and give your tithes – to whichever causes you believe in.  But it might well not be financial.  It might be the volunteer scout leader, music-teacher or sports coach who inspired you, the person who cared for your children to give you a break, the person who gave lifts in their car or who helped your elderly (grand)parents.  It might be someone who encouraged or mentored you when others doubted your abilities.  Whatever it was, the best way to repay that kindness is to pay it forward and do the same – or something even more wonderful – for others.

Of course, if the thing that most transformed your life was someone sharing the Gospel with you then that is no exception.  Find someone else whose life has gone astray and show them the Good News, preferably with actions as well as words.

The street children of Kasese have profoundly challenged me, and I’m thinking about how to respond to it.  Meanwhile I’m passing on that challenge to all of us.

Jambo’s Biggest Order… with more good news to come!

Today I spent the afternoon at Jambo Café with all three ladies (Eliza, Alice and Moreen).  I had been called in to help with the gigantic order of a three-tiered ‘Give-Away’ cake with six smaller cakes as part of a nine-cake set selling for £75, a phenomenal sale for Jambo. (A give-away is just that: the woman’s family gives the daughter to the man’s family and it is a precursor to a wedding, which may happen any time in the future).   The first thing to note is that I had a wonderful time with the three ladies chatting and laughing and working like clockwork together.  The reason that this was so wonderful was that, for those of you who remember, not too long ago the atmosphere in Jambo was particularly icy as two of the women were not speaking to each other.  Praise the Lord, those relationships have been healed and Jambo is now a friendly and warm place to be!

While we were working on the cake icing, a man phoned Alice’s phone and she handed it to me saying “You talk to him, it’s Tony!” I cringed.  I hate talking to Ugandans on the phone as I struggle to grasp what is being said, and I don’t know a Tony!  Alice shoved the phone in my face and I started to find out who Tony was and what he wanted.  It turns out that Tony runs a tour company called Speke Ugandan Holidays (www.SpekeUgandanholidays.com) and is trying to organise a coffee-farm tour that he can put on his itinerary to take his tourists to a coffee farm, talk with a coffee farmer and find out about the whole coffee business.  Tony said he had read my blog and seen that there is a wonderful café with a good testimony (he’s also a Christian) and that he would like to bring his tourists to Jambo for lunch after the coffee tour!   This is an answer to prayer because business has not been so good recently as a lot of ex-pats who have been living here for the last year or two have now gone.  And if one tour company is getting Jambo on its radar then we hope that others will follow.  This was our aim for Jambo’s business side: that tour companies would bring their clients to Jambo as they travel through the country visiting Uganda’s beautiful National Parks.

After this good news we continued with the cake, which came on nicely with the chosen colours of blue and yellow (we can only get garish food colours here, and bold colours are very popular so this is perfectly normal!).  I used this opportunity to teach the women some new icing piping techniques.  I am by no means a professional cake decorator but I’ve iced a few cakes in my time, including our wedding cake, so I have a few creative tips to share.  The only downer was when the person who had ordered the cake came to see it and, despite liking what we were doing, reminded Alice that she had also ordered red to be on the cake!  So we started to pipe red flowers dotted around the side but Deb Benn, our colleague who was looking after my boys, called me to say that Jonah needed me to come back as he is not feeling well and was having a melt-down!  However, it was so lovely to spend a joyful few hours working and laughing with the Jambo ladies and I am grateful for your prayers for the ladies’ healed relationships.

 

Finally, I am trying to organise lunchtime ‘life-seminars’ at Jambo every week in October with a different speaker each week.  Subjects to be discussed are: family planning (a hot topic in Uganda!), financial planning (which many people don’t manage), sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV and AIDS) and women’s health.  Each seminar will end with a short discussion of God’s view on each subject and how to put advice into practice.  Please pray for this endeavour as it takes some organising and we really want Ugandans to come and learn things that aren’t taught in schools, are rarely talked about in churches and are generally not even discussed in families.

Adventures on the Swahili Coast.

Western Uganda is truly beautiful and I love living and working here, but for this ex-sailor it’s much too far from the sea, and for our two boys, who share their grandfather’s obsession with trains, then the absence of trains is also an issue.  We were all very excited therefore when we embarked on our once-in-a-lifetime family holiday.

It started as most of our trips do, with the now routine 6 hour drive to Kampala, followed by a chance for the boys to let off steam at the “softplay” at the shiny new acacia shopping mall.  As it was our holiday we also treated ourselves to our first ever family cinema outing – to see “Planes 2: Fire & Rescue”, in 3D.  Jonah helpfully slept through most of it, leaving the rest of us in peace to enjoy the film through 3D glasses (a new experience for us technologically backward rural dwellers!)  Then a morning taxi trip to Entebbe airport to fly to Nairobi, the capital of our larger eastern neighbour, Kenya.  The flight was delayed by several hours.  The notice screen kept cheekily reporting “On Time” next to the ever changing departure time!  By the time we arrived in Nairobi we were under pressure to reach the train station in time for the next stage of our journey, which made the taxi through the crazy Nairobi traffic jams more stressful.  We needn’t have worried.  Our 7pm train to the Kenyan port town of Mombassa was running late.  The train was there and we could see all the carriages, but there was no engine to pull it.  The first few hours were fine.  We got some food and the boys were so excited about being on a train station and hearing the horns of, or seeing other trains coming through the station.  There was no information, however, and when people tried to enquire the station master was found hiding locked inside his office!  We were pretty fed up by the time the train finally departed at 12.15am, but we put the boys to bed in our sleeper compartment and then alternated eating a late supper in the dining car at about 1.30am before turning in ourselves.  We got up to the dawn at around 7am and discovered we still hadn’t come very far.  The timetable has the train passing through the massive Tsavo National Park in the early morning light, potentially glimpsing the notorious Man-eating lions of Tsavo, who acquired a taste for the British and Indian workers who laid the railway tracks at the turn of the last century.  However, we didn’t reach Tsavo until gone midday when the searing afternoon heat drives all the animals under cover.  We saw a straggle of elephants and tow zebra from a distance.  An 18 hour train journey with numerous random stops amidst straggly bush is a bit of an ordeal for a young family, but the boys coped very well with their seemingly endless fascination for staring out of the open windows and screams of delight whenever we passed another train or vehicles at a level crossing.  Although again, there was no information from any of the train staff about our delays or arrival, they were very helpful at providing a free lunch as well as the allocated supper and breakfast.  On disembarking the train at 6.15 pm as the sun was setting, there was further excitement for the boys as our taxi embarked onto the Likoni ferry to cross the busy deepwater Mombassa harbour (into which most of Uganda’s imported goods arrive) and pick up the coast road that heads south towards Tanzania.  We arrived at Stilts backpackers, Diani beach and ate and went straight to bed, tired after our 35 hour journey from Kampala. 

It was all well worth it.  I’ve swam in the Indian Ocean before, but Diani beach has to be the best beach I’ve ever been to:  Perfect white sand lined by coconut palms on one side and a clear blue-green ocean on the other.  It was bright and sunny but not too hot with, a refreshing breeze but not so strong as to blast your skin with sand.  Stilts backpackers was a relaxed and friendly place with good food and friendly service and we soon befriended a German couple who were expecting their first child and seemed keen to spend time with our two boys and to seek protection from the persistent beach-hawkers through our ability to politely decline their wares in Swahili.  I’ve been fascinated by boats and the sea since I was about Sam’s age, so our five days on Kenya’s beautiful south coast were one of the best holidays I’ve ever had.  We took a (motor)Dhow trip from Shimoni to Wasini island and saw dolphins on the way there, snorkelled off the island and then visited the bizarre coral gardens and feasted on delicious fresh fish cooked in Swahili spices and coconut milk.  We also took a trip on a glass-bottomed boat passing over star-fish, sea urchins, moray-eels, sea-spiders and many types of colourful fish.  Whilst snorkelling over the same spot I also spotted a white and brown sea-snake, which thankfully wasn’t disturbed by my presence!  Bethan doesn’t share my enthusiasm for swimming in the Ocean, but she and Sam enjoyed a camel-ride along the beach, padding along in silence and admiring the scenery from a greater height.  Diani beach also offers kite-surfing and sky-diving, so we enjoyed watching other people float out of the sky onto the beach or rip through the waves behind a billowing kite.  Sand-castling was more suited to our age-range and budget however, so we kept busy digging big holes, making sand walls and collecting pretty shells, while others leapt from planes!

Notwithstanding these modern attractions, this coastline is in many ways unchanged from its long history.  Beautiful lateen-rigged sailing dhows still grace the coastline catching delicious fish in much the same way as they have for centuries, using the same boats and methods as Peter, James and John would have done on Lake Galilee.  The Swahili coast has its own strong cultural identity too, infused with the influence of Islam, and the complex legacies of the Arabs’ East-African slave trade (which although less talked about, preceded and exceeded the Europeans’ Atlantic slave trade).  It was a real pleasure for us to be able to talk to locals in their own language.  Our three years of studying Swahili in western Uganda has been frustrated by the fact that although many Ugandans use Swahili, they don’t much like it and rarely speak it properly, (the Congolese version prevalent around Kasese is notoriously poor).  In contrast, on the south Kenyan coast, we found that the “Swahili sanifu” (clean Swahili), we’ve been taught is what everyone speaks, and they love it when others speak it too.  Encounters with beach-hawkers, drivers etc, which could otherwise have been an ordeal or a haggling marathon became simple, friendly and even enjoyable when conducted in Swahili.  Whereas French people will often scoff at a Brit’s attempt to speak inaccurate French, no-one expects Brits to be fluent in Swahili, and so our efforts were encouraged and rewarded. 

We were relaxed, rested, well-fed and happy therefore when the 7pm train back from Mombassa to Nairobi departed bang on time.  Alas, it was too good to be true.  After half an hour we stopped and waited two hours for another engine to pick us up.  This second engine duly broke down at 7.30am in the middle of a sparse clump of scrub-bushes in the middle of Tasvo national park – not an ideal place to be stranded.  At 11am a third engine finally arrived to continue pulling us towards Nairobi.  At this point we were becoming concerned about catching our flight to Entebbe, as the apparently ample 12 hour gap between train and plane was rapidly being whittled down while we continued to stare at the same bushes.  No-one was telling us anything but we managed to find the train manager and he advised us to get off the train one stop before Nairobi, at Athi river, as the airport is on the South-East side of the city.  This saved us another hour and a half on the train, plus the time it would have taken to drive through Nairobi traffic back to the airport.  He also helpfully booked us a taxi to collect us from Athi river.  Nonetheless it was gone 8pm when we got off the train at Athi river, 25 hours after leaving Mombassa and with only 2.5 hours until our flight to Entebbe.  Another stressful taxi rush to an airport was then followed by another delayed flight leading to our eventual return to Kampala at gone 2am –  again 35 hours after leaving Diani beach.

 

So, would we recommend the Kenyan coast for a holiday? 

Definitely.  It’s beautiful, exciting, much more affordable than other tropical beach holidays, and more culturally interesting.  However, there is considerable political instability and some violence North of Mombassa as you head towards Somalia, so pick your location carefully and check the FCO website for current advice.    

Would we recommend taking the historic “Lunatic line” between Nairobi and Mombassa? 

Sam and Jonah would say yes, Bethan would say no, and I guess I would say maybe, but only if you’re in no hurry.  It’s certainly a memorable adventure, and you get to see a lot of Kenya in more comfort and safety than from the buses which hurtle at breakneck speeds.  The Chinese are currently constructing a new 1.5m gauge railway which will connect Mombassa to Nairobi and eventually Kampala, Juba (South Sudan) and Kigali (Rwanda), so maybe that will offer an improved service one day soon?