Nairobi, week three:

instead of boring you with repeated accounts of weekly work at APDK, i'll attempt to keep further descriptions a touch more brief

wes, maddie, and i went searching for an engine on our own on monday (without allan from APDK), and found the nobody imports anything new and smaller than 125cc; so we had no idea of what to do for an engine besides shipping from the states; which is when i talked to rich at upperhill after being asked the question "how's the wheelchair coming?"; that's when we discovered the world of ngo ni wewe and parts mechanics ...

ngo ni wewe and the mechanics have no actual connection other than that the heads of the n.g.o. have tons of connections to mechanics and old parts dealers; ngo ni wewe is an n.g.o. based in gikomba (another nairobi slum) at a location called the treehouse (built around a tree more than in it); they work to take boys off the street (and off drugs) and get them involved in their drumming and acrobatic performances; so we walked around nairobi with matthias and ndogo (two of the heads of ngo ni wewe) for 4 hours on tuesday checking for engines ... result of the story being that after wednesday of walking around with these guys, there were promises of engines on thursday; nothing very fruitful on thursday produced a full day on friday where we finally found parts and an engine that should be good enough for an initial prototype ... as i had suspected, we had been asking the wrong people, the wrong questions; oh yeah, and we ended up ordering an engine from a kenyan guy in texas for a final prototype (we'll do more searching later for a reliable source of engines for eventual production)

besides spending time searching nairobi for engines with matthias and ndogo, we've hung out with them and at the treehouse a fair bit this week; we had a drumming session one morning, met the monkey that sometimes visits the treehouse, and found a couple good, local places to eat; needless to say, we'll be seeing more of the guys at the treehouse