A Greener Shade of Green - A Trip To The Tea Fields & Sugar Factory

     An hour and a half drive from Eldoret in a northern direction can bring you to the Nandi Hills home to some expansive tea estates.  The tea leaves are the most delicate color green.  Tea plants take about 3 - 4 years to mature.  All the tea is handpicked - 2 leaves and a bud at a time.

The baskets will hold about 20 pounds of tea leaves.

A picker with the field foreman.

We continued on our trip and lunched at the chairman (CEO) of the Chemelil Sugar Company's home.  Chairmen are government appointed and oftentimes have another full time job.  Simeon is also head of the immunology department at Moi University.    The first stop was his office (with plush leather walls) for talk and donning of white coats and helmets.  The latter was purely for show - it was painfully obvious no one else at the factory wore anything like this!  The factory itself could have been a movie set for the old Willy Wonka movie complete with all the sounds.  It was built in 1967 and no updates have been made.  The tour we went on would not have been allowed in the United States.  We were stepping over hissing hoses, dashing from sparks and ducking under boiling hot pipes.  We saw the whole process from the line up of tractors and wagons jammed with sugar cane (sometimes in line for 6 hours waiting to be weighed) all the way to the bagging with lots of juicing and centrifuging in between.  Many pictures were taken of us "mazoongas" - (swahili for white face) for public relations.