I was SUPER excited to be able to visit Nakuru and explore some of that family history. My dad sent me a few photos from his time in Nakuru. Below you will see a lovely photo of my father (r) and his brother Graham just before the wedding in 1960, followed by photos of what the area looks like now. My parents were married in the chapel of a Benedictine nun's convent beside the old Catholic church in Nakuru. My sister Noreen was able to visit the chapel a few years ago, but I learned it had been torn down last year and the church was building a new facility - a kind of halfway house to help out community members trying to get themselves back into the mainstream after struggling with health and economic setbacks. Lots of evidence of good service work from the church in Nakuru: the old church is now a printing press and bookshop up front and space for voluntary HIV counselling and testing out back, while the building on the other side houses a self-help organization and educational facilities.
A last bit of Morag's family memory lane came from nearby Lake Naivasha, where we visited ELSAMERE, the former home of Joy Adamson, author of a splendid series of books (Born Free, Living Free and Forever Free) about her and her husband George's relationship with a lioness called Elsa, as well as later with a leopard and a cheetah. When I was in primary school my older sister brought home a kitten. We had all recently seen and loved the film version of Born Free, and the cat was called Elsa after the lioness at the centre of the three books. You can read more about Joy Adamson (a not uncontroversial figure) here, and more about the Born Free Foundation and the excellent conservation work it still does here. The fist two images below are from Elsamere, and the final one was a painting of Joy, George and Elsa on a house just outside the place we camped in Nakuru. Sorry - no photo of the cat with me at the moment. But she was a great cat. RIP Elsa (both of them).