A few steps away, a woman in an orange dress washes her face with water from a plastic bucket. On a tree branch, a lone pink shirt sways in the breeze. Out the main gate and across the road, a cemetery beckons, along with a row of stalls that resound with the hammer-pings of craftsmen piecing together coffins. Nakuru, a frayed crazy-quilt of a town, was once just another stop on the rail link between Mombassa and Lake Victoria. In the 1950s, the town was at the center of the nationalist Mau Mau guerrilla movement that helped bring on Kenya's independence from Great Britain in 1963.
Sidewalk vendors display hand-carved tribal figurines on blankets.
Roadside shanty stalls sell second hand shoes. Crumbling storefronts market calculators and cases of Coca-Cola. Yet, only a few blocks away, raw sewage flows through a gully by a soccer field. The town's main hospital, meanwhile, is little more than a tattered salve across the health-care wounds of the region. Flies and mosquitoes come and go as if they are part of the staff.