Lorna and her children’s TRIP TO ENDERET turns a personal, one-day road trip from a 1970s rural western Kenya to a sprawling town into a classic story that weaves through the sights and sounds of the country’s people, traditions, geography, culture, economics, politics, and technology as they evolved on the world stage into the 21st Century.

Lorna, like almost all women of her time, has to take care of her young family alone in the village, doing subsistence farming, while her husband Pilipo, like most men, has to move to one of the industrializing towns to work in the newly established factories. His interaction with the family only happens during school holidays. The excitement of Jane, Jim and Meme, Lorna’s older children, in anticipation of their trip, is palpable. Their preparation for the trip is in itself an experience of a people’s lifestyle through nutrition, entertainment, trade, transport, communication, education, ethnicity, religion and beliefs, and governance.

While town life has had a bearing on Pilipo’s life and the lives of his peers, they have also taken a part of their respective indigenous lifestyles to the cosmopolis. As he awaits the arrival of his family at Enderet town bus stop, Pilipo teams up with friends to kill time by playing Ajwa as they discuss a wide range of current and historical local and international affairs.

The story returns to the ageless values of Love, Responsibility, Respect, Unity, Peace, Patriotism, and Integrity. The storyteller wittily gets the reader to experience different, simplified and fulfilling aspects of competencies such as communication and collaboration; critical thinking and problem solving; imagination and creativity; citizenship; learning to learn; and digital literacy, as espoused in the Competence Based Curriculum (CBC).