First days in Kenya

Hey guys!



So i decided i was sicking of emailing the same thing to everyone and thought i would start a blog instead. SOOOOOOOOOOOO if u are indeed interested in hearing what i have been up to you can come to this website, if you dont care thats cool i enjoy talking to myself anyway :)

Most of you have already heard about my first few days experience here, but for those of you who havent.. here is an update. The first two days were spent at orientation where we met all the other volunteers doing the program. There were 9 of us there and i think about 20 pulled out because of the situation in Kenya at the moment. We spent the first day hearing about what Kenya and the program and the second day we went t the animal orphanage. Unfortunately it was raining! (i didnt expect it to rain so much but it has for the last 3 days, i'm thinking i didnt quite bring the right wardrobe with me) We still did manage to see quite a few of the animals there though which was great.

I have been placed with a girl from France called Florence, who is staying at Day Love for two weeks (when Clare comes) then she is going to her final two months at a home stay near a different orphanage. We have both agreed that it makes a difference to have someone else with you! We finally went to the orpahange yesterday and it is really big! There are about 30 orphans who live there but during the day all the students from the primary school outside the orphanage come in for lunch. I found it quite scary at first as we were shown to our guest house but weren't really sure what to do. The house is nice we have a bathroom, bucket shower, kitchen and even lounge room. We met Winne straight away and she cooks us lunch each day in the guest house.

We were then shown around the place by Eunice and saw the classrooms and where the children sleep and eat and then back to the guest house. After sitting around for ten minutes wondering what we should do we stepped outside and went to the little playground where all the kids were playing after school. They were all so friendly and ran up to us straight away asking our names and where we were from. We then took out our camera's and they all got so excited, we didnt get them back for the next hour as they kept taking pictures and going back to look at them.

We had dinner at 7.30pm and at night time we eat with the kids in the hall and the portions the serve are HUGE! The food was quite nice but we definately couldnt finish the entire serve. Mama (the cook) asked us why we werent eating and it was hard to explain to her that we were full. We were watching the kids, even the little ones who all had large serves and ate their entire plates! The next night we went in and had beans and rice and asked for smaller serves, and while it was a little bit smaller we still coudlnt manage to finish it! Once again we keep trying to explain that it is too much but i still felt bad and had to keep reassuring Mama that it was very nice!

We had a bit of a scare on our first night there when we had quite an experience last night when at one in the morning we were woken by men bashing on the door. We had only been at the orphange a few hours and hadnt met any men yet so we were a bit concerned. Then they came up to our window and shone the torch in and started bashing on the window. After they sta outside and were just sitting around talking. So Florence and I had a big pannick but later found out that it was the new security guard with some Masai men and they thought our door was the entrance to the orpahnage.

On Thursday we were meant to go with the social workers into the street recruiting more kids for the school, but there was a demonstartion in the morning that went past the orphanage so we couldnt go out. Instead we had our first day of helping out at that school. We were helping one of the teachers Rachel, who taught the middle class with 4 and 5 year olds. We gave them the crayons that we brought when they were doing their colouring in and it was great to see thier faces when they jumped up to grab them. They were learning the colour green so at lunch Florence and I blew up all the green ballooons i had brought and took then into the kids! They played with them for 45 mins n the teacher was even having a fantastic time. It was so cute to see how excited they were!

On Friday we went back to the same classroom and brought stencils and coloured paper and textas and they spent the entire morning colouring with the stencils and didnt even want to leave when the bell went for morning tea! In the afternoon Rachel asked us if we had more balloons and we brought them out and began playing with them outside where naturally they all popped on the grass, then moved on the gravel where the kids just had to fight against the wind.

So far it has been great playing with the kids and getting to know the people at the orphanage and i think the hardest thing has been learning all the names!!!!!!

Well thats all for now, we are off to meet the other volunteers to go to the giraffe park (i'm actually not quite sure where we are going)