Kenya 2023

This is the start of our last full week in Kenya. The teams have planned their murals for the walls of the schools they are building at. The walls we get to paint are not the walls that we have constructed as they are obviously still a work in progress so, we have all been allocated to another space within the school to leave our mark. Buying paint Yes, I do think there is enough to warrant this a whole section by itself! In town, there is essentially a section of the town that is just hardware shops next to each other or across the road from each other.  I didn't brief the teams before going into the stores to buy paint, and it is always amusing going in and looking at the colour charts to make a decision about the shades you want. In the UK this can be quite a process. I know when I have decorated a room the colour charts come home and then a long debate about colours ensues before picking the shade we want and then going back to the shop and buying it. Well, here it ...

It is definitely time for a well-earned rest day. Sunday was a day to take things a little slower and give everyone a chance to recharge their batteries. Curio Market Theresa always invites specific people to come to the Karibuni and items that tourists want. Everything from jewellery, wooden figures, and paintings right through to clothing. The beauty of this is it gives us a chance to walk around without other traders hassling us. The traders that come are from the local community and the money that they make goes to support the women directly. The market was incredibly colourful and our students all flocked to the lady that makes clothes. I know she is going to have a really busy couple of days making clothes for the team for them to try on later in the week.  There is a sort of respect for these traders and the fact that we are Mzungu, so I am fairly sure that we could buy similar things at other markets potentially cheaper, there is a little bit of hagg...

Saturday morning saw us back at the church/ school for our last part of the Scouts camp. The morning started with the customary meeting for Laura and I, where we get taken through to meet another important member of the community, this time the Senior pastor for the church and then off for a brief meeting where we discuss the already planned and agreed programme for the day. This seems to be a standard set of protocols for each and every day. So whilst we are meeting and discussing the rest of the team are left to be entertained by the scouts marching in various parade marches around the ground. Kitale Museum The museum and nature park in Kitale is a really busy museum. We walked from the church along the road to the museum and we saw a number of school busses coming into the park. The museum itself has a couple of animal enclosures.  Our guide, who spoke really good English, took us first to see the tortoises. He was really informative about the...

 I had billed to the group that Friday was going to be a busy day and it certainly lived up to the billing! So a quick start to the day off to schools for only a part day. I went back to Namanda primary school where we spent most of the morning continuing to make lintel frames and listen to the neverending sound of the chainsaw going. This ended up feeling like someone actually drilling into the side of our heads!  We did have an exciting part of the morning when we watched the locals fell a tree for the timber. This started with a young man climbing the tree with a rope and tying it two-thirds of the way up. Clearly, the purpose of this was to direct the fall of the tree. I guess they missed this part on a previous tree as one of the existing classrooms sustained some damage to the veranda when a tree fell on it. So we watched from a safe distance as the tree was being cut and then the rope was being pulled. The tree started moving, fortunately where it should have been, and ...

It is now really clear that the social/cultural shyness between our students and the builders we are working with has all but gone. The building work itself is now at a really slow pace as the students have managed to work on the wire formers, for the columns and lintels, so well that these are created and ready before the concrete on the columns has set so it now becomes something of a waiting game on site. Locals This has given our students more time to interact with the students and also the locals. So today I wanted to share with you what some of the local housing is like near to the schools. I met Willy, on Wednesday, next to Namanda primary school, he lives right next to it and I walked over to ask if we could visit his home. He replied by asking what did I want to learn, which I thought was an interesting reply but my simple reply was to see how Kenyan's live. My students will have never been inside a Kenyan home and it would be really good for them to see. He ag...

 We have been here a week! The journey from school to Kitale now seems like a dim and distant memory. So I wanted to spend today sharing our daily commute and give you a sense of what the roads along our journey's each morning look like.  As we travel out of the main city of Kitale the countryside is an ever-repeating view of maize fields, colourful little towns and then an abundance of schools and houses. The maize fields are everywhere. Kenya and in particular the county here grows so much maize that it rightly deserves the name, The breadbasket of Africa. It is a crop very similar to corn in the rest of the world and is a staple diet of Kenyans. Towns The little towns that we drive through are always incredibly colourful. The buildings are painted in all colours, with lots in the colours of brands such as Safaricom, one of the main Kenyan mobile providers, MPesa, the standard payment system here, Crown or Royal Paint. These buildings are usually acco...

The building continues. Our return to school this morning sees most of the brickwork already completed. Nothing has fallen over so I'm happy that structure seems incredibly strong. This is a lot quicker than I normally expect which means that the next phase of the build has to start. This is more fiddly and requires the team to cut and bend the steel strengtheners that go into the concrete columns and lintel. Whilst there is plenty of work to keep us busy there is plenty to do with little visible signs of progress. Lessons Whilst the building slows, our students and staff get the chance to go into lessons. I took the chance to squeeze into a Science lesson this morning. There were only 30 students in the class today and they were having a 'practical' lesson about pure and impure substances. I highlight the word practical here as she is the only one to have a Bunsen burner, really it is a small camping gas bottle with a burner on the top. A student he...

Our first-day building. Today I went to ACK Namanda primary school and our team there started working on the new classrooms that we have funded. It is one of the awkward moments when we arrive and there is a silent standoff between us and the Kenyan builders as the language barrier is the first issue and the reluctance of the Kenyans to reach out and show our students what they can do. I am unhappy to allow us to stand around and not get stuck in so I spoke to the foreman and we started with some of the manual labour tasks and then with a little bit of broken English managed to get us to fill in the gaps and even bricklaying before too long. This is fairly common among the sites and has been for years. The builders have no idea what they can ask of us and obviously, we are not builders but we are able to be taught and learn with some guidance the skills we need in order to get the building moving. All that said I was concerned about how quickly the building was ...

  Sunday wouldn't be the same without a trip to church. We went to AGC church in Kitale for a Gospel church service. The service started with some very energetic gospel singing from the worship band. This was completely electrifying and unlike a traditional service in the UK, there were lots of active worship and children joining in with whistles and even a vuvuzela! One of the strangest things was when they were leading a prayer, everyone was joining in with their own prayers out loud and this was quite a strange experience and a little overwhelming as everyone was joining in in their own way. The pastor then led the sermon for the day with members of the congregation following along with their own bibles but also taking notes about the sermon. I have never seen this before. There were large numbers of people writing in their notebooks taking on board what he was saying. I would be interested to find out what they do with the notes afterwards! I was asked to introduce ...