Kenya 2023

1 week until we arrive back home. The journey to Kitale seems like a dim and distant memory and our new normal seems very ingrained in our day-to-day activities. I get up early each morning and watch the sunrise whilst writing my blog, and Olly takes an elite squad out for their morning run. My blog is seeming to be a popular morning read with you all and I did get a message from checking in with me as it was a little late yesterday being published.  Painting All of our teams spent the day in full swing painting their murals in the schools. The creative ideas are all starting to take shape. I was back at Namanda Primary today and the team there have a large exterior wall to paint. This is the outside wall of a classroom that was built by our school back in 2014. It has faired really well since we built it and in the last 9 years, it would have accommodated somewhere in the region of 1500 students! This is part of the legacy that is really hard to...

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...