Katie in Kenya

well this is all very strange. it's almost a week since i left kenya (this time last week i was doing some last minute tanning by the pool) and now i've already had a job interview, seen all my family and caught up with a lot of friends. the unpacking is still unfinished though, partly because emptying my rucksack and finding homes for all my kenyan stuff is like admitting it's all over. for now, anyway.

i've never flown on my own before, and after fun and games with online check in i was very confused by the time i reached the airport. what with the confusion and the emotional goodbyes, i had to ask a lot of dumb questions about which desk i was meant to be at when, until one of the staff actually felt the need to check that i was old enough to travel alone. i felt like flinging my luggage in her face and yelling that actually i was 19 and perfectly capable of doing all this, but i'd just said goodbye to the last six months of my life and i'd only had three hours sleep. but i just waved my passport at her and dragged my reluctant self through check in...duty free...and onto the flight. all this made me feel kind of numb - i'd expected to be dramatically upset but out of consideration for the others passengers i kept the emotions in check. despite this i'm glad that i flew home alone rather than with the guys who left on the 6th. it's nothing personal, it's just that three of the four of them had family and boy/girlfriends to see that they'd been separated from for six months and so they were really excited. obviously i was excited to see mum and dad again, but it's not the same when you saw them a week ago anyway.

i'd been warned that all the things you think you're really missing when you're in kenya aren't actually as great when you get home - but my first real, cold pint of guinness was a definite exception to that. as was my first snooze in my own lovely bed. seeing all my friends and family is great, too, because i've seriously missed them. but things like seeing new photos on facebook of all the kids at baraka and jamii really reminds me what i'm missing back there, and a somewhat disastrous job interview at hobbs today made me realise exactly how much re-adjusting i have to do. sales techniques and things have never really fascinated me, but i just can't get excited about them at all now. unfortunately i think that came across in the interview, but hey it's all good practice. six days of unemployment is plenty for me - i did a big CV drop in cambridge on saturday so hopefully that'll turn up something. i have a trial at a pub tomorrow as well, which will hopefully be a bit more down to earth and a bit easier to get into. tonight is my first proper night out in cambridge - messy monday, student night, whatever - but even that will have changed beyond recognition!

we finally opened our christmas stockings yesterday - two and a half months late! some of the things, like fish that grow when you put them in water, would have amazed the kids in kenya - so now i have more ideas of things to take back with me when i return!

on the subject of returning - watch this space, watch it closely. i have two projects on the go regarding kenya. they are both in the very early stages, but hopefully they'll take shape very soon. the smaller project is in partnership with a kenyan friend: collecting donations of sanitary pads in order to enable girls to attend school during their periods, and a rather larger one is to get cracking on the lack of classrooms at baraka by raising £3k for a new classroom. or two...or eight, which is what they really need. any project in kenya needs a lot of planning to make sure the money goes to the right place, so ultimately this will be in two parts: fundraising in the UK, and the creation of bank accounts and accountability systems back in kenya. so like i say, keep an eye open for more details about all of this and the fundraisers which we'll be doing. if you want to get involved right away please drop me an email, kc.godfrey@hotmail.co.uk

man, it's depressing to select 'england' as the country i'm writing from again. where did the time go?

xxx

oh and, ps, i'm planning to enter a travel writing competition and i want to know which blog was YOUR favourite, so i can pick one to rewrite for it. so let me know!

apologies for the long blog-silence. february has been a crazy month and in the last three weeks i've been online about three times.

our very belated family holiday finally got going on the 14th with a very emotional reunion in the hotel in nairobi. i arrived halfway through the safari briefing which was totally disrupted by mum shrieking, leaping into the air and trying to break the land speed record to come and hug me. promptly followed by dad and alex, much to the surprise of the five total strangers also in the briefing. i think we're allowed that after five months apart though. i'd been kind of worried that, like it often is when you see people after a long time, there would be this awkward silence even though we had a lot to say but it was nothing like that. one trip to the giraffe centre later and it was pretty much like i hadn't been away. what was a bit weird was being a tourist again, but it meant nice food and comfy beds so, y'know, i got over that! other perks included being whizzed around in a big 4x4 safari van thing, instead of a diddy little matatu and staying in INCREDIBLE lodges. i've been here five months and hadn't realised service like that existed in kenya, but apparently it does. exclusive to simba lodges.

the safari itself was just incredible but i don't think travellerspoint allows long enough posts to cover the whole thing... just a few of the highlights were the leopard (finally!) and a performing elephant in samburu. as we were driving back to the lodge we passed an elephant having a slurpy drink from a puddle by the track and when we pulled up to take photos he started to dance about for us and wiggle his trunk around his tusks. cute isn't a word you associate with huge grey leathery things, but this really was. samburu is a weird place, the landscape is so, so arid (even after a thunderstorm) and it changes totally every few kilometres. there's not quite as much to see as in the mara though, because the animals are much more thinly spread. maybe it's just too dry to support as many?

after the samburu we headed down to the aberdares and treetops. we managed to upset our driver here, because i'd planned a trip back to kabiruini (the village where helen grew up) but the managers at the outspan hotel (the check in base for treetops) took a real dislike to our daring to plan our own itinerary. the way it works is that you check in and have lunch at the outspan in nyeri, then you're shuttled to treetops. all we wanted to do was to take a later shuttle, but apparently there wasn't one. after some nagging it turned out there was one, but it'd cost $20 each plus 2,800/- for the vehicle. more nagging. ok, the guy driving you to kabiruini can drive you to treetops, that'll be 600/-. we settled on that, but when we arrived it turned out that there was actually a later scheduled shuttle which we got on without paying anything extra. generally, people here go out of their way to help you, so a bunch of jumped up receptions doing their best to trash your plans is as surprising as it is annoying. it was worth it though - we got a lovely welcome at kabiruini and it was great to get away to 'real' kenya for an afternoon. i really enjoyed treetops itself as well, but i think the 'rents found it a bit too touristy and pretentious. true, the rooftop viewing place was jam-packed with chubby americans yelling about the fortunes they'd made it real estate, but i've been away from these strange people for so long that they were nearly as interesting as the elephants (which, by the way, had a scrap right under our cabin window. woweee)

we spent the next night in lake nakuru national park, which i hadn't visited properly before despite living right next door. the lodge was fine but nothing special...but we saw EIGHT rhinos, so who cares about the lodge?! i hadn't seen rhinos properly before so this was a real treat. they are actually enormous. the little ones are very very cute though, but sadly not little enough to fit into my rucksack.

and on to the masai mara. the contrast between this visit and when i went in september really couldn't have been greater. goodbye concrete shacks, hello phenomenal luxury. complete with 'house hippos'. the restaurant overlooked a hippo pool, and when we finished ordering drinks one night the waiter just goes 'and have you seen the hippo? it is walking' like he was just offering us another drink! about as casually as the black rhino which just wandered out of the bushes in front of our van on morning. it was so close we could hear it chewing it's breakfast. amazing - these are my favourites but i hadn't seen one properly before. probably because they're incredibly rare and we were incredibly lucky!

so on monday we finished our time as true tourists and were sort of catapaulted out of the luxury and into, er, nakuru via downtown nairobi. this was more like normality to me, but obviously not for the fam. they just went with it, right from the chaos of the shuttle stands to the very dilapidated taxi i bundled us into in nakuru. we spent the week moseying around nakuru, meeting people and visiting the placements. they were made really welcome at both baraka primary and jamii children's home. all the kids really love visitors, so a whole family group to stare at was just like christmas! they had a go at playing hangman with 6N, until we got told off for making too much noise and hangman became PE. they all really liked 'real' kenya as well as tourist kenya, although maybe kenyan timekeeping and forward planning was a bit of a shock.

so that's my attempt at cramming two packed weeks into a blog. mum, dad and alex will know i've missed loads of stuff off but you get the idea - it was great

as for me, my planned trip to rwanda next week has totally hit the rocks and i've changed my flights and everything again. it turns out that when my KENYAN visa expires i have to leave EAST AFRICA before i can come back into KENYA. anyone else see this as a bit odd? rwanda is still part of east africa, which left me the option of entering one of the warzones surrounding east africa (no) or accepting the immigration official's offer of a bribe for a new visa (also no). i'm still really quite crushed about it all, because i really wanted to visit rwanda, and i'm also really not ready to leave kenya, but i've rebooked my flight for tuesday and am trying to remember that being deported from rwanda to the uk (with all my stuff still in kenya) would have been considerably worse. so now i'll be arriving home on tuesday night. form an orderly queue guys...and bring hot water bottles because i hear it's still around 4 degrees? so this will probably be my last blog from kenya itself, but the weirdness of the reverse culture shock will probably be worth blogging about.

until then... xxxx

but it's ok - on lamu they certainly all have donkeys.

so mine and ayne's trip to the coast finally got underway last tuesday night, on the night bus to mombasa. we'd heard so many different stories about whether to take the night bus or not and how likely it is that your luggage will get robbed - it was all fine. well, the luggage was fine, you're still sleeping upright in a bus full of strange kenyans, which isn't exactly conducive to a restful night's sleep. we left nakuru around 9pm and woke up in mombasa at 6.30am. i'd heard that mombasa was a bit like kisumu and therefore assumed that this meant it was hot and everyone was friendly. i was right about the hot and humid bit, not so much the friendly. no matter which city you arrive in, as soon as you get off the bus every single matatu and bus tout in the area will descend on you and try to shove you onto the next bus back to nairobi. i don't know why it's nairobi, maybe they think wazungu naturally gravitate there or something? regardless of the fact that we'd just come through there. muppets. we dived into the first hotel we found (slightly strange place, lots of elderly muslim men with orange beards staring at us) before heading out to explore the market and old town mombasa. the market was the kind of place (like kisumu) which made me want to buy EVERYTHING (except the dead and alive things in the meat market) and get cooking. there's an exceptional amount of haberdashery shops around mombasa as well. ayne is taking sewing classes at the moment so she's a bit addicted to african materials and prints, cue shopping spree... several dresses, scarves and lengths of material later we went to look around actual old town. this is the really old (clue's in the name) and slightly ramshackle end of mombasa. the tourist end in other words! the houses with their swahili balconies are really attractive, and they generally house curio shops and things. we found one kooky little beauty salon tucked away down here. it had 'ladies only' painted on the wall - and to reinforce the point the door is kept padlocked and screened! it's run by islamic women and so the point is that there are no men allowed so that they can beautify themselves without revealing their hair or anything like that. old town has some interesting graffiti - moral poems, peace slogans and michael jackson memorials all share the same bit of whitewashed wall. although old town was lovely, i can't say i'm that taken with mombasa. too humid and not friendly enough. having spent two nights there i'm less sad again about our family holiday there being cancelled at new year's eve - a week in nakuru is definitely going to be better. if only nakuru had a beach!

and so on to malindi for one night. this place has hands down the most wazungu in kenya: a fifteen minute mzungu spotting game on the seafront counted twenty. after dark there's a flip side to this: in fifteen minutes i saw more prostitutes than i've seen in my whole life. not that i make hanging around in red light districts a habit... sadly this is mainly brought about by european tourists (men and women). i felt particularly sorry for one poor girl teetering along the gravelly pavement in six inch heels attached to her legs by gladiator style tie-up straps, and in a dress which displayed simultaneously her g-string and her bra... i felt as sorry for her as i did angry at the elderly wazungu men leering around them all. but despite this malindi is also beautiful - the sand on the beach has gold in it. i don't suppose it's real gold, but it looks like someone's taken hundreds of tubes of gold glitter and mixed it all in. amazing!

after malindi we headed on to lamu, which is really the place we'd made this journey for. the bus journey turned into a bit of an adventure...about halfway along we got a puncture, and lamu is about as close to the somali warzone as you can get in kenya and so the malindi-lamu road isn't the safest in kenya (i mean, not safe as in we travelled with an armed guard). not the best place to be an immobile sitting duck then! but they fixed it and we ploughed on through the dust and the heat. serious amounts of dust, actually - by the time we got to the ferry i was not only very sore (six hours on a tarmac-free road - you can imagine) but dustier than i have EVER been, literally brushing it off my clothes. the speedboat to lamu island blew all that away though. lonely planet was right (again) - places do look better when you approach them from the water and you're high fiving the boat's wake. the same crazy pushy people grab you when you get to shore, just like they do with the buses, but of course now you have to try not to fall in at the same time as stopping them running off with your luggage. we found a tout for the hotel we wanted and this little toothless old guy lead us there. we found our way blocked by donkeys: he gave it a slap on the bum and identified it as a 'lamu taxi!'. that was the 'i'm going to like this place' moment. we got a really gorgeous place to stay, the 'wild beast' apartments (wildebeest apartments, actually). we got a few rooms right at the top of a topsy turvy old swahili house - lots of open stairways that are about as confusing as moving hogwarts ones. the rooms only had three walls (make joke about getting less for our money here...) and the sea-facing wall was replaced by a roll-down thatch blind thing. right up top there was a little flat roof, with one bed and a tiny bit of makuti thatch over it, looking down over the old town to the sea. i spent every morning here watching the sun come up with a mug of tea. perfick!

lamu was described to us as the perfect place to do nothing - and it really is. we went to shela beach a few times, where i managed to forget my swimsuit. the water was far too lovely not to go in though, so i braved it in my underwear instead (egged on, bizarrely, by ayne and her muslim dress sense!) i'm sure the beach boys enjoyed that. we spent quite a lot of time just wandering around the streets and people watching. we came across a catalogue shoot in the main square one day, this gorgeous slender blonde girl was prancing around in a silky flowing dress and looking ridiculously glamourous. kenyans like to stop and stare at the best of times so this gathered quite a crowd. i'm pretty sure it's the first shoot she's done where she's had donkeys strolling across the shot, as well as big-assed kenyan mummas frowning in the background. they'll make her look even taller and skinnier anyway. lamu seems to be the place to meet interesting people as well - from azman in the cafe to cynthia, the white kenyan living in the flat below us and ali hippy, the semi-celebrity local who makes a living by inviting tourists back to his house for a traditional swahili evening. ayne and i went, along with four others, but about halfway through we realised that whereas the other four were there for the genuine cultural experience, we'd actually been living the cultural experience for the last five months!

even though we only stayed for three nights, i felt decidedly sad to say goodbye to the place and it's top of my list of places to re-visit sometime. this wasn't the best frame of mind to start 24 hours of straight travelling in (the joys of night buses...) but we made it back fine. i don't like nairobi any better at 5am than in the middle of the day though! we spent a day at the house of the malaysian ambassador to east africa doing absolutely NUFFINK except eat malay food and watch american tv - definitely what was needed after all the buses.

so now i'm back in nakuru until monday morning when at long last my family arrive! it's a slightly surreal feeling - knowing that after five months apart it's something like 32 hours until we're reunited again. i hope the jacaranda hotel is ready for the scenes because I AM SO EXCITED =D

xxxx

but first -

if you think what i'm doing out here is good, have a look at this

http://aynezarof.blogspot.com/2011/01/project-fearless.html&h=52d9b

it's my housemate's project which aims to get kids into and through secondary school here. whilst primary education is free and compulsory until around age 14, a secondary education is unreachable for too many kids due to financial problems. however, you cannot be legally employed in kenya until 18, which leaves primary school leavers in limbo and facing a future much less bright than the one they deserve. from my own experience teaching i know that, on the bad days, the thought 'where's the point, where is this really going to take them?' creeps in, especially when you know that for a lot of them there's an educational dead-end coming up. so that's where ayne comes in - and hopefully where you guys will too. i know that for everyone reading this from their university halls money is tight enough for your own education (so looking forward to joining you in that next year...) but if you pass it on to your parents, and they pass it on to their friends, eventually we'll hit some rich altruist!

the books bought with the donations from my lovely family and friends finally reached the kids yesterday, to their massive excitement. you can tell it's going to be a good lesson when you're greeted with wriggling, squealing kids rather than the 'good morning' song. while we handed the books out they all looked a bit worried that there wouldn't be enough - big anxious eyes a go go. after posing for photos waving the books around they all settled down to read - it was really encouraging to see even my little reading group doing their best, tracing the lines with their fingers and quietly muttering the words aloud. towards the end of the lesson we had a competition to see who could re-tell their story well to the class. prize: a photo with your book. this is gonna cost me in print outs! everyone who donated, by the way, should be receiving a hailstorm of blessings from kenya, as 'thankyou friends and family of madam kate and GOD BLESS YOU' was the general response. slightly more restrained and on behalf of the teachers - thank you for allowing them fully to cover the whole curriculum by providing the teaching materials they couldn't afford.

i'm in trouble with 6N - i told them yesterday that i was effectively going away for three weeks. this, apparently, is really not cool. "no teacher kate, not three weeks. maybe you go for two days?" this was complete with pouting disapproval from one of the girls. they're all massively excited to meet mummy and daddy mzungu though. if kaka mzungu uses his expertise to teach them ways of winding the teacher up then he will definitely be stood in the corner on one leg...

so tonight ayne and i are headed to mombasa on the overnight bus. we haven't actually booked any tickets or accommodation or anything - we did try. sort of. so we'll just have to see how pitching up and hotel hunting goes. it's ironic how just five months ago i was SO organized for coming to kenya and now i'm going off on holiday with absolutely no plans except to spend ten days exploring the coast. raiding the mombasa spice market is pretty high on my list, though, as is a day doing absolutely NUFFINK on a dhow in lamu. beaches? sunbathing? i guess i'll be doing a bit of that too.

can't remember if i put this on my last blog, but i'm going to be home a bit later as i'm heading to uganda and rwanda before i come home. i think my new flight date is march 20th, bang on two weeks later. as well as this, i had an offer of a bit of expenses paid work experience at pembroke school (google it), not too far from nakuru. it's not really 'my' kenya (as in, it's the kids of the super-rich), but it'd be a great experience and cv padding. however, there's this wedding i have to go to in may and also the whole thing of needing to earn a bit before uni. nevermind money, i wish time grew on trees!

wish me luck in mombasa! xxxx

as i was biking home yesterday afternoon a matatu full of schoolkids went past with the usual 'MZUNGUMZUNGUHOWAROO' fanfare - but i heard one little voice informing the rest that actually i was european. i overtook them again later and the chant had changed to 'EUROPEENEUROPEEN'. close enough, they got a wave. i don't know why they all think every white person is american - but they still called us mzungu. a few geography lessons are needed perhaps?

talking of extra lessons - this week i realised that some of the kids in my standard 5 class can't actually read at all. they're aged around 10-11, something like that, and somehow they've gone through five years of schooling and not learnt how to read. the class teacher's reaction to this was to tell them to tell their parents to teach them. yeah, right, like that's going to happen. so instead i'm trying to teach them. just for twenty minutes at a time, during breaktimes three times a week. theoretically this gives me and the eight kids a classroom to ourselves. or it would, if there was glass in the classroom windows. as it is, the rest of the class hangs in the windows watching everything. there's a bit of an echo too - i'll say something, the kids will repeat it or whatever, and then the 'window monkeys' will repeat it too. challenging much?! (and when i say it's challenging - you know it really is.) i've also got no real idea about how to teach someone to read - because whereas i've learnt how to speak another language so i understand the problems that can come with that, i can't remember not being able to read. so far we've learnt the alphabet phonetically and from here i guess common syllables and things. i've only got a few more teaching weeks left so i'm not sure how much progress we'll actually make but i guess every little helps. and perhaps something crazy will happen - like the class teacher will decide to carry on with it.

we went to the rugby again on saturday - and nakuru rfc won! the chants made me laugh just as much this time. at first we made the mistake of sitting in front of a group of school boys who were definitely the most enthusiastic about jumping up and down and banging on the corrugated iron roof of the seating. ouch, my eardrums... for the final match we moved and ended up right between the home supporters and the away ones, which was entertaining. some bigwig to do with the visitors, coach? manager? was wearing a shuka around his waist. ok, he was wearing a sarong-type skirt, which is something you'd definitely NEVER see at twickenham. so he got a fair bit of stick for that. as well as this, the opposition's chant was something like 'let's go machine, let's go!' which sounds a little like 'esco' (excuse my spelling) (swahili slang for 'your arse') ... their chant was quickly altered to 'your arse, machine, your arse!' complete with butt-shaking dance. apparently, it's not just kenyan women who have sizeable backsides.

at jamii we've really made progress with the painting and decorating. the whitewashing has been re-done, the window and door frames are shiny black, the gate is pink (as voted for by the boys) and the bedrooms are halfway between dirty cream and BRIGHT yellow. it's actually so white outside now that it hurts your eyes a little bit. the whole place seems to have undergone a bit of a transformation really - now that kat and sarah have bought uniforms for all the primary school kids they can go to school (that's something like ten kids). it's pretty quiet during the day now and there were only eight or ten kids there yesterday morning. now that the older boys aren't there anymore we've started to do a bit more, like bathing the kids, which they absolutely love. the problem is getting them out of the tub and dry afterwards - kevin threw a serious sulk when we swapped the tub for a towel. typically for a three year old boy, an hour later he looked like he hadn't had a bath in weeks. after bathing we went and ordered the bedroom paint and after a two hour wait for it to arrive we began on the bedrooms. all the primary school kids were back from school by then so we had lots of 'helpers'. the last thing we needed, though, was ten small children running around high on paint fumes. we let one of the boys help by wiping away the paint drips with white spirit which ended up being quite comic. he was taking his job very seriously - so seriously that he didn't notice when he wiped his head on the newly painted wall. certainly the first blond kenyan boy i've seen!

i realised the other day how patchy my tan is - a respectable shade of brown on my arms, shoulders and face but white as a sheet everywhere else. heading to the pool on sunday to try and even this up. i've just realised that i'll be in malindi this time next week - can't wait!

xxxx