Yay for English Summer.

I am SO WET.

My trousers are sodden, my shoes, which are sadly made out of cloth, are like little puddles, and I am wearing a white shirt in an office full of men so I can't take off my damp jumper.

This is not summer!! I feel like gathering some buckets of rainwater, wrapping them in brown paper and and shipping them to Kenya.

What Fun You Can Have with Umbrellas, Ben and Jerries and a British Seaside

My two insane housemates and one insane banana-girl (Amy) who I was in Kenya with came to stay with me :) It was SO exciting to go and pick Annie up from the airport, Rebecca already sitting in the seat next to me and mocking my driving, and drive back to Bristol with them both in the car and bickering and laughing away at stupid things every few seconds.

The week:

-- Bath. A lot of sitting in a queue waiting for the carpark and trying to forget about the massive detour we made on the way, but also a lot of eating pizza, looking at Bath's nice grey architecture, 1/2 a litre of Ben and Jerries each, and then the resulting sugar high and a few hours of posing with umbrellas like Jane Austen.

-- Weston-Super-Mare. The day was sunny! We walked out almost until we could see the actual sea, and Rebecca discovered that bouncing around Baywatch style in Weston's lovely 'sand' is not such a great idea. She ended up with mud up to her knee. We ate chips and did the Kenyan shuffle dance on the sand :)

-- BANKSY and PRIMARK. Annie desperately wanted to see the Banksy exhibition, Rebecca desperately wanted to see the UK's second largest Primark. So we got up at 7am, sat on the street doing sudokus for two hours, then went around the Banksy exhibition (really, really good, I loved it), ate a tasty burger at Nandos for lunch, and then spent several hours in the new four-floor Primark! I bought clothes for the first time since being in England, because they were so wonderfully cheap that it felt like a good investment.

-- Getting mocked by comedians. We went to a comedy club on Friday night and I was mocked for being a vegetarian. Annie was mocked because the comedian asked if anyone was from far away places, and she's from Holland. Rebecca was mocked because when the comedian asked if anyone was from further away than Holland, Rebecca offered 'CAMBRIDGE!' Bless her.

-- Curling up in giant duvets watching Cinderella at midnight, eating dutch-snacks on toast, leaping on Annie simultaneously, teasing everyone for everything, fruit salad, and general LOVE.

I had such a good time. I really liked being able to show them where I worked, where I lived, what my friends and family were like, so that there felt like there was some kind of connection between my life in Kenya and my life here. To be able to talk about the last 6 months of my life, and KENYA in proper detail again was so good, and just to see them and sit around laughing with them again. I missed waking up and seeing them.

And the Similarities to Apes Continue...

A photo Amy took of a gorilla whilst trekking in Uganda:

A photo Sid took of me whilst eating sugar-cane in Nakuru:

The gorilla looks ultimately cooler than I do.

It's a Job a Monkey Could Do...

But unfortunately I am that monkey.

Work is boring. I have to get out of bed, and it's COLD, and sleeping in a giant jumper and a masai blanket doesn't help. I sit at a computer mindlessly clicking things all day. BUT it's money and that money will be made into a classroom roof and so that makes me happy :) Plus, it's something to do all day (as mindless as it is).

I did some much more exciting 'work' on Saturday, waitressing at this beautiful wedding in a big white marquee with all my friends :) We dressed up all posh, in black-and-white, and wandered around balancing plates of canapes ("chilli pineapple?"), serving huge white plates of guinea fowl, and trying to minimise the number of shiny forks sliding onto the floor every time we had to clear everything. There was a ton of pudding left over so we all ate some AMAZING chocolate torte and fruit tiramisu, and gleefully harvested all the posh chocolates the guests had abandoned. Then, when we finished at 10pm, we joined the dancefloor with the live band, bouncing up and down and screaming the lyrics to 'Mr Brightside'. It was awesome, and we got paid.

Then yesterday there was much excitement as it was SUNNY for the first time anyone could ever remember in the history of being in Bristol, SO, we all went up to the downs and played ultimate frisbee, with the setting sun casting long tree shadows over us all :) We gained a player from the Bristol University Ultimate Frisbee Team, who stopped, stared, asked "do you know what you're playing?" and thankfully joined our team. We're useless, all running around and knocking each other over, but it was hilarious.

Sun, Castles, Art Galleries and 40,000 Skeletons.

Prague was really pretty :) It was a beautiful city everywhere; even away from the traditional old town all the buildings were lovely pastel shades and decorated ornately. It made a difference from all the agricultural shops smelling of grains and chickens lining the street in Nakuru.

Pragueness:

-- The castle: long walk uphill but compensated for by the amusement of seeing some famous window out of which someone was 'defenestrated' (i.e. thrown out of it, and I think this is a word that should be used more often in modern english) causing some big war. Seeing a medieval torture chamber complete with spiky chair was interesting but gruesome, and we spent ages queing to get into quite an impressive cathedral.

-- A chapel filled and decorated with the skeletons of 40,000 plague victims. Well weird. There were bones all strung up like streamers across the gloomy stone room, and enormous pyramids of skulls, not to mention a huge chandelier made from every bone in the human body.

-- An art museum I've been wanting to see for years, AWESOME, I should do more art.

-- Pretty old streets with little open air cafes where you could get a cold drink, and gardens with fountains and peacocks creeping up behind you.

-- A fascinating day spent in the National Museum because it was raining, consisting of several million rock specimens, 10 of which may have been interesting, the other 999,990 being the kind of standard lumpy grey rock you find in your back garden. A scary exhibition on pregnancy filled with photos of mutated babies completed this wonderful experience. Yay.

-- Watching street artists drawing quick portraits on a very old bridge, eating evening meals in the sun with my family, eating CHEESECAKE and TIRAMISU for the first time in 6 months, and burning my nose because I am just that cool.
Oh my God I want that much tiramisu.

Now I am in Bristol, where I am SO UNCONVINCED about this summer thing. This place is just one big ball of grey mist. And my umbrella is broken so looks ridiculous, metal things dangling in front of my face when I use it. Work is the dullest thing ever but well paid. I need to buy new i-pod headphones because I hate the radio station that's permenantly on in the office.

Nimetoka Kenya na sasa ninakaa Uingereza.

And for those English speakers of you (i.e. all of you, the only point of typing Kiswahili is my own comfort), I have left Kenya and now I live in England.

Leaving is really difficult to describe. Until you're sitting in the plane chairs with a tiny TV screen in front of you and a British Airways blanket draped over your knees (which you feel would look better placed on Sid's bed back in Nakuru after the long-term borrowing of some in January) and suddenly the plane starts moving and lifts off the ground with a terrific roar, you don't really believe it. The country's sinking away below you and you realise that it's irreversably taking you thousands of miles away from what's been your home, your family, your friends and your children for the last six months of your life.

And although you're extremely excited about seeing your family and friends in England again, the sadness from leaving Kenya is quite overwhelming because you're not only going to miss it, but you're so worried about what could happen whilst you're not there. When you leave England, you're not worried that you leaving will have a bad impact on anyone's lives, but when you leave Kenya you're terrified that if you're not there to help the kids, and make sure they're going to school, and learning, and happy, that no-one will be. Seeing how sad the children are when you leave makes you feel TERRIBLE for leaving.

Anyway, despite that, seeing my family, and my friends, and EATING CHEESE again, was so good. I spent Sunday on my Nan's farm, with my Nanny and Jilly the dog and Mum, Dad, and Ilana, walking across the fields and smelling the beautiful sunny green Devon countryside and eating trifle and cheesy pie, and that was perfect. It was so good to be back there again.

Being in England is SO strange though. Everyone's white, there are no children, there are actual roads with concrete and no enormous holes filled with god-knows-what, nobody understands when you say 'asante', mangoes cost a flipping fortune, the streets are all empty of happy Kenyan women selling fruits or cutting maize or carrying brightly wrapped babies, and your feeling that you're doing something productive and worthwhile with your life suddenly disappears. I feel so unproductive; in Nakuru if I didn't spend all day at school and then all afternoon at the orphanage I would feel awful, and here I'm doing nothing. I'm looking forward to starting work so I feel that, at least, the money will make a difference to the school.

Since getting back I've also been watching a ton of Scrubs (I bought season 1-6 for 6 pounds on my last day in Nakuru, wahey!), sending enormous packages to teacher-friends in Kenya, plotting many many ways to fund everything from a classroom roof to a food programme for Nakuru Workers, and missing Kenya a great deal but also loving being able to see people again.

Hello is Always Followed By Goodbye, and Goodbye is Always Followed By Hello.

Before we came here, when we spoke to previous volunteers, they all said that leaving Kenya in July would be far harder than leaving England in January, and I didn't believe them, but now I'm here, I just want to say that it's true. It is so hard to leave and I don't think anyone who hasn't been here can understand because I had no idea before I came. I've had my last day at school and it was really lovely in some ways because the teachers and classes, completely unexpectedly, had arranged a three hour show, taking the entire school out of lessons, for us. We had NO idea, and all the classes we've taught sang us beautiful songs, did dances for us, taking us out of our seats to join in and performed plays, all on the grass with the whole school watching and laughing along, in a big semicircle around our new classroom. Everyone did speeches, they gave us such lovely gifts, and afterwards the teachers had bought lots of soda and cake so that all the teachers could have a drink together for the last time. I spent the morning, before the show, singing and dancing crazily with my class, and then after the show we were shepherded into Standard 7's classroom, which they had decorated with flowers, cloths, and set out a big table with a beautiful table cloth, juice and cake for us all to share. They'd found some perfume and made it smell really nice, and on the blackboards were written amazing messages for Annie and I. They sang songs for us, gave us gifts and I think it was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. It was perfect, and they have so little but always want to give so much, and they were so lovely to us.

I also had brought beads for my class to make bracelets with, lots of gifts for them like colouring pencils each and prizes for the top students, and then the rest of the day was made up of a million horrible goodbyes. I must've made so many goodbye speeches on the verge of tears. All the children cried, wouldn't leave, I cried, and gave enormous hugs to every child and then had to go outside and speak to them again because none of my class would leave until I did. The following morning we had about ten kids from my class and ten from Annie's waiting outside the gate because they wanted to see us again. We played with them for ages and it was so nice but it doesn't make saying goodbye any easier.
I've also said goodbye to the kids at Pistis now - I took the six who I'm closest to out for a meal, then on motorbikes to feed the monkeys by Lake Nakuru, then for ice cream in town. It was really touching because when I took them to Taidys for the meal, they just sat there looking so bewildered. Eventually one of them said "I'm so confused. I shouldn't be in a place like this. I feel like they will serve everyone else before me because I shouldn't be here." Taidys isn't really posh at all, and about half the price of English restaurants, but they were just so surprised and amazed. They couldn't decide what to order and when I told them they could have whatever they wanted and not to look at the prices, they were so amazingly happy. "There is a whole chicken! I can have a whole chicken, just for me?" They loved the motorbikes too, grinning like mad every time theirs passed mine.

Then yesterday some of us went on a bit of an unexpected daytrip. We wanted to go to Lake Nakuru to see the animals one last time, but after getting up at 5.30am to get there early, we ended us arguing with the lovely people at the gate who refused to let us in for resident price, despite the fact that we have alien cards proving that we're residents of Kenya and every other national park has let us in for resident price. Instead, they wanted us to pay US$60 each. As we still had to pay for the vehicle we'd hired all day, we decided instead to go to Lake Elementaita, which is about 15 minutes away from Nakuru and has giraffes, zebras, buffalo, gazelle, and literally thousands of flamingoes. Unfortunately, these flamingoes were to blame for getting stuck at the side of the lake for 4 hours as our van had sunk about 1.5 metres into the mass of flamingo poo that surrounds the lake. This was pretty ridiculously funny as it took two rescue vehicles to get us out, the the first one having joined us in sinking irreversably. We had a lot of fun anyway, having a picnic on a masai blanket spread out on the flamingo poo, with a ton of junk food, chatting and then visiting the hot springs nearby which we paddled in :)

Now there's not much more to do but say goodbye to the children at St. Stevens today, pack (something that has still not started) and warn everyone back in England that YES, I know I have got fat.

You Milk Like a Real Kikuyu!

I spent the weekend visiting Karanja's parents at their farm just at the base of the Aberdare mountains. It was a really cute little house, made of bricks, but with a few wooden sheds around it, then surrounded by vast fields of maize, beautiful colourful flowers, tall trees, and just generally vivid green weeds. Karanja's parents were very old and spoke mainly Kikuyu (their tribal language of which I know one greeting and the phrase for 'come here'), but were very friendly and loved feeding us and praying for our general wellbeing.

Whilst we were there, everyone (minus Amy and I who hid inside) killed a sheep as a sacrifice for Nick, who has had a lot of bad luck recently with bad men mugging him and holding machetes to his throat, as Karanja believed that if a sheep was killed and then a very entertaining ceremony undertaken, then the bad luck would go away. Nick was therefore sat on a little stool, had sheep's blood smeared on his cheeks, drank some sheep's blood, was danced around by a man who must have been clinically insane (he had crazy sticking out hair and enormous wide eyes) who dangled the entire sheep stomach in Nick's face and then proceeded to scatter the grass from the stomach around Nick. The whole ritual was then summed up by Nick downing a glass of sausage-tree-wine, this really strange stuff that comes from trees and is highly alcoholic. We half thought the entire thing was made up to make Nick look like a complete idiot, but on accusing Karanja of this, he protested "he's a witchdoctor! I would not make this up!"

I also milked a cow whilst I was there and was very proud to get lots of milk out of it very quickly, and be told that I milked 'like a real kikuyu' :) We went to a local pub in the evening, which was fun but had disgusting toilets that you could occasionally smell from the pub , and we encountered a man who told us ''I am made in Kenya" and started taking his shirt off in joy at meeting us. Wahey.

The next day we went for a long walk through a beautiful forest which reminded me a lot of one near the farm in Devon (you don't picture Kenya like that but it is sometimes), meeting a chameleon along the way,seeing some monkeys and collecting lots of enormous wildflowers. It was a really nice, relaxed, sunny weekend and we spent lots of time just sitting on the grass and talking, with random members of Karanja's family just milling around and relaxing with us.

On Monday I told my class when I would be leaving, which is the worst thing I've had to do here. They previously had no idea when I'd be going, and although I was glad to chat to them about it because they were able to ask lots of questions and I was able to explain to them why I had to leave, it was SO sad. When I told them the date of my last day, they all just stared at me in disbelief. They all fake-cried when I said I wanted to talk to them about it, but by the end quite a few of them were actually crying. It was horrible.

Tuesday was a happy day. I did a silly activity with them where I drew cartoons of people in the class, saying various stupid things, and got them to write what the people were saying as a practice of speech marks, and they found it hilarious. One of the things I drew was Miriam, the other class teacher, who I'm good friends with, saying "no, I will not dance for you!" and the class replying "dance, teacher!" because they're always asking us to dance, and this led into an enormous dancing session with them all singing in kikuyu, Miriam and I dressed in multi-coloured cloths, and laughing and dancing with them all. It was so much fun. I love them.

Boiled Eggs in Hot Springs

The weekend was awesome. Annie, Hannah and I went to Nairobi on Saturday. Nairobi has these appeals:

-- Cheap souvenirs (SUCCESS, we'd been told about a really cheap shop where everything was about half the price it is in Nakuru, and thus I bought way too many pretty soapstone items),
-- Good food. You have no idea how happy chocolate doughtnuts and pizzas just in a five mile vicinity make us.
-- The camera fixing shop with whom my first camera had a guarantee with. They told me they could fix it and send it back to me by Monday so I was well excited but after two phonecalls ("It has more problems", and "The lens is broken" - I knew that!) they are telling me it won't return home to me til next Wednesday.
-- Crazy men who hang out of matatus screaming "Give me visa!' at you. Ha.

We happily travelled back on our lovely cheap matatu (no more shuttles for an extra 100/- each for us), laden with awfully touristy things, and then spent a really funny evening out, where we finally returned to Summit after the shame and hilarity that was my birthday. Strangely, the only comment I got from the doorwoman, who definately knows us after so long, was 'you look smart tonight!', so I think they missed us and the crazy number of drinks our group buys. It was so good to be back at Summit again, we danced tons and got lots of free drinks from our rich and generous friend, Ozzy.

Then on Sunday I went to Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria, both about two hours away from Nakuru. It was AMAZING. We zoomed along in our hired van singing along to the cheesy music the driver was providing us with, stopping quickly at the equator for some pictures, watching all the sloping hills and millions of honey sellers lining the roads. We went on a boat ride onto Lake Baringo, which was so peaceful, and saw an island on which lives a 70-year-old man with 5 wives and 28 children. Livvy and I spent about half an hour discussing how horrific this must be for the wives and children, only to be told that one of the Kenyans in the boat with us was one of the 28. ARGH. "Does he speak English?" "Of course!" Oh dear.Lake Baringo also had crocodiles, hippos, and enormous lizards roaming its shores, but that didn't stop us from leaping off the boat, into the middle of the lake. It was a baking hot day and the water was lovely, plus there was the added excitement that in the murky brown water a giant long crocodile could easily creep up on us and nibble our toes. We were told that area of the lake was safe, and thankfully the only screaming that was done was when a big fish scared the life out of Anna.After the lake, we went to a reptile park on the shore, which was creepy because of an enormous python that we held (the texture was HORRIBLE, I hadn't expected to be afraid of it but I hated how it felt on my shoulders) and lots of snakes and crocodiles in small cages, which felt very cruel after having just seen them in the wild.From there we went to Lake Bogoria, stopping quickly for bread, butter and eggs for a bumpy lunch in the matatu. Lake Bogoria must've been one of the most beautiful places I've been in Kenya. The lake stretched out in a strangely long, elongated shape, green and shimmery, mountains coated in trees on the opposite side, and pools of violently bubbling, boiling water on the shores. There were geysers spurting water into the air, creating tiny rainbows everywhere, and a steamy mist floated around all the water. We found a long stick and attached a plastic bag onto the end of it, placed our eggs into it and then dangled them into the boiling water. It was like fishing with eggs. Within 8 minutes I was eating the best boiled egg I've ever had. I felt like I could happily stay there forever and just live looking at the amazing view in the late afternoon light.Schoolness:
The classroom has foundations and a floor and by tomorrow they will have started building the actual walls. I LOVE it. They're moving so fast that we have to literally go and look every hour to keep up. We had a really emotional staff meeting on Wednesday morning, where the headmaster officially told all the teachers where the money from the classroom had come from. He told us that they'd reached the end of the road, and all they could do was hope, before we came, and that we'd saved Nakuru Workers. Of course the words 'God has come' were mentioned many many times, but it was really moving and I'd like to pass on another massive thank you to everyone who's given money, especially those who, completely unexpectedly, gave more after my last blog entry. I love you all, as does everyone at Nakuru Workers. They're all so grateful, as am I.

I've had a lot of fun with my class this week, just being silly with them, drawing bad pictures of cows on the blackboard in science and getting them to draw some very interesting 'ghosts' as part of an English lesson. I've been to Pistis this week and had yet another great conversation with a boy named Allouise who is fourteen, extremely sweet, and interested in absolutely everything. I found out that he's good at drawing so I'm taking him a drawing book next week, and he's promised to teach me some kiswahili.

And then last night Amy and I slept on a dusty mattress, in a tiny room with about ten children in, at the orphanage. It was lovely :) We stargazed and they had immense fun doing silly things with our hair, and laughing at us eating ugali with them, and then at 6am this morning we waved them all off to school in the half-light, with the moon still shining over us. It was really nice to see them all running, excitedly, out of the gate to school.

Just one more thing to say: I have no phone. The story is long and complicated so I won't get into it, but I'm hoping to get it back. If not, I'll let you all know my new number.

OUR CLASSROOM!!!

SO EXCITED :D

On Monday a group of builders will come to our school and they will start digging the foundations for a brand new classroom. It means that next year Standard 7 will have a classroom to move into as they become Standard 8, and the school will be able to admit a new Standard One. And this is all from the money that Annie, Rebecca and I have raised so far.

We have less than half of what's needed to complete the classroom, but we have enough to get all of the brickwork finished before Annie and I leave (real walls!), and then by the end of the summer we are DETERMINED that we will, between us, have the money to send over to finish it.

THANK YOU SO MUCH

to everyone who donated money - to all my family, half of whom I didn't even know were following what I've been doing, and to my friends (especially to Byatt, who donated more than a poor student should).
It's going to make such a difference and I cannot wait to tell Standard 7 that they'll have a new classroom.

THERE'S ACTUALLY GOING TO BE A NEW CLASSROOM!!!

Rainbow Clouds Mean God Is Coming

There was a cloud at lunch at school today, floating over the dusty yellow crater, changing colour from green to blue to orange to yellow. It was amazing! The children told us it meant that God was coming, but sadly we weren't intending to stay in school for the afternoon so if he did arrive at Nakuru Workers Primary School at 2pm today, we missed him.

Ellen and I took strawberry ice cream, cones, mango and bananas to St. Stevens last Thursday - they loved it :) I'm not sure if some of them had had ice cream before! We dolloped it out with a metal spoon that kept bending every time I scooped, and the kids sat in a big semicircle licking away. They were so happy but now we get requests for ice cream every day, as there were 2 litres left (we overestimated the amount that would fit onto one cone) and we've promised to bring them back another time.

Talking of St. Stevens, I'm not sure if I've mentioned to many people that we're rebuilding it - at the moment they're in a rented building in a horrific area, filled literally with the rubbish from the entire of Nakuru (the sign on the top of the matatu going there reads 'sewage'), and full of houses that smell very strongly of sausage-tree-wine every time you pass them. Gemma, one of the other volunteers, managed to raise A LOT of money from schools back home, and so that's enabled us to start building a permanent home for them, right next to Nakuru Workers Primary School, where I teach. It's looking SO good - the walls are about my height already and construction only started in May. It's so much bigger for them, and such a beautiful area, compared to their current one :) At the moment construction's stopped because Gemma's money's run out, but some more from other volunteers should be coming soon.

I wish I could give something towards it, but currently my plans for the money all you lovely lovely FANTASTIC people have given me is to put it towards a new classroom for Nakuru Workers, as without it they won't be able to admit a new Standard 1 next year because there simply won't be space for them. By the autumn Rebecca, Annie and I are determined that we'll have the money to send to them and say 'start building', in time for the new school year in January.

We had a pretty dramatic weekend, as

a) Our relationship with the manager of St. Stevens blew up in our faces as Becky had some money stolen, and the manager is claiming that one of the children stole some of it, then returned the rest to him. The rest has now mysteriously gone missing and he's refusing to give it back. We are all very reluctant to believe that any of the children took it, as I would honestly trust those children with absolutely anything, and from the first day they've been trusted with our cameras and phones everytime we visit, and Gemma ended up in a massive argument with the manager about everything, culminating in him saying that there are too many volunteers visiting and he wants half of us to go away. Its ridiculous. He is NEVER there and we care far more about the children than he does.

b) Gemma left on Monday afternoon, meaning another depressing goodbye at the shuttle bus station, which is rapidly becoming the saddest place in Nakuru. This was not helped by the fact that we knew the next time we would be doing this was when WE would be on the shuttle.

c) To top everything off, four children ran away from Pistis at the weekend to become street kids. NIGHTMARE. Chasing four children around town and convincing them to stay once you've got them back is proving pretty impossible. They've left because they want to be able to eat bananas, and all they eat at Pistis is ugali.

Loughborough's also being awful. My only accomodation option is to share a room with someone in halls I didn't want to be in, and hope I can move in the first few weeks, because they told me I wasn't allowed to apply til June and are now telling me all the places are gone because I didn't apply earlier. HATE.

I have to go and have tea with Leah, age 10, from my class, and visit her newborn baby sister now!

600 Small Children and 600 Enormous Knives

This week has been 'bring your panga into school' week. A panga is this enormous, sharp, metal farming tool, used for cutting crops, and the entire school has been running around with them, the pangas at least half as big as the children, all week. The football field is full of weeds and so it's the task of the children to eliminate them, everyday between 3.10 and 4.00pm.

It's hilarious! I've just been sitting there watching all these children piling their giant weapons in the corner every morning before starting work, trying not to burst out laughing at how ridiculously dangerous it is, and jumped quite a few times today when I turned around to see a crowd of ten-year-olds standing behind me, peering over my shoulder to see what I was drawing, all holding long metal swords.

I love the insanity that goes on in this country.

Flying Without Wings Could Lead to a Painful Fall

I'm yet again in the internet cafe (obviously) and I've just finished writing my fifth English exam (I'm doing it on Wednesday today in an attempt to free up my time on Thursday and give me another day to visit the orphanage). It might sound stupid and exaggerated but it broke my heart a little to write 'ENGLISH EXAM - WEEK 5' at the top of the exam. When I started the weekly exams I had nine weeks of teaching left and I'm on week five and I have no idea how time went so fast. I'm flying back exactly five weeks today and although I am so looking forward to seeing all my family and friends, and eating my Nan's apple pie and playing with her dog, I don't know how I'm going to be able to leave. The kids are like my children. To have to go and know that if they get into trouble of any kind then we'll be powerless to help is horrible.

Teaching's still going well; the teachers are frustrating me slightly in making my lessons completely unpredictable by taking the ones I'd prepared to teach and giving me ones I'm completed unprepared for, but everything's working well. They actually seem to be improving, and I'm so proud to say that the worst students in the class are getting better because they know they can come to me for individual help, which the Kenyan teachers never give. I did a lovely creative arts lesson with Standard 7 today - they cheered when I came in the classroom and we sat outside in the sun for an hour, piled up with colouring pencils and paper, and drew the hilly crater with the school in the foreground. Quite aside from the kids, it was a brilliant way to sit and draw for an hour! It felt like things couldn't really get anymore perfect, with my toes in the grass and the kids laughing at the chicken that wandered through the middle of us.

Dave's been at school with me everyday, and managed to pick up some maths and P.E. lessons. I was impressed at how quickly he worked out how you need to speak to the kids to get them to understand and he did really well. Then on Saturday, we piled all nineteen of the St. Stevens children into a matatu, dressed them in adorable little swimming costumes, and took them swimming for the first time at Gracelands. It was amazing to see their faces - I think it was the poshest place they'd ever been and they couldn't quite believe it. They loved the water, constantly splashing each other and laughing, and the playground too - I'm not sure they'd seen swings or a roundabout before and they were SO excited. We bought them all chips for lunch and had brought along brightly decorated biscuits from the bakery for them :) You could tell how grateful they were because the next time we went to the orphanage they were even happier than usual to see us, and even more keen to spend time with us. I lay on their bunkbeds with them talking in kiswahili and making them laugh by the fact that I could tell what they were saying about me!

Other good things were Annie and I wandering around our area on Sunday and bumping into loads of kids from school, all dressed in their Sunday best and looking so smart and lovely, and chatting to them whilst on our giant circular walk, and also talking to a 14-year-old boy at Pistis who was insanely intelligent and knowing, talking to me about everything from God to Kenyan politics to the film industry. The kids here are immensely clever - this boy is only allowed to watch T.V. once a week and has no access to newspapers or anything like that yet knows so much about what goes on in the world.

Dave left this morning and I've spent the day at school, then running many many errands in town. And now I'm going to go, and buy a mango, and be happy in the chaos and smiles-despite-everything that is Kenya.

I have not completed onion of the work

I am busy typing up yet another English test for my class (they have become a regular Friday thing; I write the scores up on the wall complete with stars for more than 50% and it's so nice to see how happy the kids are when the do well. Last week Mary, a girl who's usually in the bottom third of the class in English, got 90% and came joint top. She was skipping round the classroom grinning, it was amazing). I have subtly slipped in the word 'onion' as a possible answer for five of the questions so I am just waiting apprehensively for my class to prove how attentive they are by answering 'onion' to the questions.

A little bit about Pistis:
Pistis is another orphanage that I've been visiting more often recently; it's a lot larger than St. Stevens with about 150 children and a school attached to it. I wish I'd started going earlier as it's difficult to remember names and stories when you've only got time to visit once a week, but I'm loving going at the moment. It's a funny mixture of cute little girls wanting to manically plait your hair and ask you to imitate how to swim for them, and older boys who are really interesting to talk to about anything and everything (some of which boys their age should not know, both in the horrific-past sense and the spent-too-much-time-with-stoned-Moses-at-the-market sense). We always go there by boda-boda (the bike taxies which feel pretty unstable if you're carrying 120 exercise books on your lap!) and most of the space there is outside in a huge concrete courtyard, with big metal barns crammed with bunk-beds as the dormitories. The owner of it is pretty horrifically corrupt; the money supposed to go to the children has all gone on her daughter's wedding, and thus the only reason they've had food recently is because Nick bought it for them.

The weekend was EXCITING as on Saturday a small group of us went to Hell's Gate, the National Park you can cycle through that I'd already visited and loved with my Dad. After only a tiny argument of 1.5 hours with the charming Kenyan Wildlife Service men about how we ARE residents of Keyna, thus shouldn't be charged extortionate prices, we spent the day cycling past zebra, giraffes, gazelle and warthog, climbing a very tall rock tower with an amazing view over the entire park and all its big, prehistoric cliffs, and clambering over dusty and muddy rock faces through the gorge. Being the immensely clever Zoe that I am, I spotted a vertical rock face that looked perfect for climbing, and reached about half-way up before Anna said to me from below: 'Zoe you don't have a rope!' Now this didn't bother me too much until she pointed out that without a rope, getting down would be interesting. At this point I PANICKED, lost my footing and scrambled down at the speed of light. Other highlights of the day involve falling a few metres onto my bum, into a muddy pool, with white shorts (not so pretty), and watching enormous dramatic rainclouds approach the golden yellow park in the late afternoon sun, making an amazing rainbow and not actually getting us wet. It was beautiful :)Sunday was just as exciting as DAVE was arriving to stay with me for a week, after not having seen him since September! I picked him up from the carpark next to the souvenir market in town, where he was promptly surrounded by some opportunistic street children, and then me, comparing tans with him and admiring his remarkably feminine frilly pink pillow he'd brought with him across Africa. We spent the day at Graceland Hotel with some others, catching up in the sun next to the pool.

Since then live has been pretty normal but plus a Dave! He's been at school with me, and has been taking maths and P.E. lessons (and discovering the joy of marking an entire kenyan-class of exercise books), and visiting the orphanages. We took the kids at St. Stevens to have their hair shaved on Monday, because they're not allowed to have hair at school and because of yet another useless Kenyan-orphanage-manager, some of them had been being caned and skipping school for two weeks because no-one had taken them to the salon. It was really fun actually, and the locals certainly found six white people with a crowd of small children crammed into a tiny, hit, tin-shack barbers entertaining. It was definately worth it, seeing the smile on their faces when they'd had it done.

Now I'm looking forward to the weekend because we're taking 18 small orphans swimming, which they will LOVE, despite the fact that none of them know how to swim and we need to investigate bulk-buying armbands tomorrow to keep them alive :)

The amount of attention you get as a white person in Kenya triples if you take a giraffe on a motorbike

SCHOOL:
I greeted the kids entirely in kiswahili last Thursday, which they found hilarious. When you walk into the classroom for the first time each day they all stand up and chant 'good morning teacher'. Just to show off my kiswahili, here is how the conversation went:
--Kids: Gooooood Morning Teacher
--Me: Good morning class. Habari za asubuhi? (how is the morning?)
-- Kids: Nzuri sana mwalimu, natena karibu. Shikamoo mwalimu? (Very fine teacher, welcome again. 'Shikamoo' is a respectful greeting for people older than you)
--Me: Marahaba wanafunzi. Keti chini. (response to 'Shikamoo', sit down)
--Kids: Asante sana mwalimu (Thank you teacher)
And so they all sat down, grinned and clapped for me :)

I've also picked up a lot more random lessons; I'm now teaching 3 different maths classes, 1 English, millions of P.E. and 1 science. I've been asked to take a lesson on animals 'removing waste', in which I have to draw pictures of various different animals pooing on the blackboard and ask a group of 9-10 year olds to draw them. It's gonna be hilarious.NIGHT OUT:
We all went out on Saturday night for my birthday, dressed in lots of different coloured clothing items. The idea was to all swap clothes until we were each just one colour by the end of the evening, but everyone had drunk a little too much to remember such a complicated theme so it didn't really work! We started at Taidys, spoke to some random Kenyans as usual, everyone marvelled at Amy and I's self-decorated white hats, and then went to Summit by motorbike. Got attacked by Nick (very drunk already) when I arrived, DANCED for a few hours without really stopping, then suddenly someone reminded me that we'd said we would jump in the swimming pool at Summit on my birthday! Now the swimming pool is technically closed at 2am, and you have to have done some extra exploring of the back-alleys of Summit to know where it is, but thankfully we have done our share of exploring Summit, and so ran through and leapt into the pool :D It was AMAZING. But suddenly the entire group of Summit's security guards appeared and told us sternly to get out of the pool, despite us having asked two of them if it was okay for us to swim before jumping in. They locked us in the pool area and a huge long argument ensued, ending in them threatening to call the police and charge us a fortune, until a Kenyan friend of ours paid them something and we stormed out,
screaming that we would never be coming to Summit again!

So overall an extremely eventful evening!

BIRTHDAY:
I had a really lovely day :) I woke up to open some extremely exciting post from Louise and my family, then I went to school, happily taking photos of anything and everything on the way there (NEW CAMERA!), and taught English and took Standard 3 for P.E. (fun, did skipping with them). My class remembered it was my birthday and all sang happy birthday to me as I walked into the classroom; it was so sweet. I had lovely phonecalls from the guys in Hawaii and from Rebecca :) Annie and I left school at lunchtime and went to the most expensive cafe in Nakuru (still cheaper than Starbucks) for the cheesy chips and mocha fudge cake that I finally had an excuse to buy. I stopped off at the souvenir market to say hey to my market friends and bumped into Nick, who presented me with an enormous wooden giraffe as a present from him and Rebecca. LOVE IT.

Amy, Annie and I went to the orphanage in the afternoon, which was equally lovely as they all sang to me and Amy gave me a lush book of lots of photos from Kenya and drawings by all the children at the orphanage for me. I'd discovered that my favourite girl, Becky, didn't know when her birthday was (she estimates her age at between 9 and 10) and so I told her she could share my birthday, which she loved. I gave her a photo of the two of us as a present :) The kids loved my giraffe and carted it around, taking photos of it everywhere in the orphanage, until I got it back at the end and it had a broken ear! Poor Mr Twiglet (as he's now named).We went straight from the orphanage to Taidys, where I met all my friends and we had a big meal together :) Annie gave me a beautiful present: a hanging string of photos from the last 4 months, with birthday messages from all my friends on the back. We all chatted and laughed and had loads of fun :)

I finally finished the day by taking my giraffe on a motorbike home. This was hilarious; I attracted so many funny looks from passing matatus and had quite a few "give me that giraffe"s. No! It's mine! I put all my lovely cards on the wall, hung up my photo thingy, talked to my family and propped Mr Twiglet up at the end of my bed before curling up in my Masai blanket and sleeping :)

WET

There is lots and lots of rain here. The bottom of my trousers are all soggy and there's a thunderstorm at least once a day. Everything's MUDDY and I want my blue wooley jumper from home but I know Rose, the maid, would ruin it by handwashing and bleach (why do they add bleach to the washing? Nobody knows)

Last week was a big blur of school, which is going really well, I'm so proud of my kids. It makes me happy when you have a kid who usually doesn't understand anything get 7/7 in your exercise :) The marbles were working well, I just had to take them out of my desk and the class was silent within a minute, last week, but not so much today when my English class went nuts and wouldn't shut up. I've also picked up some more lessons; I'm doing Standard 4 and 5 maths regularly now as well which is awesome as maths is really easy to teach.

Annie and I also visited a new orphanage last week, one for babies between 3 months and 3 years old. It was SO cute, they all clung to you and wanted to be picked up and played with as soon as you arrived. It was a really wealthy looking orphanage for usual standards, which surprised me - it was in an enormous beautiful house with such cute little tables with multicoloured chairs set out like a tea-party for their dinner! Hopefully I'll go again sometime but I seem to have no time anymore - everyday I go to school from 8am until 1ish, then into town for lunch, then spend the afternoon at the orphanage or preparing for the next day's lessons.

The weekend was awesome and horrible at the same time. On Friday we had the leaving party for Rebecca, Amy and Lorna and each household had to dress up as a country. Annie, Rebecca and I chose America as Rebecca already had an interesting pair of 'shorts' from the second-hand-market in American colours, and so I went dressed in a red t-shirt, painted with white stars in tipex, and each of us in very attractive white hats with the American flag drawn on them. We spent most of the evening at Eunice's house, a friend of ours, just generally being stupid and messing around, until our HEADMASTER from school arrived, a 'surprise' for Rebecca, as she was leaving. WE HATE OUR HEADMASTER. He's always really unfriendly and patronising to us at school, and the evening just confirmed that he is a man to be avoided. URGH.

Anyway, the evening was still really awesome and we have some hilarious photos (I am resolutely not untagging them on facebook because I love them despite the fact that some are pretty awful - BLAME REBECCA for that). BUT, by the next morning, everything was sad and nasty as the reason for a leaving party is obviously that people are leaving.

So, on Sunday morning, all the volunteers went for a final meal at Taidys, the first place we all ate together in Nakuru, and then trooped to the shuttle station to say an extremely sad goodbye to Rebecca, Lorna and Amy. We all cried and the Kenyans all stared at us. We ate a hell of a lot of comfort food in front of a film at Karanja's house, and then Annie and I went home to see the room SO HORRIBLY TIDY due to the lack of Rebecca's stuff.

The last few days, other than the absence of Rebecca, have been quite nice. The kids at school have (mainly) been lovely; everyday we walk with our standard three girls to the road to get a matatu and give them all giant hugs before we go. They love it, and so do I :) Oh and we went to Ann's house (one of the standard threes) and met her cow! We got stuck at the orphanage during a giant thunderstorm the other day which was pretty nice actually as we played clapping games and sang with the kids for ages. Then yesterday I went to Pistis, a different orphanage, which was awesome but crazy, the kids just swarmed me and basically stole all the wool I'd brought for them to make bracelets. There are a lot more children there, about 150 at the orphanage and tons more at the school it's attached to, and lots of older kids who are really interesting to talk to.

Anyway, this is getting pretty long, so to sum up: school is good. Orphanage is good. Absence of Rebecca is very sad and I miss her a hell of a lot as I spent nearly 24 hours a day with her for four months. Rain is bad. Need more jumpers.

Red and Yellow and Pink and Green....

After a movie night where I slept at Amy and Ellen's house on Friday night, the most exciting thing that has happened recently has been Gemma's birthday party, which was on Saturday night. The theme was colours and we all picked a colour and spent an amusing hour or two at the second-hand-market in town (sells cheap but dubiously stained clothing - Katharine I bought your topshop emo shorts for 2 pounds or something!) finding a wide selection of strange clothing items in our colours. I was red and bought a large tie-died shawl thing that they call lessos here, along with a red waist-belt for 50p :)

So, decked out with our various weird items of clothing, we headed to Karanja's house (where Gemma lives) to begin a colourful and hilarious evening where alcohol was downed through funnels, we all did lots of dancing and bouncing around and screeching at Scooby the dog everytime he ran into the house, covered each other in facepaint of varying degrees of appropriateness, and finally left in the back of a pickup truck to go to Summit, leaving Annie, Rebecca and Becky already in bed at 10pm. We spent a lot of the journey trying to stop Ben tumbling off the top of the pickup truck, and then had lots of fun at Summit doing normal things like yet more dancing, screeching and scaring random Kenyans.

The next day was spent teasing certain people for things they'd done the night before and watching in horror as Gemma continued drinking after no sleep and as part of her I-must-drink-for-four-days-straight-to-celebrate-being-eighteen-idea. She passed out that evening, finally. We also met the two new volunteers, two girls, who seemed nice but rather scared by the interesting morning-after scene they found (I couldn't really blame them!)

Yesterday school started again and I am so happy to be back :) Despite yesterday being spent preparing new textbooks for use (i.e. not all that productive), today was brilliant. Miriam, the teacher I share my class with, was away and so I took them all day, teaching them lots of English and playing a game with them which involved some of the kids acting out different professions. They loved it and went mad when a really funny boy named Isaac, who acts like a clown the entire time, zoomed around the classroom pretending to be a pilot. They also clapped and cheered when I drew a beach on the board to demonstrate the concept of sand, which I didn't really understand! Anyway, I've also started a new behaviour system where they have 50 marbles in a jar, which are increased or reduced according to their behaviour, and if there are 50 still there at the end of each week, I've promised them prizes. They LOVE it and it works so well. They all did my exercise in complete silence, insanely quickly and well earlier and then cheered when I gave them a marble for it.

Another awesome piece of news is that we got the results from last term back yesterday, compared to the other 46 schools in the area. Nakuru Workers, my school, is NUMBER ONE in nearly every class and subject, and my class, Annie's class and Rebecca's class are ALL the best in the area for English. SO SO SO HAPPY. It feels better than I can explain to feel that you had something to do with that.

It's a Zoe in a Tree!

After spending Monday at the orphanage making yet more woolen bracelets and catching up with the kids (their puppies have grown enormous!), on Tuesday we took Gigi and Vanessa (the daughter of Karanja, our 'helper' person in Kenya and another host family) to Graceland Hotel to swim. We'd promised Gigi ages ago that we'd take him and he was so happy :) We spent the day outside in the amazing sun, tanning and leaping into the dubiously cloudy pool and watching Gigi having a lot of fun.

The next day I had planned to travel to Nanyuki, the town at the base of Mt. Kenya, as Amy has spent the last 4 days climbing the mountain and so Becky and I were going to go and meet her on Wednesday, then stay the night and do exciting Nanyuki things on the Thursday. The journey to Nanyuki should only take 4 hours, but due to our bus breaking down irreversably half way there, we spent three hours sat on the side of a hill, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, watching the road for possible vehicles we could get a lift with and watching the dark clouds gathering over the opposite hill and creeping closer and closer towards us. Thankfully, before the enormous rainstorm quite got to our lovely hill, we managed to get a lift in a matatu with a sheep in it, and finally arrived in Nanyuki at 6pm, 4 hours after we'd hoped to. We could see the snow-peaked caps of Mt. Kenya through the clouds, extremely dramatic, and found Amy extremely tired from having clambered all the way to the top.

That evening we went to a local bar to watch the football and phone Karanja to gloat when Arsenal lost 1-0 and then slept happily in our cold and lumpy beds.

The next day was pretty awesome :) We walked for 9km along an extremely muddy track, following the fresh trail of elephant poo, to the MauMau Caves, which aren't really caves but a kind of large overhanging rock, right next to a big pool with a waterfall and river flowing in and out of it. Years ago it was used by the MauMau, a group of Kenyans, as a hospital where they could hide from white settlers, as the waterfall drowned out the sound of the screaming. Despite this being a slightly gruesome historical background, it was really interesting. I had also promised myself that I would swim, as the others had when they visited, and so, remembering Rebecca's words that it was the coldest water she'd ever felt, I apprehensively stuck my toe into the water and INDEED IT WAS BLOODY FREEZING.

Nonetheless, I was determined and waded in fully-clothed, squealing and swearing more than I should, until I was deep enough to swim around a bit. I'd wanted to swim right up to the waterfall but the current was too strong, so I settled for swimming for about a minute before getting out of the water as fast as physically possible to check that all my toes were still attached to my foot. IT WAS SO COLD!

Once the feeling had returned to my toes and I was dressed in dry clothing again, we walked the 9km back, bumping into a chameleon, which we held and stroked and generally scared, before continuing on our way. Chameleons have really sticky feet! It didn't change colour but we did hopefully hold it up against Amy's red jacket to see if it would.

We ate lunch at this amazing restaurant. It was basically an enormous tree, surrounded by the ponds of a trout farm at the bottom, with a huge wooden tree house at the top in which you could eat. There were giant, furry black and white colobus monkeys bouncing around the tree, stealing sugar bowls and creeping into the bar, clutching bottles of alcohol. We ate some tasty spaghetti and carrot cake with cream (SO good), and fed the monkeys with peanuts whilst the waitresses weren't looking :)

After eating we took a matatu back to Nakuru, through a big rainstorm that came through the windows of the leaky van and got me rather wet. I felt quite at home, watching the torrential rain pouring down over miles and miles of grey, bleak fields, surrounded by rickety fences.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Okay so I didn't see any tigers or bears but I did see a LOT of lions, and I've been wanting to use that blog title for ages.

Amboseli, the national park in the foothills of Mount Kilamanjaro, was so beautiful. The whole area was almost completely flat, with a few scatterings of smelly swamps and lakes, meaning that Kilamanjaro, emerging out of the ground on one side, looked so dramatic and enormous. A lot of the time it was surrounded in misty clouds, making it look even more mysterious and exciting, the top just peaking out covered in snow.

We were camping right at the base of it, and after an afternoon game drive where we saw hyenas, elephants, hippos and of course a lot of gazelle and zebra (I always have remind myself to mention these as they're pretty much the cows of the Kenya world) we had a very tasty fire-cooked dinner by lantern-light on a wooden bench under a big tree.

After eating an awful lot of rice and vegetables, we stepped outside the big tree and suddenly realised that WOOOOOWWW the stars were absolutely amazing. They covered the whole sky; you could see the milky way, a kind of white floaty misty thing in the sky, and the plough was SO big because we were on the equator. Amy, our official star expert, spent quite a while explaining to Nick why the plough was enormous, how shooting stars appeared, and generally what stars were (worryingly Nick is going to do geography at university) and then we all sat around the fire in the dust telling ghost stories.

Despite being sufficiently freaked out by these (and the white bag that the wind blew close to us), it was eventually Rebecca's observation of 'Oh it's a scorpian!' that made us all leap up and retreat to our tents after finding another one in the toilets. The night was filled with silly conversations yelled between tents and finally a silence only broken by what sounded scarily like the sound of a lion trying to get into our tents. Camped inside the national park, and with our tents pitched about ten metres away from the 'fence' we weren't supposed to go closer than 50m from, these noises were not all that reassuring.
Thankfully the lion, imaginary or not, never made it inside the tents and we awoke to watch the sunrise through the thick clouds over the mountain, a sight made all the more spectacular by the group of five lions and four cheetahs prowling around in the early morning sun. It was really interesting to watch as we were told the whole story behind the prowling: a lion had killed a cheetah cub and so the mother-cheetah had left the remaining cubs in the long grass to try and make the lion think that all the cubs were gone. Thankfully, despite watching the lions searching the long grass, the cheetahs were never found, and we headed back to camp to a breakfast of pancakes and eggy bread and pineapple :)The rest of yesterday was spent travelling back, listening to i-pods as the safari van passed huge stretches of desert and little towns where chocolate and pineapple lollies could be obtained to make a mess of the van. We arrived in Nairobi where I picked up my 'fixed' camera (broken by too much sand; sorry for the lack of pictures because of this), which promptly broke an hour later, and then ate our final real pizza before getting a shuttle bus back to Nakuru.

So I now have clean clothes, a comfy squishy bed with no bed bugs, and food that is free :) I love Nakuru :)

This Could All Go So Wrong, But We're So Happy

The day after my last blog entry I awoke to find my right ankle swollen up rather horribly because of my silly tendancy to run into large rocks in the sea, and so I rather reluctantly took a matatu 2 minutes up the road to Palm Beach Hospital (bringing my Kenyan-hospital count up to three). This was by far the prettiest of all the hospitals I've visited before, but pretty shocking in every other way. They told me the cut on my leg was infected, did some nasty things to my leg which hurt SO MUCH, gave me a tetanus injection, antibiotics, and took an x-ray (exciting!) to check it wasn't fractured (it wasn't). They then presented me with an enormous calculator displaying the equally enormous amount they wished me to pay for the privilege of having my leg tortured for an hour, and I almost cried. I have NO MONEY.

This was still in the place South of Mombasa, and we didn't do much else there during the day other than eat lots of food by the beach and make friends with a hilarious Kenyan woman named Mamasofia, who came and plonked herself onto the sand in front of us with an aching back and entertained us with impressions of waterskis and giving us multicoloured hats for us to try on for about half an hour.

However, the nights in this place were amazing. One night we went to a bar called Forty Thieves, literally on the beach, which served really good food (falafel!) and played primary-school-disco music on a dancefloor lit with lots of stars spinning around. It was so much fun :)

The next night was even more spectacular, as we had dinner in a CAVE :D It was the poshest place I've seen in Kenya, with enormous round tables with big white tablecloths, set with 3 wineglasses increasing in size and lots of silver cutlery in each place, and all under this coral cave, lit with lanterns and candles and with a large hole in the roof at one point where you could look up and see the stars and hear the sea. We had a waiter named Athman, who told us he would transform into Batman the following day and looked very amused when we sat there grinning like chesire cats on drugs at how amazing this place was. I ate a veggie shepherd's pie and, for dessert, a flambeed mango, which I ordered simply because I didn't know what flambeeing was and the menu said they'd do it at the table. So my mango appeared, looking tasty, I went to eat it, and Athman said 'No, wait for flame'. One minute later he reappeared with a metal jug of flaming liquid, which he poured on my mango, and it danced with fire in front of me :) SO exciting.The day after the cave, we once again made a rather intrepid day of travelling, taking two matatus, the pile-in-like-sheep ferry again and a tuk-tuk to central Mombasa, only to find we'd missed the bus to Lamu that we'd needed to get. Wonderful. Whilst everyone else actually tried to be useful, Lorna and I spotted a nearby bakery and wandered towards it, and were suddenly confronted by a man saying 'you want to go to Lamu? I get you bus.' Before we knew it, he was on the phone, we were arguing about price, and we were happily zooming along on our way to Lamu in a private matatu.

Sadly, this happiness was not to last, as when we stopped about 2 hours into the journey for chocolate (of course), an undercover policeman suddenly appeared and we consequently spent two hours in Malindi Police Station as apparently the driver didn't have the right insurance to drive tourists. It took 3 phonecalls to our police friend, quite a few bribes, and an explanation from the policeman that he was worried the men would simply abduct us, before we were allowed to leave, reassured by the fact that, as the police had taken our names and passport numbers, they would at least be able to inform the British Embassy if we were abducted and killed. Fantastic.

The remainder of the journey was long, dark, and had an air of danger as we discovered the reason that buses don't go any later than 11am to Lamu: you have to drive through an area filled with Somalian bandits who will very seriously attack vehicles in the dark. We had an armed guard come with us, but thankfully the only danger we saw was a large hippo stomp across the road right in front of the van.

Our brilliant day of transport was completed by a boatride: Lamu's an island just off the Kenyan coast. It was pitchblack and we zoomed across the water in a little motorboat. The black sea merged into the black sky so it felt like we were flying, thousands of stars twinkled above us, and approaching the old white, lit up buildings of Lamu town, which looked like they were floating in the sky, it felt as if we'd come to the end of the world.

We spent five days in Lamu not doing very much; it was SO hot that any unneccessary movement was to be avoided. We went to the beach and baked, and took a boatride out to this beautiful idyllic private desert island, which I swam around in the clear blue sea :) The house we were staying in was extremely weird but in a very good way; it was four stories high and we were renting the top three. It was like Hogwarts, with stone staircases everywhere and everything being highly disfunctional. There was an absence of real walls, and so all through the night you heard the sounds of Lamu as though they were right there in the bedroom (which indeed they were some nights; often random black cats would just run through). Donkeys e-orring, cats screeching and muslims talking in kiswahili were all around. One night we went to a club, which was a bad idea, as it was stupidly hot even at 2am, and we found that all Lamu-men were pretty aggressive and nasty in their treatment of women.
Now I'm back in Nairobi, after taking a sleeper train from Mombasa last night (see above!), looking very sadly at my hugely decreased bank balance and heading to the foot of Mt. Kilamanjaro tomorrow morning, to do an evening and early morning game drive, and watch the sunrise :)

Beaches in the Moonlight and Swimming with Turtles

So I was right to ask for luck for the bus journey to Mombasa, as it was pretty hideous. We were in a big dark coach (there went my hopes of catching up on my journal on the bus as I'm two weeks behind) playing the same kiswahili song over and over and over again for the first hour and a half, it was absolutely boiling so the window had to be open the entire time, and there was nothing to rest your head on, so Rebecca and I just ended 'sleeping' on each others shoulders and on my hoodie pillow.

We arrived in Mombasa at 4.30am, after a lot of confusion on the bus with a man shouting 'MALINDI MALINDI MALINDI' at the top of his voice, which we wrongly interpreted as meaning we were in Malindi. However, when we heard him also say 'Welcome Mombasa' to another woman, we got slightly worried. It took about 10 questions to random Kenyans ('Are we in Mombasa?' 'No', 'Are we in Mombasa?' 'No', 'Are we in Mombasa' 'Yes') to establish that maybe we should be getting off, and so we stumbled out into the baking hot, dark, maybe-Mombasa street. After ringing our friends at a nearby hotel and consulting the map to discover that THANK GOD we were not stuck in Malindi at 4.30am, we ended up in their hotel room, sleeping on the very hard tiled floor to the sound of the nearby Mosque calling all Muslims to 5am prayers.

That morning Rebecca, Annie and I went to Fort Jesus, a historical fort-thingy next to the sea, which made some interesting photos with lots of turrets and dungeons to hide in, but wasn't amazing, and then we all went on the rather intrepid trip to South Mombasa, where we had a beach hut booked for that night. This involved a matatu ride, a ferry ride (SO different from normal ferries, more a kind of weird experiment of 'let's see if we can cram 10,000 people into one strange looking metal, industrial type boat', with George-Bush-insulting videos playing on large screens whilst we waited to get on), and another matatu ride with enormous rucksacks, but it was SO worth it when we arrived.

We had a big, proper house, with an actual bed per person, about 10 metres away from a secluded, white-sand-warm-blue-sea-and-skinny-palm-trees beach. It was amazing. We couldn't believe the view we looked out onto when we woke up.
We of course rushed straight into the sea, exploring some caves and finding some brightly-coloured crabs, before some people made a big trip to the supermarket then cooking spaghetti for tea (we had a kitchen!). That night we went down to the beach and did some paddling under the moonlight. It was so beautiful.

The next day, Easter Sunday, we awoke very early to catch a bus to go snorkelling and dolphin watching for an extortionate price. After about 2 hours on a wooden, old fashioned sailing boat on rather rough seas, feeling seasick and with no sign of a dolphin, we were feeling slightly worried about the amount of money we seemed to have wasted, but then came the snorkelling. We stopped by a shallow area with coral reefs, put on our masks and snorkels and spent about 3 hours swimming just above these fantastic coral reefs. It was like entire landscapes underwater, and there were so many fish. I never realised it was possible to gasp underwater until then. There were angel fish (so pretty), literally thousands of tiny black fish all swimming in one movement, rainbow, turquoise coloured fish, and we actually swam about half a metre away from a huge turtle. I could have touched it at points, and I just swam alongside it for ages marvelling at how amazing it was. To top the day off, we did see a dolphin once we were back on the boat, and had a really good vegetable-curry lunch on board the boat.

That evening was very funny; we spent the first half crashed out on the beds, wishing we could just sleep, then suddenly found some energy and ended up sat on the beach, playing a hilarious game of truth or dare, until 3am. There were tons of stars and the moon reflecting off the water, and the waves just splashing in against the shore. Unfortunately we also had the idea of running into the sea at about 2am, and, being the ridiculously clumsy and uncoordinated person I am, I went running into the sea at the speed of light and smacked my shin straight into an underwater rock, it being low tide. This hurt rather a lot and I had to go back up to the house to bandage it up before spending about an hour alternating between panicking that we'd buried our room key on the beach (it turned up in the keyhole of the house, stupid us) and talking to Amy. We ate CREME EGGS that Amy's friend had brought over from England at 3.30am :)

Yesterday we spent on the beach, reading and attempting to tan (all this achieved is that I now have a bandage-shaped tan line on my leg), Rebecca fell in love with a shell and sat all day in the ocean cleaning it and is now lobster red, and we ate lots of good food at the restaurant in the beach hut complex, and lots and lots of noodles cooked in our kitchen.

In the evening, six of us travelled to another beach, slightly south of the previous one, where we're now staying in a surprisingly nice (for the money) hotel, inhabited by a tiny tabby kitten, a matatu ride from the beach.

Today was spent on the beach (rather more seaweedy than the last one, and with lots more beach boys trying to sell you hats or rather more dubious goods, or alternately trying to pay you for rather more dubious goods), riding a camel named Tristan (brightly decorated with flowers and patterns for Easter), sunbathing on the dampish sand, and eating pizza by the sand. Sadly I am a bit afraid to swim because of my leg, which hurts quite a bit, but we are planning to do some watersports soon and go on a giant yellow banana boat, so hopefully it will be better for that :)

Nairobi: Ice Cream, Pizza and Stupidity

So Nairobi is a bit insane, it has ICE CREAM and BOWLING and some extremely 'interesting' clubs.

We've been here since Tuesday afternoon and the whole thing's a little surreal. It feels like a Kenyan city in that there's lots of street kids and crazy traffic (you can scream 'red light red light RED LIGHT!' at the taxi driver and still they will drive through it), but there is also real shops (I bought a novel!), bowling, mini golf, and pizza restaurants, which makes it rather unnerving for people who have been living in pure(ish) Kenya for 3 months.

Over the 4 days, the best things have been bowling (I got three strikes in a row and everyone thinks I'm some kind of bowling genius! Pretty sure it was pure luck but I'm liking it anyway), going to the cinema (saw Marley and Me and cried and cried and cried), playing mini golf and watching Rebecca be so bad that the ball was flying everywhere, visiting the elephant orphanage again and the wedding today. It was the wedding of the son of one of our teachers to an American woman, and it was really fun :) There was tons of clapping, dancing, singing and random orders to 'high five your neighbour!', and the whole thing was so happy and cheerful. It was all outside and it was a beautiful sunny day :) All the other teachers were there and it was nice to spend some time with them outside school, although the interaction is limited as they speak in kiswahili most of the time.

More interesting experiences have been waking up to realise that leaving your hotel door room unlocked, with the key on the outside of the door, all night is NOT the best idea, especially in Nairobi which is supposed to be one of the most dangerous cities in Africa (proven a little by the consequences of leaving said room unlocked), going to a fun but unpleasant at times club, and renewing our visas, which wasn't difficult but left us all covered in blue ink after having our fingerprints taken.

Tonight we are about to go and get yet another pizza (Nairobi is the only place in Kenya, I swear, where you can get one in less than 45 minutes) and then get on an overnight bus to Mombasa, on the coast. It's going to take all night and arrive at 7am or something, and Kenyan roads are very bumpy, so wish me luck with getting any sleep whatsoever. At the moment though I am unworried as the thought of pizza is very very nice :)

Off for a little bit

Today I am heading for Nairobi, where we need to stay for a few days to renew our visas and do exciting things like visit an Ostrich Farm where you can ride ostriches (I'm torn between the feeling that this is slightly cruel and the excitement at the idea of doing something so strange as riding an ostrich) and visit the Elephant Orphanage again. Me, Rebecca and Annie are also going to a Kenyan wedding there on the 10th which should be interesting!

After that we're all travelling to Mombasa and Lamu, on the coast of Kenya, with long white beaches and warm sea and awesome things like snorkelling and beaches with turtles laying eggs on and swimming with dolphins :D We'll be spending 2 weeks travelling around there, camping on a beach for two nights right next to a nightclub with waterslides! After that I think Rebecca, Nick and I are going to camp for a few nights in the National Park at the bottom of Mount Kilamanjaro to watch the sunrise over it.

Sooooo...I won't be back in Nakuru for a couple of weeks, so there will be no blog entries til then but probably an enormous one when I get back :)

Streamers and Balloons and Rasta Bracelets

It was the last week at school this week and it was so much fun :) The kids had exams on Monday and Tuesday, so I sat marking an enormous number of social studies papers whilst invigilating, and then on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the kids had nothing to do whilst the teachers were all marking exams, and so we basically had free rein with them.

Earlier in the week I started a fortune teller (you know those funny little paper things you write colours and numbers on and silly things like 'you are a monkey' inside?) craze by making one, and prompted literally the entire school to swarm me and go 'teacher make for me!', waving pages of lined paper ripped out of exercise books in my face. Therefore on Thursday it was pretty much essential to teach at least some of them how to do it, and so I taught my Standard 4 class how to make them, eliminating 60 children out of the 600 asking me for one, and they loved it :) I was pinched and poked by fortune tellers from every angle for the whole day.

Friday was possibly the most exciting day at school ever. It was Rebecca's last day, as she leaves at the beginning of May so isn't coming back next term, and she had a huge party with her class, with popcorn, bracelet making, cakes, streamers, badges and balloons. Her, Annie and I spent about two hours sitting in a restaurant in town the day before shoving sweets into the smallest balloons in the world, and so on the Friday we gave each of the kids a balloon, and they had to blow it up and pop it to get the sweet out. It was so funny, everytime one popped the entire class screamed and then burst into laughter.

Rebecca had also bought a ruler and a pencil for all of the class, and their faces when we got them out were amazing. They screamed and cheered and leapt up and down when they realised what we'd got for them, and it was so little compared to what they should have anyway. They were SO happy :)

I also had a good day with my class: I made friendship bracelets with them, teaching them how to plait with red, yellow and green wool (coincidentally rasta colours - not intentional) and I was so proud that they all made one as I had to sit with about 10 of them individually and show them exactly how to plait. Admittedly some were very 'interesting' plaits, but they all did it :) They were all so pleased to have bracelets, especially as I was wearing one too, and the bright colours look really lovely against their skin. It's also a really good way of identifying all my class members as, with 60 kids, I'm still a bit unsure about some!

After the bracelets I did some drawing with them ('Draw the happiest day of your life' - most children drew their birthday, but I sat down with one boy, drawing a greenish animal with a threatening looking metal object labelled 'knife' drawn next to it, asked 'which animal is that?' to get the answer 'sheep! i kill the sheep'. So I now have a charming picture of a green ship being slaughtered by a nine-year-old boy as the happiest day of his life. Fantastic), and generally messed around all day, visiting the hair 'salon' with my standard 4 girls, who excitedly and messily braided about half of my hair ('You look very smart teacher!').

It felt really really sad that it was Rebecca's last day, but it was a brilliant last day of term. I feel sad that I won't see them for a month (although I have a feeling that small children may be turning up at our gate for the whole of the holiday as they ALL know where we live).

Other eventful things this week have been Tuesday night, when we went out for the leaving party of my friend Helen, who's gone back to the UK, and Rebecca and I played some interesting and noisy card games with poor Annie's cards before going into town, and last night when we went out, talked to many many many Kenyan men, told many nonsensical lies (I was Natalie from Bulgaria with Amy as my twin sister who came from Sweden), later bumped into those who we had lied to (by which point we'd completely lost track of who had said what and about who) and so all our lies fell apart and we ended up with a lot of Kenyan men calling us liars in a funny and jokey way. I couldn't really blame them given that I think I claimed that I was related to at least three other of my friends all night, and I introduced Rebecca to someone as Carrot at one point.

I cycled 100km across Kenya in one day :D

And actually can't believe it. It was AMAZING. Seriously one of the best things I have ever done.
We headed to Naivasha the night before, sleeping in the cheapest hotel we could find, having dinner in a nice little place with good food, a TV showing the hideous spanish-dubbed-into-english soaps they show over here, and a mouse or two running around for us to laugh at. An evening of inexplicable hyperness occurred, with lots of hiding in a cupboard and leaping on beds for no reason.

On Saturday we got up at 6am, aiming for a very early start before it got too hot, but getting slightly delayed by a) Nick's inability to get out of bed and b) A long matatu ride to get to the place we were hiring the bikes, which was half an hour outside Naivasha, around the other side of the lake. We all just sat looking out the window at the endless dusty roads passing us by, thinking 'OH my god, in half an hour we're going to have to cycle back along all of this'.

We got to Fisherman's Camp, a campsite we were hiring the bikes from, and despite many phonecalls to these men previously, when we arrived they asked 'Are you going to Hell's Gate?' Sadly not. Hell's Gate is 3 km from this place. We replied 'Errr...nooo, we're cycling to Nakuru' and they laughed at us until they realised we were actually being serious. They kindly (well, not so kindly considering how much we paid them) provided us with a van to follow us, taking photos and carrying our water and food for the day.

And so off we went :) It was 25km from the bike-hire place to Naivasha town, and nice and flat, so we all cycled along whooping and cheering and wasting precious oxygen by singing the Sound of Music songs. An hour later and we had reached Naivasha, picked up some hitchhiking kids in our van, and eaten half our food already. We thus stopped, bought more food and continued.

At this point we realised quite what we'd let ourselves in for. We'd used most of our hyperness in the first bit, and the signs saying '69 km to Nakuru' were not entirely encouraging. We'd been under the impression that the road was flat and soon discovered that a) this was a LIE and b) signs saying 'climbing lane 150m ahead' are the most evil signs in the world, as they basically mean an immensely steep and painful hill is coming up. The road went down ('WHEEEEEEEEE') and then UP (OOOWWWWW) then down then up then down then up. I was so glad I had my i-pod as I was able to put some motivational music in one ear and didn't have to listen to the monotonous sound of my bike chain slowly going round as I struggled up a hill.

Basically, it was so difficult, and although the downhills were amazing, whizzing past zebra and golden hills and thinking 'I'M ACTUALLY CYCLING 100KM!', the uphills were so painful. We stopped every 5km or so for water and after we were halfway (i.e. 50km in), everytime we got back on the bikes we were all swearing and shouting in pain because our bums hurt so much. Oh, and the fact that the roads were lined with small children going 'how are you?' when you went past, clearly rather preoccupied, and chasing your bike, was sweet on downhill stretches, bearable on flat stretches, and hugely irritating on uphill stretches.

BUT, we all knew that we were going to do it, and the sense of achievement as Ben and I rode onto the road leading into Nakuru, seeing hills that we recognised and places we'd been, was amazing. The last 18km or so we only stopped once, just pedalled and pedalled and pedalled, whooping and cheering again, until we'd reached the border of Lake Nakuru (5km outside the town of Nakuru, thus making our total 100km). We just couldn't believe that we'd cycled 100km and we'd DONE IT, despite the fact that everyone we'd met on the way didn't believe we could.

The last 5km was also rather funny, as we'd managed not to really crash for 95km, and then as we got into Nakuru our friend Olympas appeared at the side of the road. We all turned around, waved, I screamed 'OLYMPAS' and in the excitement forgot to watch ahead and so before we knew it, my bike was entwined with Rebecca's in front of me, and all five of us had piled into each other with a lot of laughter.

So far, I've raised 440 pounds, and we spent Sunday watching films until the rainy season finally arrived with a literal bang, lightening hitting the aerial and breaking the television. We therefore just lay on the sofa, with aching bums, playing card games and chatting :) It was a really nice relaxing day. Oh, and we didn't go out on Saturday night as planned, as me and Rebecca got home, our maid was like 'come and see how to make chapati!', we sat with Gigi screaming in our ears, half asleep, watching her cook 20 chapatis (these take SO long) and finally realised that as we were struggling to stay awake to eat our lentils for dinner, realistically we were not going out. So we chatted and fell asleep watching desperate housewives (i bought season four for a pound!) So everything is very very good here :)

A week of spacehopping

My Dad brought me over a bright orange spacehopper that's been living in my cupboard for the past few years, and the entire school is obsessed. I must've taken about 300 children for P.E. in the last week. They've never seen one before and so they all LOVE it. Everyone screams when we get it out and it gets prodded by small fingers and punched by slightly more vicious fists constantly. Gigi came home from school the other day and told us that some of the kids from our school had been speaking to him and telling him about it. I love it when they're happy :)

It's been a really nice week, done some usual English teaching, millions of P.E. lessons and lots of singing (I've caught on to the fact that this is an extremely good way to stop a class running riot if they have nothing else to do). It's awesome when they sing; they all starting dancing up and down and grinning and doing air guitar, using random classroom objects like the schoolbell and the duster for the blackboard as a microphone. It's SO cute.

Annie and Rebecca also bought two footballs last week, so P.E. lessons are getting more and more advanced, the school's P.E. equipment now consisting of a field full of potholes, a pile of rocks (used for marking goal posts) and 2 footballs between 600 children. I can't believe how lucky they feel and act just to be given this.

So I am in the internet cafe at the moment waiting to go and meet my friends to travel to Naivasha, where we are staying the night tonight, to start this insane bike ride tomorrow morning. I'm actually really looking forward to cycling 70km for some reason, and we've planned an equally insane night out afterwards to celebrate and just to make sure we have no energy left whatsoever on Sunday.

Too much STUFF

Basically I have done a lot in the last few weeks; my Dad came out and it was really lovely to see him :)

Main events were:

-- Hyperactive Children - Dad came to the school and orphanage to see what on earth I'm actually doing out here in the African sun and watched my English lesson (observing that the kids here are more obedient than in England; I partially agree but they are also very good at finding sneaky ways to hide the fact they haven't done their homework) and P.E. lesson (i.e. lots of kids running screaming at each other under the guise of 'the hokey-cokey'). I had much fun watching his reaction as he walked into my classroom and was greeted by a screaming-excitable-chorus of "GOOD MORNING TEACHER!" by sixty children. They do this every morning but it's a little overwhelming the first time. The orphanage was nice and relaxed, Dad played football with the older boys whilst I did some more parading round the building with small girls on my back. I think he did realise though how much more could be done with some more money; the 'football' was actually a ball of rubbish cleverly bundled together and the classes of sixty - eighty are an insane number, an excuse that the Kenyan teachers use to hit and generally abuse (there are some seriously horrible cases here) the children, under the idea that it's the only way they're controllable.

-- Cycling Uphill Through a Desert - although good practice for my insane 70km bike ride, this was rather painful. Basically we went to Hell's Gate, a big national park with lots of zebras and giraffes and warthogs wandering freely around in the wild, and cycled 9km down to this fantastic gorge with boiling hot spring waterfalls in it :) The landscape was amazing, it was like going back to some prehistoric time with all these enormous raw faces of rock. It was so good, but the journey of 9km back to the main gate, uphill, through sand and with bikes that had minds of their own was less enjoyable.

-- Masai Mara - we spent 3 days here, seeing more lions, cheetahs, elephants (fifty in one group!), hippos, crocodiles, buffaloes and just about everything OTHER than a leopard. We told our driver that we particularly wanted to see one, and this may have been a mistake as we spent rather a long time playing an enormous game of 'Where's Wally', only over 2500 sq km of the Masai Mara, peering into every tree looking for an extremely elusive animal. However, the landscape there is beautiful so it was lovely just being there again.

-- The Discovery that I am Allergic to the Masai Mara - I spent a rather unenjoyable day travelling for 7 hours in a safari van from the Masai Mara to Nairobi feeling extremely ill, finally resulting in a nice visit to Nairobi Hospital to get another injection and lots and lots of tablets. Kenya is really not the place to be ill; the roads are bumpy and and bounce you up and down all the time and there are an awful lot of extremely nasty smells around. BUT, there was a highlight to this as I got to watch House and Scrubs for the first time in 2.5 months whilst waiting for test results in the hospital. Woo!

-- Cheetahs and FOOD - Yesterday Dad and I went to a safari walk, which was basically a rather animal-less zoo, but was awesome as they had a tame cheetah, which we went in and cuddled and stroked :) And the FOOD note is simply because I had SO much food, everywhere, and REAL food like cake and pizza and actual protein.

I'm now back in Nakuru, having been into school this morning to see where my class had got to in English (my class screamed and cheered when they saw I was back, it was so sweet), catching up on lots of rather eventful gossip from my friends from the last week and trying to plan this mad sponsored bike ride we've got ourselves into.