Lakes and Rainforests and Being Surrounded By Baboons

Lake Victoria was fab and involved the following:

-- Boats - After much haggling and a lot of 'you must be kidding me we're not paying ten pounds for an hour in your boat', we had two boat trips onto Lake Victoria. These were very funny as after clambering into these little wooden boats with holes in the bottom and only life jackets for half of us, the boats spent a lot of the time lurching and splashing and generally threatening to tip us out to the hippos. However, Lake Victoria was absolutely amazing and ENORMOUS and on the second boat trip we did spot some hippos :)

-- Sunsets - Watching the sunset over the lake was one of the most beautiful things ever; it was so peaceful and we all just perched right at the end of the lake, myself on a large rock, listening to the plants rustling and floating around on the waves, and watching the sky gradually turn from light blue to yellow to deep orange to black.-- A Lot of Squashing Into Small Spaces - Travelling with very little money means everything must be minimised. Thus, we fitted 8 people into one tuk-tuk (these are little metallic box-like vehicles designed for 3 passengers), and 5 people into one very very small and hot room with only 2 beds.

-- A RAINFOREST - This was absolutely amazing as we really hadn't expected to find this. Basically, we were chatting to one of our boat-drivers and asking where was good to go near Kisumu, and he told us there was a rainforest about an hour away by matatu. Soooo, with much excitement we all embarked on an extremely bumpy journey that actually consisted of 2 matatus and took about 2 and a half hours, and arrived at our rainforest. It's the last section of rainforest left in Kenya and we spent the day wandering through it and finding trees that strangle other trees, trees that cure cancer, lots of monkeys and dinosaur-like birds. We even climbed a tree made of lots of vines (I can't adequately describe this tree but it was so cool). We must've walked about 15 miles over the day and made the mistake of thinking there would be a cafe in the rainforest and consequently didn't eat for about 12 hours, but it was worth it.

-- A Lot of Baboons - We saw these in the rainforest but I think they're worth a separate bullet point. Basically, we were walking happily along quite a large track, when suddenly I realised there was something large and gorilla-like wandering across our path ahead. We all stopped and looked around, and before we knew it, there were about 10 baboons blocking our path ahead and another 10 or so emerging from all the foliage around and above us. Half terrified that they would eat us, and half amazed and taking a lot of photos, we continued cautiously and found that they didn't want to eat us, and actually scampered away a little bit when we approached.

-- A Very Nice Restaurant - Two of the nights we ate at an amazing restaurant right on the edge of Lake Victoria, with SUCH good food. I had a vegetable lasagne and a banana split and some rose wine out in the open night air and it was so lovely :) Plus, just as we were settling the bill on the first night, someone spotted a hippo very close by, and so we all leapt up, literally running away from our bill, and went and stared at this hippo sleeping about 25m away from us in the dark on the shore. We were really silly though as we all decided, for a joke, to stamp our feet at the same time (the men on the boats do this to attract the hippos), and soon found this was not a good idea. The hippo got up, stampeded towards us, sending us all running in every direction, but thankfully decided to just circle back round and disappear into the water. Lesson for today: never stamp at a hippo.

The teacher's strike has now finished and I'm back in Nakuru looking forward to starting teaching on Monday again :)

Brief Disappearance

The teacher's strike seems to be continuing (and annoyingly looks like it will do for a long while) and so we are going to stay in Kisumu, by Lake Victoria from Wednesday until Saturday. It should be awesome as there's lots of wildlife and exciting things to do like boat rides and waterskiing (tempting!)

Sooooo...if I don't reply to the mass of emails that seem to be in my inbox whenever I look, that is why.

And, Byatt, the water DOES go different directions either side of the equator. I am not naive or gulliable and I saw it with my own eyes. Silly boy.

Showering in Waterfalls

After quite a disasterous Friday night, involving a drunken roommate, spoilt plans for a girly night in and quite a bit of arguing, on Saturday I escaped it all by visiting Thompson Falls with two friends, Amy and Ellen.

It was absolutely AMAZING. I had been before (our 'guide' person Karanja decided to take us on a day when everyone was hungover and/or tired and we saw more of Karanja's elderly relatives than we did of the waterfall so it was a bit of a let down) but this was so much better. Basically, the waterfall is quite cool to look at from above, being a big stream of water tumbling from a cliff, but me and Amy decided it would be even cooler to view from directly below.

Therefore, we clambered down some 'steps' (I'm using quotation marks because these were actually the work of some random Kenyan who one day decided 'OH let's put a load of boulders on the side of this very steep cliff and allow people to walk down'), over many many slippery rocks (in flipflops) and got ourselves as close to the waterfall as possible without actually being in the water. We got absolutely soaked and covered in mud on the way back up the cliff thing but it was SO much fun and just amazing to be standing right underneath an enormous waterfall yelling over the roar of it and laughing insanely.We also stopped at the Equator on the way to the falls and a Kenyan guy gave us a demonstration of how the water spins clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, anti-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, and straight when it's directly on the Equator, in the hope that we'd buy a paper certificate from him for an large amount of Kenyan shillings. It actually DOES do it! That was pretty awesome, and we had some fun being stupid and leaping from one hemisphere to the other.

On the way back from the waterfall we also found some HIPPOS! There was basically a big swampy area and in the middle we realised that what we thought was a big lump of mud was actually breathing and twitching its ears and being generally hippo-like :)

In the evening it was Mark's birthday (Mark is another volunteer who came out 4 months before we did so has been very nice showing us around) so we all went to Taidy's for food and drink, where we spent a very long time trying to surreptitiously get a pink, heart shaped cake + candles lit for Mark. I then had the most TERRIFYING journey of my life.

Basically, we wanted to go to Summit, the club we went to last Saturday with a dance floor and a log fire. The cheapest way to get there is by Boda-Boda. These are bikes, cycled by scrawny Kenyan men, with a padded seat on the back of them for a passenger. I'd been wanting to try one just to see what it was like and so we all clambered onto the back of them and away they went, all of us screaming and going 'OH MY GOD THIS IS SCARY' to each other. This wasn't the bad part. After about 2 minutes, everyone else had disappeared into the distance and I was left on the back of this little bike, surrounded by blackness and total silence. Suddenly, my guy decided to stop the bike, turn around and take a different route to that which all of my friends had taken, insisting that 'the road has been changed' when I asked why. From this point onwards half of my brain was busy thinking 'actually this is quite a cool way to travel, and aren't the stars beautiful?', and the other half was busy formulating an escape plan in the scenario (which was seeming more and more likely at this point) that this man was actually just going to kidnap me or something horrible. After a lot of panicking on my part, and about 10 minutes of seemingly everlasting and identical roads, I finally spotted my friends waiting for me in the distance and ALLELUIA we were at Summit.

NEVER again am I taking one of those in the dark.

The evening was quite good, but I was totally sober and thus totally aware of all the bad things such as homesickness and arguing that was going on around me. I did do some dancing, but after that a lot of the evening was spent comforting others, and then finally being comforted myself as I suddenly felt extremely ill at around midnight and ended up being parcelled into a taxi and sent home at 2 am.

Today I feel almost normal again, but rather intrigued as to why I felt so ill last night.

Happiness and Other Things

As the teachers' strike is still continuing, I spent most of today at St. Steven's, a local orphanage that some of the other volunteers are helping at permenantly. There were 9 volunteers there and 16 children, which was really lovely as we were able to give them individual attention and properly make friends with the children, which is more difficult to do in the schools where there are classes of 60+.

It's absolutely amazing how children with such awful backgrounds and stories, and living in such an appalling place, can be SO happy and so wonderful to spend time with. The orphanage is set down a little dust track, piled high on both sides with rubbish of all varieties, all emitting horrible smells, and down the middle of the road trickles a horrible mud brown stream of some unidentified liquid. There are no rubbish collections in Kenya. In the orphanage they have no clean water as it's all stored in a big, dirty stone well that they all bath and then drink out of, and no kitchen, only a small fire and a few saucepans. The children all sleep two to a bunk (so four children in one set of bunk beds), which have no real mattresses, just thin blankets.

That said, as soon as you walk in the wooden-plank gate, the kids come running towards you smiling and laughing and wanting to hold your hand and play with your hair and it's rare that you see them looking sad. I spent the morning drawing pictures for them to colour in and sellotape onto the wall, and playing stuck-in-the-mud with them, and then we attempted the ambitious task of taking 16 small children out for lunch.

We all piled into one matatu (bear in mind that these are designed for about 12 passengers and we had 9 volunteers + 16 children on our laps) and took them to Summit, the club we went to on Saturday night that's also open during the day, serving food in a big garden. Having ordered every child sausages and chips we played some running around games and skipping with them until this arrived. Watching their reaction to the food was horrible as all the food for the volunteers arrived before theirs (despite having specifically requested theirs to come first) and you could see that they were terrified that they weren't going to be fed and would just have to watch us eat. When their's did arrive they ate the sausages at the speed of light in disbelief at having been given meat and each finished an enormous plate of chips plus anything we didn't want.

They are the sweetest people ever and it's terrible thinking of what they've been through and how their lives are likely to turn out (some are HIV positive and so may have no options whatsoever). They are so innocent too; I could safely give them my camera or rucksack to play with and know that they would have fun with it but return it happily when they felt they'd had enough. To have been through what they have and still be completely uncorrupted is unbelievable.

Mad Dogs and English-men...

...climb a crater in the midday sun with no map and wearing only small strap tops and shorts.

Yes I am sunburnt, but luckily only on my back where it cannot be seen if I wear a t-shirt.

We decided to climb the Menengai Crater, which is a big dormant volcano that you can see from our road. From one side it just looks like a big wooded slope, not very high, covered in parched maize crops being tended by small children and women with large metal instruments, but when you get to the top there's this amazing view of an ENORMOUS valley. As far as you could see were all these spectacular rock formations, tiny little detailed trees and rocks, and smoke rising occassionally from areas where native tribal Kenyans still live and farm the land. I thought of Louise and all the geographers looking at the view because it was like geography come to life :)
At the top of the cliff there was an large wooden structure that swayed from side to side in the wind which we clambered up onto, Ben, one of the boys, shuddering and swearing that we were going to die. It was about the height of a three-storey building and the view was even more amazing from up there :D

Having walked uphill for about 2 hours to get there, we drunk the best cokes in the world (they were warm and exploded all over my camera but they were SUGAR and LIQUID), admired the view for a while and then got the sweatiest, bumpiest and most-delayed-by-silly-official-women-trying-to-make-us-pay-for-being-white bus ever back down. We stopped at a cute little hotel called the Graceland Hotel, ate some very nice and appreciated food, and then swam in their pool :D

Tuesday night was also interesting as we had offered to cook a full roast dinner for 10 people in our host family's kitchen. We made the mistake of not checking the equipment beforehand, and so a victoria sponge cake was mixed in a saucepan, and we soon discovered that:

1 dish of roast potatoes
+ 2 dishes of yorkshire pudding
+ 1.5 kilos of meat to be roasted
+ 1 victoria sponge cake to be cooked

does NOT = 2 very small shelves in an oven.
Consequently, the meal took 3 hours to cook, the victoria sponge cake was burnt and had to be made into a crumble with pineapple jam and icing sugar (sweetest thing ever), and we have vowed never to do this again.

BUT, the food all tasted rather good :)

It's impossible to lie-in in Kenya

I was awoken at about 6am today by Bum-Bum the dog (NO idea why he's named that) barking right outside my window on my left-hand-side, and the TV blaring loud news about Obama becoming president on my right-hand-side.

Talking of Obama, the people here love him, and absurdly connect him to us. Obama is half Kenyan, half American; we are white, which they connect to American, and thus people scream things at us like 'sister Obama!' and ask if we know him several times a day.

So the Kenyans must have seen us coming and not liked the look of our teaching ability, as the teachers are striking until at least the end of this week, and so we have nothing to do but wander around Nakuru (and go on facebook more often than we should). We are thinking of staying at Lake Victoria for a few days, maybe Wednesday to Friday, but we're not sure yet. We definately need something else to do.

I have put some photos on facebook today so go and take a look :) Here's one for those of you without facebook:This is me and a monkey in City Park, Nairobi :)

Please teacher, may I hit the nails on my desk with a rock?

Teaching is very fun but was very scary to start with! I've been assigned (mainly, they're very flexible) to a class of 60 children between about 9-11 and so far have taught English, Science and P.E. (ha) . P.E. is the most fun because we can do whatever we want, as long as the kids are moving around, so we just play lots of games. We've tried the hokey-cokey with them and our aim is to get all 600 children in the school doing it by the time we leave :D

Teaching English is a lot more difficult than I realised it would be; it's hard explaining how a sentence structure works or what a particular phrase means if you have no idea how to say it in swahili. I'm enjoying the challenge though.

The kids at the school are absolutely awesome; they are the loveliest, happiest people ever and will join in with whatever you start doing with them. They're very funny though as often we sit at the back of classes observing other lessons to get ideas for teaching, and the children will just turn around and grin at you every few minutes as if to check that you're still there and you're still white. They've already taught me a complicated clapping routine and we had a big singing session with the lower school kids (between 5 and 8ish) which was SO cute.

Everything else about the school is less happy. The teachers are lovely to us (one of them feeds me a weird type of Kenyan porridge every break time) but they have so little passion for teaching that it's depressing. They teach the most boring lessons and hit the children so much. It's technically illegal to cane children in Kenya, but on Thursday I saw literally every child in the class caned at least 3 times. Two 9-year-old girls forgot to write the date in their book and were hit over the leg until they were weeping and screaming. It was absolutely horrible but there's nothing we can do about it other than not doing it ourselves and hiding the canes whenever we have a chance. It was really shocking to see but it's made me want to be a really good teacher and friend to the kids. The school itself is also very poor, with no electricity, plumbing (toilets=holes in the ground which are the most foul thing ever) or shade for the kids at lunch.

On weekdays, my general day starts at about 7am; we wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast and walk to school for 8am and then teach, play with the children (yes I know how that sounds in your mind Will) and observe other lessons until about 3.30-4 when we walk back home. It's properly exhausting but so much fun.

This weekend we have been into Nakuru on both Friday and Saturday night, which involved quite a lot of drunkenness (not from me I'd like to add, although the fact that I'm insanely clumsy all the time has made a few people think I've drunk a lot more than I actually have). On Friday night we went to a bar called Taidy's, which does very good food, but where I gained 2 Kenyan boyfriends because my friend Amy was very drunk and decided to just assign men to random people. Luckily they seemed alright with a handshake and a smile and didn't care too much when I disappeared in horror. After Taidy's we found a very cute little Kenyan club with a good dance floor, but at this point the evening went down hill as some people had started drinking at 5pm and so by this point were at the collapsing-on-the-floor stage and needed looking after by the sober ones such as myself. The consequences of this drunkenness were very funny though.

Last night (Saturday) we went to another club called Summit, which is literally right on the border of Lake Nakuru National Park with lions, giraffes etc. It had a nice log fire that we sat around and a grassy area where we lay and admired the AMAZING stars until someone screamed 'OH NO THERE ARE SAFARI ANTS' and we all leapt up in terror. I had a good evening but I missed having people around with similar attitudes to alchohol and random Kenyan men as myself.

So today is Sunday and I am very tired, having not got home til 5am last night. I am looking foward to some sleep tonight :)

ps. Oh and the explanation behind the title of this blog is that if the children need the toilet, they come to me, as the teacher, put their hands together as though praying, and say 'please teacher, may I go to the toilet'. Often they mumble or their english isn't very good, and so we generally just say yes even if we can't hear what they're saying. So Rebecca, one of my friends I'm living with, did this the other day, and the response of the boy was to leave the classroom and return a few minutes later with a large rock. He promptly started whacking the loose nails on his desk, and those on the desks of any kid who put their hand up, with the rock. Extremely funny.

Giraffe kissing and more

So Kenya is AWESOME. Everyone I'm with is really lovely; I'm staying with two girls called Annie and Rebecca, who I get on really well with, and we're staying at a woman named Grace's house. Her 8 year old grandson, Gigi, also lives with us, and is adorable and hilarious, but less so when he demanded that I give him my i-pod.

My last week or so has been as follows (and I apologise for the long post because I know the attention span of many of you is limited)

--Some Giraffe Kissing - we visited a giraffe centre where you could feed and stroke the giraffes, which was absolutely amazing, and nobody was allowed out without feeding a giraffe from their mouth (i.e. kissing them). In my case it was more being licked by a giraffe but I think I prefer it that way.

--Some Monkey Feeding - we went to City Park in Nairobi, where there are wild monkeys which will come up and take peanuts from your hands, and, if you hold the nuts near your shoulder, will leap up onto it and climb on you for a while. This was SO cool. I also met a group of rather less friendly monkeys today in Nakuru (the town I'm staying in) National Park, who chased me and tried to cling to my leg. My friend Amy has a ridiculous photo of this somewhere so I will put it on here when she's around.

--Some Hippo Watching - we took a little wooden boat onto Lake Naivasha, which has wild hippos and about a billion pelicans who all float together in one area and heard the fish into a big group for them to eat. It was late afternoon when we did this so it was soooo beautiful.

--A Lot of Handshaking - we are the only white people in this little town so EVERYWHERE we go we are stared at, waved at, shouted at and hit upon. It's lovely when people are welcoming and want to make friends with you, but horrible when they start harrassing you. We visited 3 schools and 2 orphanages yesterday and were mobbed by childrern who find us absolutely fascinating. I must've shook the hands of hundreds of kids and at each school we were completely surrounded by children trying to grab our hands and hair and ask 'how are you how are you how are you' repeatedly, as this is the first english phrase they learn and they love it.

--Many many many servings of vegetables - the food here is quite good and it's easy to be a vegetarian, but getting a little tiring already; we generally eat Mocchimo, which is mashed potato and maize and herbs, and some kind of vegetable every day. The mangoes, which you can buy from wheelbarrows on the street, skinned and cut, for 20p, are amazing.

-- A Lot Of Very Scary Driving - the drivers here are NUTS. Lots of screaming and bumped heads is involved in every journey. And the vans have a tendancy to almost break at every major roundabout.

--Some More Wildlife - I have also seen SO many flamingoes and pelicans at Lake Nakuru today, where we went on a kind of safari, as well as gazelles, pumbas (wild boar), zebras, giraffes, rhinos and some scary looking vulture-like birds.

I start teaching tomorrow which should be amazing. I told the headteacher I'd like to teach some art and he seemed really enthusiastic, so I am going to be teaching English, Art and Mathematics (oh dear).

So yes, missing everyone back home but loving it out here.

Auf Wiedersehen England

This feels really, really bizarre. I am having huge difficulties understanding that I am actually not going to spend a full day in this country until July. And that I am actually getting on this plane to Kenya!

It was the weirdest and saddest thing, saying goodbye to everyone today. After seeing people everyday and knowing all the tiny silly insignificant details of their lives for God knows how long, it seems insane that I'm not actually going to see everyone for 6 months.

I am, however, immensely looking forward to seeing a zebra, and a giraffe, and some REAL SUN (I had an email from Karanja, the guy who's meant to help us when we're out there, yesterday saying that it was 'cold' in Nairobi as it was only 28-32 degrees Celsius). I have printed out the big list of everyone's addresses so when a large and stripy package appears on your doorstep please don't be alarmed :)

(ps. As Chloe has already requested a giraffe friend in addition to this, I feel I should also offer a spotty and tall package instead/as well as the stripy one) :)