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 :)