Bug (close up)

In case any of you wanted a closer look at the bug boy's bug...

Sports kit

 

Bethany is not impressed that the PE kit looks like a boys soccer outfit. We get more American everyday as words slip into our vocabulary. Daniel hates this and always corrects the children, but I think it is just an inevitable result of living in an international community. Maybe Caleb will always have a slightly Dutch accent!

School

 

We had fun today trying on the school uniform. Now I have the fun of sewing on all the woven labels! School starts next Tuesday.

Houses

 

Through the trees, houses for the workers that work on the tea plantations.

Lunch

 

Lunch at Brakenhurst. Definitely worth a trip, we will take you if you come to visit!

Brackenhurst

 

Today we tried a different church (Rosslyn International Christian Fellowship, we have been going to Karen Vineyard) and then headed out of the city to Brackenhurst Christian Conference centre. It is about an hour out of Nairobi up amongst the tea plantations. Again we were struck by the contrasts in this city. We drove through beautiful neighbourhoods near the embassies with amazing houses and then a few minutes later were in really poor areas, with kids rumaging around on rubbish heaps. I took a few photos but it is difficult when you are driving at speed. I don't want people to see the camera or me taking pictures of them. I am also not too keen on being shot for taking a photo of an embassy.

Buying trainers

..A simple thing you would think, but one that demonstrates the stark differences in this city. We are in the process of kitting out the children with their school uniform and needed to buy trainers. I went to the shoe shop in one of the very nice malls that I enjoy shopping in, price £60 plus per pair. I mumbled something about not buying them today and hurriedly left the shop. A new experience feeling very poor. I come from Dodoma where I felt like a millionaire to Nairobi where I feel scruffy and poor. Anyway the next plan was to go to the second hand market. If I am honest I would rather not shop there. It is dirty and smelly, there are people everywhere (almost none of them white). There was also a rather dead looking guy (I think he was dead because someone had covered his face) with horrible looking burns over his chest lying by the side of the road. To be honest I didn’t look too closely because it wasn’t very nice. But you wander past feeling like you are doing the complete opposite of the good Samaritan. I was actually quite pleased that when I walked past later the man had been taken away somewhere. What do you do in those situations? What you really want to do is go racing back to the nice clean mall, have a cappuccino and forget that that side of the world exists. How can it be in a world of bandwidth, decaf lattes, and cereal that costs £10 a packet that side by side with this there are people dying on the pavement?

We managed to get trainers eventually but next time I will buy them on sale in a sports shop in the UK!

Bug Boy

 

The bug boy asked me to take a photo of his new friend! Some things never change.

Relaxing at lunch

 

Brothers

 

Silly swimmers

 

Day out

 

As Daniel starts work next week we decided to have a special day out and went to Windsor Country Club. It sounds posh and it was, and we are clearly not, but there seems to be some system here whereby really nice places let in riff raff like us at a cheap day rate, allow us to use their facilities all day and treat us like full fee paying guests. It was the kind of place that in the UK we would have been thrown out of for not wearing the right clothes. Needless to say it is a system that works for us and we had a fantastic day. We swam or lounged by the pool while waiters kept bringing us delicious food and drinks. They provided us with towels, shampoo and shower gel and the pool was kept heated at 30 degrees C. We realised that it was the first time in over 4 years that we had actually had somewhere we could go for a day trip. The nearest day trip from Dodoma was a 7 hour drive away. There are definitely some advantages to living in a big city!

Hindu temple

 

Another example of interesting things you see here, a Hindu temple. We saw this shortly after the camel. Sorry not a great photo as we were driving past it and I took the photo quickly because I wasn't sure whether or not it was allowed and I also had the camera on some weird light setting.

Driving in Nairobi

 

You see all sorts of random things when you drive around Nairobi, with our new A to Z we have been all over the place. Today in the middle of the road works we saw this guy on a camel, completely random, so I took a sneaky photo. You get a lot of people selling things in and around the traffic like you do in any 3rd world city from DVDs to bottles of water to aerials. It was the same in Dar, but this week, a first for me, we saw a guy selling rabbits one day and then the next day puppies. Sorry no picture of this, he was too close to me to be able to take a subtle photo.

Cake time!

 

Playing musical chairs

 

Compound party

 

On Thursday, to celebrate children's birthday's in July and August we had a joint compound birthday party. Unfortunately 6 of the children have already started school so couldn't be there, here are the remaining 10. (There are also 2 babies not in the picture). It was a great way to have a party as we divided up all the tasks with each mum organising one game. The kids had a fantastic time and a pile of candy prizes at the end.

First impressions

Not sure what to write this week. Nairobi is just a big city with lots of cars, lots of shopping malls and lots of people. You can buy almost anything here but everything is very expensive. Would you pay £9 for a small box of cereal? In some ways it has been very useful living in Tanzania first and then coming here. There are so many things I am used to not being available, that now I don't even look for them on the shelves, even though I could probably get them here. I am grateful for a much smaller supermarket 5 minutes walk from the house which although huge by Dodoma standards is much smaller than the other Nairobi hyper markets and makes shopping much simpler and quicker even if you can't buy everything you want. It's the type of shopping I have got used to.

In some ways, here, it is easy to forget that you're in Africa, especially when the temperatures have been quite low and we have been freezing. However, every so often you get a small reminder of Africa, you see a gecko scurry across the wall or a huge cockroach. The cockroach made me feel nostalgic for the real Africa, temporarily and then I killed it because frankly in any context they are gross. The kids were pretty excited to see a monkey on the roof at church. We actually got Caleb out of the service to see it as he would have been gutted to miss it. (Josh had spotted it on a toilet break). Not so many monkeys at church in England! The power cuts and the 3 days without water were also a good reminder that we are still in Africa and it is always nice to talk Swahili with the vegetable sellers outside the compound. In Tanzania we lived much closer to the normal Tanzanians and to quite poor people. Here however, there are a lot more rich nationals and the real poor seem to be in their own areas, like Kibera. (Largest slum in Africa 600,000-1.5million people) So in some ways the poverty, although very real, is hidden away.

Dressing up

Dressing up biker people. Joshua is on the left. After 4 years in Dodoma with no where to go the kids are excellent are making up their own games and are very loathe to leave the compound. There is a small alley that runs behind all the back gardens and each garden has a small gate in it, so the children are free to run in and out of each others gardens.

Ibis

Kenya

These Ibis birds seem to live in and around our compound, they are huge and make a very loud noise like a crying baby. They often sit in groups on the ridges of the houses.

Kenyan compound B

This is our compound in Kenya. A bit different from Tanzania. To me it looks a little like somewhere in England not like east Africa. I do miss the rural roughness of our Tanzanian compound but the kids are having a fantastic time here and spend all day playing outside with all the other children. There are now 18 children on the compound ranging from 3 weeks to 11 and from Australia, Canada, America, Scotland, South Africa and Holland. The team here is more commonwealth than European. Other diffences to Tanzania include the concentration like barbed wire fence that we have on top of our six foot wall and the panic buttons in the houses, which when pressed summon men with guns!