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.