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Charlotte's Travels
Hi everyone, the last few weeks have been more chaotic and busy than usual and I feel a bit like I'm being stretched in five different directions. Jessie and I are visiting children's homes. It's often an odd experience, we end up all over the city in obscure subrurbs and towns. We usually wake up and get home in the dark and spend most of the hours in between stuck matatus waiting Narobi's truly shocking traffic and then getting hopelessly lost. Luckily Kenyans are increcibly helpful at giving directions, even the usual hoard of creepy men who attempt to befriend us while have a break from creepiness to explain in detail exactly where to go and will run after you (relatively non-creepily) if they then see you make a wrong turn.
I've been feeling emotional at our children's home visits, I think because it makes the predicament of all these children hit home. From my experience the bad homes are the government run ones. The private homes I've visited have been fantastic. The children are given love, attention, activities and are healthy and clean. Strangely I find this the hardest to cope with. These places give the children nearly everything they need usually with less resources and support than Nariobi Children's Home. I find the waste of the children I care for because of the arrogance and complacency of the adults hard to cope with.
People ask why Jessie and I are doing these visits, although the homes themselves seem not to bat an eyelid when two 20 year old foreigner turn up on their doorsteps asking questions. We don't have a clear answer to why we go, but we have this opportunity while we are here to see things we would never usually get to see and we are trying to take advantage of it. We are both passionate about protecting vulnerable children and I think in a few years may come back to try and do more about it and we've learnt alot by seeing a variety of different homes. We also just needed to reassure ourselves that not everywhere is as bad as Nairobi Children's Home. I'm hoping to write a more comprehensive piece when I get back to NZ and alot of what I've seen will feed into my honours thesis so I won't go into details on specific homes right now.
Another experience that made me re-see everything I see everyday was a visit we made a month ago to the International School of Kenya. We turned up at the home one morning and two buses were waiting outside. Not knowing what was going on, we followed 30 of our older kids onto the buses and ended up transported to a different world. I mean it, when we got out at the beautiful open ISK grounds with American and British English speaking, please and thankyou saying, caring teachers and parents trying to get the children to line up while the NCH staff stoof back and watched, I almost had culture shock, towards my own culture. It was a really good morning for the kids, they were buddied up with ISK's second grade class and made macaroni necklaces with their help. A bit dazed, I ran around (while NCH staff watched) letting the ISK kids know their buddies names and translating my usual rhetoric of 'sit down', 'look here', 'good work' and 'do you need to go to the toilet?' It's a good thing I did because the children are not veyr well toilet trained so I enlisted some teachers to take a group en masse to the bathrooms where the teachers couldn't get over the children's questionable toilet etiquette and me and the kids couldn't get over the properly running water and soap. Afterewards we all went outside for morning tea and I nearly laughed when the hand sanitiser was brought out, when Sharon dropped her cup on the ground and a teacher rushed to get her a new clean one and when one of the second graders asked if I was any of the kids' mum. The KIS kids were really nice to the NCH kids and the NCH kids were the calmest and most well behaved I've ever seen them, which just proves that they can be really good kids in the right environment.
I don't think I realised I was any good at swahili until that day. I'm still not actually very good, but I have a workable amount, at least with the children. Last weekend I went on safari and had my first full (very basic) swahili conversation with a maasai guard at our camp.
The masai mara was truly beautiful with a kind of landscape I love. The way the sky and grassy plains go on forever, it feels like being at sea. We spent two days driving around it, which is alot more interesting than it sounds. It was very relazing to be in this land and seeing animals in the wild was like no zoo or aninmal park can ever be. My favourites were actually the zebras, which you expect to be just like a horse, but the stripes somehow make them ten times cooler.
We visited a nearby masai village, I was worried it would be be tourist oriented, but it wasn't at all. While the others were shown how to make fire and convinced to buy necklaces and knives, I got distraced playing with children (lately, the story of my life). They were hilarious and I was so thankful for the little swahili I had which warmed them up to me. Masai jump up and down, don't ask me why, so I spent half an hour jumping up and down in the mud with the children. I'm becoming convinced I'm really just a kid myself, but with alot less energy, half an hour of jumping completley wore me out. I've been invited to stay with the tribe which I want to do when I come back to Kenya next January. I'm excited, but nervous. They sleep in mudhuts, drink cow's blood and only five people speak English. But I tried some of their honey beer and it was delicious, so may I'll be fine so long as I build up my stamina for jumping up and down.
Back in Nairobi, everything didn't look nearly as beautiful but it is beginning to feel like home now. On Saturday we helped Tim, an Australian volunteer, run a sports day and the boys' rehabilitation centre he works at. It was a big day and I didn't wear sunscreen so I'm now bright red, a nice look when went out to Black Diamond, the crazy bar we frequent for its' dancefloor.
This week is another busy one. I'm trying to visit two mroe childrne's homes because it's Jessie last full week (which I'm trying not to think about). We may be going to Nakuru for a wedding this weekend and on Wednesday I'm taking Maria to court to get her legally transferred to Machakos where Cherotich and Jessie's Mary are already legally committed (they made a mistake and forgot to commit Maria). Thankfully the home is only taking Maria and a few other kids, an improvement on last time when we took 35 children and 7 babies in a van designed to seat 14 and sat all morning on the cement ground at teh back of the court watching police and court officials walk around being important in any way that didn't involve children (it's a children's court, what do you expect?). In court, the children's names were read out (three had been left behind by accident, but no one seemed to care) , a few mutterings were made about some and the day was finally over. Except for the two hour drive back stuck in traffic with 42 hot cramed children and babies.
I think that's enough for one blog post, Kwaheri
- comments
gia hey charlotte, what a wonderful comprehensive post. i'm really interested in your honors thesis topic and argument so when you start working on that, if you're interested in having an eye, i have two that would be overjoyed to take a look. the field research you're doing is invaluable and you document it really well. i really feel that i am with you when i read your writing and have images in my head without trying. i really feel your energy and the feelings that these experiences conjure for you. i'm sure it's all terribly joyful and hilariously terrifying all at once, every minute. glad to know what you're up to, and also excited to hear that you plan to go back to kenya in january! if you're there for a while, maybe i (and mourra) could come visit you. all the best, gia