Okay, so we have been gone for nearly a month, it is therefore high time we did some blogging.
We spent 3 weeks in a little village called Maanzoni (near Wamunyu in Mwala district, Eastern Province) taking part in a work camp with KVDA - Kenya Volunteer Development Agency. There were 5 international volunteers including us, 2 from Kenya (including the leader) and 4 from the community we were working with. We learned a lot about African time our first day, an 8 o'clock departure meant we left Nairobi around noon. We finally arrived in Maanzoni to be greeted by the womens' group singing and dancing with our vehicle to the Primary School where we were saying. After brief introductions we were served our first meal - goat stew with nothing left out. African portions are HUGE and an African portion of goat entrails was more than most of us could handle after a long bus journey, except for Taira, our Japanese comrad. Taira consitently was up for seconds before most of us had taken a mouthful and goat was no exception.
The community we stayed with were lovely, so welcoming and friendly and really excited we were there. This was a little bit because they see wazungu (white people) as being angels and the west as heaven, but mostly they were just genuinely happy to have visitors.
The community took a day to show us round all there projects they wanted help with, a total of 7 or 8 from which we chose 2 that we could get started on straight away. All the projects were to do with their need for water, the closest reliable supply is at least 4km away at the Athi river and they wanted us to help build some sand dams and also dig out a dam that was already built so it would hold more water. We were all sceptical at first, we didnt understand the necessity to build a dam to keep sand in, surely you want to keep the water?! That evening we went for a little walk with the local volunteers and saw a sand dam that had been built before and saw women collecting water from a hole dug in the sand, the idea being that the sand can hold the water for much longer than it could be in the open and you don't have to dig down very far to start getting water. It was a far from ideal situation but definitely better than having to walk miles.
Our working days were only from 8.45am-12.30pm since the community members had other commitments and we were not there to work for them but to work with them. African time means people started arriving from 9.30am and most people are there by 11.30am meaning time to get work done was quite short. We continued to amaze the women by carrying rocks with our hands and getting dirty while they amazed us by carrying rocks 3 times the size of the ones we could manage. It is common practice for girls to start carrying 20L of water when they are very young, they carry it on their heads and must have necks of steel. We tried carrying maize on our heads but it was far too heavy and they all laughed.
The local volunteers were amazing to us. Ngila, Benjamin, Faith and Vincent were our best friends and our guides for those three weeks. They made sure we didn't get ripped off in town, made sure we always had a vehicle home, took us to their homes and generally looked after us. Their families are also amazing cooks. After church one Sunday we had 2 lunches, first at Ngila's house for elevenses and then Benjamin's for chicken lovingly killed infront of us. We all had thirds of everything.
Talking about chicken killing, Andrew is very proud of having now killed his own meat, even if he did make a lot of mess. The trick to chicken killing is to cut far enough through the neck to puncture the windpipe therefore killing it, but not so far as to cut the head off entirely so the stump of a neck is left to flail around wildly spattering blood on your feet; Andrew learned this the hard way. Chicken blood is hard to get out when hand washing.
There are many many more things we could write about our time in Maanzoni, and we have - just only in hard paper form just now. And we haven't even started talking about the safari animals: from cute to scary and all things in between, but it is time to leave the internet now. We shall be back soon. Hopefully.
