I’M LAUGHING AT CLOUDS, SO DARK UP ABOVE – When you think of Africa what kind of image pops into your head? Beautiful sunsets, clear blue skies, scorching heat, dry land and a nice cold coke in your hand to cool you down. That’s the image that often pops into my head, or at least while I was back in the UK. Well this week the weather changed, quite dramatically, one day it was all blue skys above, now its grey, very grey and the rain has kept pouring, which is fantastic! The problem of dust which we have all been dealing with has now ended, I think I must have swallowed many kilos of the rich red dust, in and around the kids home, now instead of dust whirling its way into every nook and cranny, all over and in the car, through the windows of the office into the tiny gaps on the laptop, we now have thick sloppy mud EVERYWHERE!!! The last few days as I have been driving down the road I have noticed something different and that is mainly the number of people walking ON the road. Its hard enough dodging other cars as it is, let alone people as well. And then all of sudden the penny dropped and the obvious answer finally entered my brain; the pavements are all dirt, no tarmac so people were avoiding the mud. If it was me making my way through the muddy and wet streets of Nairobi on foot I think I would prefer mud up to my ankle rather than a bull bar of some massive 4x4 wrapped around my head!
MAMBO.....POA – So I have always admitted my poor skills in learning other languages, but it seems I am slowly managing to learn a little bit of Swahili, but not your text book Swahili, the every day Swahili that gives you a little kudos when conversing with your average Kenya Joe. Mary in the office is always trying to teach me new things but probably the best phrase so far has been MAMBO... which is responded with POA. I have used this a number of times on people I just happened to meet and they look at me with shock and disbelief and then they smile and we both laugh. Works a charm every time and my hope is that maybe, just maybe this little phrase will separate me from all the rich embassy and big NGO Muzungus.
LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL – I moved into my new house a week ago, and it was a very strange experience, suddenly being all alone. Monday night was odd, but I coped, I cooked myself some food (didn’t taste that great, bit out of the habit) but I’m still here so thats good. Tuesday night as i had not seen them for about a whole 36 hours, David and Juliet came over for dinner, along with Mo, who lives across the road. We had drinks on the veranda (the sun was still shining at this point), and then Chris and Maia (my next door neighbours, they live in the guest house on the same plot) to say hi, so I invited them to stay. Ok it was me cooking again so I had to step up the game a little, so I brought out the big guns, Pesto, Bacon, Mushrooms and pasta, always a winner (and very easy!). We all had a great time and spent all night pretty much out on the veranda chatting. So David and Juliet stayed over as they live so far across town. The next day we all headed off to work. And that night I wanted to collect one of my birthday presents from across their side of town so I was invited to dinner back at David and Juliets. Hey it had been at least 10 hours since we had seen each other!! So whats this story really all about, and all the bat stuff.... well here is a parental advisory warning, if you are easily scared, or you are related to me or you are thinking of visiting don’t read the next paragraph, just jump down to the next wee story..... anyways back to Wednesday night, in the area where David and Juliet live there are many UN workers, Embassys, NGOs etc and there are some times car jacking, where they steal your car, or worse, kidnap you and hold you for ransom, so basically not a good area to drive around at night on your own. I could have stayed at their house, but with visitors arriving the next day I wanted to get home and get the house ready. I decided to leave at 8:30pm, so not too late, but lets be honest I was pretty nervous. I had a plan though, and this will be called ‘Kierens plan to foil all car jackers and generally nasty people while driving home, whilst probably being a useless plan’ plan. So the plan involves driving as fast as you can, with full car beam headlights on to dazzle everyone and anyone and wearing a hoody to hide my white skin whilst playing the fugees really loud through the speakers so perhaps by some small chance I myself might seem like a car jacker or a gangster and then everyone would leave me alone. I don’t know how great this plan is, but what i can tell you is I made it home safe and sound. Most people probably thought what is this crazy muzungu doing trying to drive his 4x4 like a rally car through the streets wearing a hoody and sweating hugely due to the heat listening to rap music??? I have now decided in future, just stay over, much better option. And for those of you naughty people warned not to read this bit... don’t worry, it all sounds worse than it really is, you have more chance getting knocked over on the roads back home than getting car jacked here! (maybe?)
BARCLAYS – Just a quick shout out to Barclays bank. I plugged Robs book the other week (Cycling home from Siberia.... look there is another plug for Rob, great book, I’m almost finished!), so here is a plug for Barclays: I am not a customer, don’t work for them, don’t know anyone who does. On Friday I walked into Samuels office to find 3 well dressed young men in Barclays ties and jumpers, all smartly dressed and certainly looking like bankers. I was told they were coming the next day to do some work at the home. Samuel was going to be away on Saturday, but I said I would be around, and would be bringing my own visitors (Mark and Alice) anyways. I expected it to be another, ‘lets worship the corporate day’. In fact it was AWESOME. About 30 – 40 people came from branches all over Nairobi. They brought sweets, an amazing lunch, tools, paint, trees for planting, sports equipment, schools supplies and very very big smiles and plenty of laughter. They cleaned the class rooms, planted trees, ran career mentorship meetings with the older ones (many of these guys had come from poor backgrounds before becoming bankers). We worshipped, we danced, we played loud music on the PA, we laughed, we prayed, we presented, we ate an we all had a fabulous time. They all wore bright blue T shirts with Barclays on, but apart from that, there was no plugging, no official photos, the whole focus was on the kids. I do believe many of the Barclays staff were moved by the whole experience. They were so relaxed and so much fun. So all praise to the corporate, Barclays, on Saturday at Cheryls Childrens Home you rocked! Thank you! (for your info, apparently Barclays do this kind of thing, on this day all over the world... I wonder how many other groups enjoyed their day as much as we did?).
GUTTED – So its raining, a lot! Currently we are paying for water each week for the kids home, we have to buy it in and its expensive. What we need is some guttering where we can channel the rain water into our tanks. We have the tanks, just not the guttering. There are so many financial priorities at the moment, many of the kids are getting ill, because of the rain, and when money is short who can afford something as simple as guttering. Well we were so chuffed when one of the current volunteers offered to cover the costs! AWESOME! They started today and the guttering will be going up in the next day of so. We can collect rain water, save some money and maybe help the old environment a little bit too, so not really gutted about all that!
THE PLAN – Why do I always leave the most important stories until the end... do people even read this far down the blog? Probably not. Anyways if you have, consider yourself privileged to read the most important bit. The pressures on the home are immense, cash flow is always an issue and once we pay one bill, i feel great, only to discover we now need to find money to pay the next thing. That I have to say is slightly depressing! But we have a plan... the home already does a little bit of child sponsorship, but do to moving money globally etc the cash flow is not always great and we only have 28% of the children sponsored. We have worked out a new plan for sponsorship and are currently working on the finer details so we can get it going ready for the Cherish Watoto Kenya official UK charity launch later in November. If we can get 100% of the kids sponsored that would mean the running costs of the whole project would be covered, including future staff that need to be employed in the next 12 months. That would be awesome. Its a mighty task, its a lot of children, but if we can achieve this in the next 10 months or so it means we can focus on developing the bigger picture. This is the plan, its exciting and if we get their it will revolutionise Cheryls. It will mean staff will get paid every month, as opposed to when money is available, bills would get paid on time, and we wouldn’t have the same money pressures everyone week. For Sam who has run this place for the last 10 years I think he needs a break from these money worries, it would be great to give him that next year.
AND THE WINNER IS – Thank you for all the entries to the competition for naming my car. If you look at the pics way below you can get a wee glimpse of it. Now there were many good suggestions as well as some rubbish ones... and although you are meant to give cars a girls name I have to announce that Claire Oxenham (and Amy too I think) have won the competition and will receive a free guided tour of Nairobi in my car, at any time of their choosing (flights not included, but accommodation is). My car shall now be named, hence forth: RON.... and for those wondering why, well my car is a burgundy colour, a little bit big and clumsy in driving and well is basically a legend... just like Ron Burgundy from the film ANCHOR MAN, one of my fav films of all time. So well done Claire (and amy), congratulations.... and well for me thats it, again too much to say in this blog, there have been many more adventures, so for now all I can say is “Thats all from me, I’m Kieren Barnes, you stay classy San Diego”.
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