Blogs from Shimoni, Coast Province, Kenya, Africa

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Africa » Kenya » Coast Province » Shimoni September 18th 2010

Well, I found out where I will be spending the next three months. It's a place called Vipingo, and it's an hour north of Mombasa. It's a more conservation oriented place, versus more aimed at tourism. They have had 130 turtle nests since January, and there are 8 currently on the beach. I'll be living with a homestay family, which is exciting. I'll also have access to a computer and the internet so I can do research, which I will definitely be doing. I'm hopefully going to be looking into building a hatchery, giving presentations on the different types of marine life seen in the area, and making up forms to be able to record them. That will probably take up a lot of my time during the expo, and I may spend a few weeks ... read more

Africa » Kenya » Coast Province » Shimoni August 6th 2010

Jambo! Well, week 5 has come and gone. I can’t believe how fast the first half of this expo has gone for me. I’m still having fun, and loving my time out here. This week I was doing community work in Shimoni. Normally this would involve mostly teaching at 3 different schools, but it turned out that this was the first week of holidays for the kids, so I did more community work. On Monday my fellow volunteer and I got our TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) training. It’s harder than I thought, but at the same time it all makes sense. Ours was geared more towards children, and it told us things like, keep the language simple, don’t over complicate the lessons, and make sure they know you are the one in charge. ... read more

Africa » Kenya » Coast Province » Shimoni July 24th 2010

Jambo! This was another fun week of forest, monkeys and good company. Abduls refers to the local restaurant that we eat at almost every Wednesday. This week went somewhere different, but I want to tell you about the amazing food that Abduls gives us. We have to order several hours ahead, because normally there are over 10 of us going. Once we arrive we get a glass of nice, cold tamarind juice, followed by a chapatti. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s fried flat bread. Then its coconut rice, coconut sauce, scuma, which is a spinach mixture that’s fried and very good, fried cabbage, beans, and a whole fried fish per person. I come away nice and full every time. There are also several cats that live in that area and whenever we ... read more

Africa » Kenya » Coast Province » Shimoni July 17th 2010

Spiders, spiders everywhere, and all of them on your face. Or at least across your path. It's amazing how fast spiders are at building webs across our paths in the forest even if we had been there 3 hours before. And they are big, at least compared to spiders back in North America that I've seen. The biggest was a Golden Orb spider which was as big as my hand, and I almost walked into him. As you might have guessed, this week was all about the forest. We have been out every day this week, and done so much. We did bird point count surveys, where we watched for all of the birds we could spot. We did human disturbance where we walked along our transects and would look for signs of humans (ie: stumps, ... read more

Africa » Kenya » Coast Province » Shimoni July 10th 2010

Well, I have now been in Shimoni Kenya for a whole week, and it has been amazing. We got picked up from our hotel in Mombasa on Saturday and bused out to Shimoni. There were around 20 of us, so it made for a very fun bus ride. It was such an eye opener to look out and see the people and places go by the windows. I have travelled to developing countries before, but this was very different from any place I've been to before. In Shimoni we got lunch and a briefing at the Shimoni Reef Hotel, which is a very nice place. Some of the GVI staff are based there. After eating I learned that for the first 4 weeks I would be doing forest work based in Shimoni Village. After that I ... read more

Africa » Kenya » Coast Province » Shimoni August 25th 2007

I met up with the group for my volunteer project on the 10th of August (Friday) in Mombassa, and we went to Diani beach for a couple of days for our orientation meetings. The group are all really nice - 13 girls and 2 boys, so quite unbalanced though. After being briefed on the local customs and culture, and being given some health and safety talks, we just relaxed on the beach for the rest of our time in Diani, and then on the sunday afternoon we headed to a small village called Shimoni, a bit further south along the coast from Mombassa. We've been living in Shimoni village for 2 weeks now, in a local house that we have rented out for the time we are there. The house is pretty basic - 4 bedrooms ... read more




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