Nairobi

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Hello again!

I am back in Ngong about to go into Nairobi centre. Last Monday was an interesting day, I took the bus into Nairobi and one of the lovely people from Fadhili took me to all the various main branches of Barclays in the city. Turned out to be a completely lost cause, Barclays are currently refusing to refund me my money and saying that they have already given it back to my bank Nationwide - but when I phoned up Nationwide they said they can't do anything until I have sent them a written letter with all my bank details and the valuable receipt which acknowledges that I should be reimbursed. Do I trust the Kenya post system enough to send my only evidence?

Other than that, we have had a very busy week - from Tuesday to Friday we have been teaching every single day, and it is so tiring! On Friday, some of the previous volunteers left, which has meant that we will have more classes next week. I will be teaching 3-4 classes per day, which may not seem a lot, but the preparation which you have to put into it is huge. David is going to be just teaching 1 class a day and then doing construction work for the school - they were very happy to learn that he spent the last 6 months doing manual labour and they opened up an empty classroom full of broken desks for him!

The children are very enthusiastic, but it is of course more difficult to teach them - English is often their 2nd or 3rd language, after Kimaasai and Kiswahili, so we are effectively teaching across a language barrier too - quite challenging! The class sizes are also crazy - Class 4 has 63 students, Class 5 has 48 students, so making sure that each child is understanding what we are saying is hard! I really like my Class 6 students, and there is only 26 of them in the class, so I feel like they are really learning a lot because I can devote individual time to them if they need it. I think the student numbers drop off as you go up the school, because by Class 6 the students are about 14 and therefore more useful around the house than at school, so thats when some families will stop sending their children to school.

We are slowly getting used to Maasai family structures too. The Maasai men usually have multiple wives, so it is quite unusual for a student to say to me "I would like you to meet my motherS" note the plural mothers!! SO many of the Maasai's are so astounded that in the UK people only have 1 wife. They say "but surely it is so difficult for the women to do all the housework by themselves?"

It may be a while until you next hear from us, next weekend we are going on safari to the Maasai Mara game park with 5 of our other friends, we will update you all soon!

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