Visit from Parents

---

Hello and I am back in Saikeri after a very nice holiday to Mombasa for 5 days with my parents and sister! They arrived and visited Saikeri, saw the closing ceremony at school and then we travelled to the coast. It was very relaxing but now I am back in Saikeri, I'm back teaching, the well has broken so we have no water, all 3 pick-up trucks are broken so no one can travel to Ngong, and there is the onset of another drought and famine in Kenya. However, I am still having a great time, absolutely loving it and am very happy! It is amazing how humans are able to adapt to live without these luxuries such as water, transport, etc...

I am very lucky that today one matatu came from another town very very very far, through Saikeri, and we managed to hitch a lift to Ngong. I was literally horizontal in the air inside this Nissan minivan, squashed on top of so many other people. So I have managed to make it to the internet!

Once again, I have organised tuition for the Standard 7s and Standard 8s, with the help of Becky, and one boy who is about 25, a former pupil at Saikeri and is now a teacher in another school. So the three of us have been teaching for 1 week now, and we have another 1 week to go. It has been going very well - I am eternally grateful for the help from this other teacher, because obviously me and Becky are unable to teach Kiswahili and Social Studies (think Geography and History of Kenya) to any high level.

The borehole (well) is broken again, and is driving us all insane - in Kenya, for anything to happen, you have to be so careful to contact the right person-in-charge. The borehole was broken for 1 week and finally a mechanic arrived, but he had not been summoned by the right person in charge in Saikeri. The Saikeri water committee (the elders) had not yet had a meeting to decide what to do about the broken borehole. And until they gave their blessing, the mechanic was too scared to fix anything. We literally were in a situation where no one in the whole village had drinking water or water to cook with.

Maggie has been summoned by the Kenyan government to be a Supervisor in the Kenyan census, which is happening on Monday. So she has been away, and we had about 5 new-ish volunteers who wanted water to wash and cook and wanted water to drink... so on the worst ever day, I was forced to be a complete mzungu and walk to the nearest town and pay someone a lot of money to take a bicycle to the next well, which was very far, so that cooking and drinking could resume in our house. It was not one of my proudest moments when the rest of the village saw water being bought to the doctor's house - but there are 4000 people in Saikeri and around, I can't buy water for all of them, and they cannot afford to do the same as me. It could jeopardise the whole volunteer program if volunteers went away saying they starved and had nothing to drink. Unfortunately life in Saikeri sometimes presents a few moral dilemmas which are not nice to deal with.

Several people have very kindly asked about the food situation at school. Luckily the government has responded very well to the imminent food crisis and famine - they have donated money to every school to buy relief food for the months of September and October, and then school closes at the end of November anyway. Which is very good, because again the food that I last bought was all eaten by 400 very hungry students. I will update on the situation when we go back to school in September 7th because in Kenya you must never count your chickens until they hatch...

I am going to try very hard to come into Ngong after school on Wednesday, to track down an exam paper which people in Ngong are running around trying to find for my students. I am planning a special blog update on Wednesday. Olesere na.

---