Hello again

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I have finally managed to get Travelblog to work again after a delay of about 2 weeks when all of their servers were down, I was very annoyed!

Here is an entry I wrote about 1 week ago and planned to post:

The safari was absolutely excellent, we had a great time. Back in the maasai village we are plodding along, there's more problems with the starvation. Last year, all the violence has caused big problems for Kenya - a lot of the killing happened in the west, where there is a lot of farmland, so lots of farmer's were killed or had to run away from their homes, so there's not enough food produced this year. And because of all the corruption in the government, the someone stole something like $2billion dollars worth of the government's supplies of maize, so there are major food shortages right now.

The school we are at is supposed to give a free meal to the students every day, but this hasn't happened for weeks now. The families don't feed their children because they rely on the free meal they get at school, but now the children aren't eating at school and the parent's still can't afford to feed them. I am finding it very difficult to watch children in my classes asleep on their desks when I walk into the room, because they haven't eaten for 3 days.

They are also registering for their exams right now, which costs each family Ksh 500, which is 5 pounds, but to most of them that takes weeks to save up. There was one child in Standard 8 which is the last year of secondary school, who is about to take his exams, who is so sick because he fell and a stick went through his knee, and it swelled up huge and he can't move his leg. I suspect it is dislocated or broken and the piece of stick still in the leg has caused some sort of infection. He couldn't afford 7pounds to have an xray, so for almost a month he has just been hopping everywhere, and has accepted that is his future because the family can't imagine ever getting enough to pay for treatment.

Also, on Tuesday when we came back from safari we decided to do something I said I wouldn't do - we went into Kibera and Kawangware which are the two big slums in Nairobi. Kibera is apparently the biggest in Africa, and it is a horrendous place. The streets consist of just dark alleyways of muddy human waste, and people put up 4 sticks with some plastic or cloth on top and sleep under that. There is so much disease. We went to visit an orphanage, of about 200 children living in a area just a bit bigger than my home in Scotland. The children seem surprisingly unaffected by it however! I really wanted to take pictures to show everyone what the shanty towns are like, but we didn't feel safe there at all and I didn't want to get my camera out!

I realise that this has been a slightly morbid post, we are having a very good time here, but the problems are so very obvious.

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