Our trek into Africa is nearly coming to an end. As I’m writing this the day before we fly out to Amsterdam. We’ve had a long and arduous time here, but it’s finally time to go home…
And by home, I mean Europe and THEN home.
The week began with on a slow start. On Monday we continued our lessons with all the little children. We started with Word and taught them more sentence structure and typing techniques as well as how to make the font look AWESOME. This consisted of all the classes except P4. So the kids really enjoyed the button that let them make smiley faces and different shapes. Lunch that day was Ugali and greens….
On the way home, we picked some water for our team meeting that night where we hashed out a few of the problems we had faced the last week.
Tuesday was even slower, that day we wrapped the lessons with the kids and showed them our lesson which was more of the same stuff, but with more coloring and shapes-makin’. Lunch that day was Makandai….
Wednesday picked up speed when instead of taking us directly the teachers meeting the way we thought it would happen, they took us to the school track meet, where the kids ran races, threw javelins, shot-puts, and even a weird little relay race with gunny sacks and bottles. We didn’t have much to do during this but at the end, they had the teachers run a race where they stuck us in the middle. We had fun as some of us were really good, and the others just couldn’t keep up. I’m talking about the Matts, seriously guys, take some Jazzercise or something. After cooling off the sunburn we had gotten from watching the students they took us back to the school to wrap up their ceremonies where we presented awards to some of the first place winners of the meet. And yet afterwards, we met with Madame Anna about what we could come up with the next team’s projects and how to expand on what they already have now.
Thursday we split up into three teams; Joe and Corinn would stay and meet with Ewald at the home in Rift Valley about the feedback from the schools and how to proceed in Rift Valley. Nate and Taylor would go to Mwl. Anna’s to teach a special course to the teachers on the new website, Excel program, and Pi usage. The Matt’s would go to both the nearby hospital to drop off extra first aid equipment and talk about other projects there in the future and go to Majengo to help the nurse work out the medical records brought over as well as assist with several of the children’s checkup’s. The latter two met up at Mwl. Anna’s to give the lectures and say good byes before heading home to homemade Chapati.
Friday was mostly the day for clean-up, in the morning we packed our bags, gathered whatever food we had left, and cleaned our rooms. The girls and Joe went into town early to get some items so the rest of us sat back and watched paint dry. Seriously though, we were waiting for the van to get to the house for three and a half hours before leaving ourselves to go to Mwl. Anna. When we got there we got lunch (ugali and greens) and taught the teacher how to use Excel for their grading sheets, as well as showing them how to update their website. Around 6:00, they hosted dinner for us which was amazing; pilau, spaghetti, beef, fruit, sodas, and a banana-lookin’ thing which tasted great. After we all ate, we gave small speeches thanking the school for having us and letting work with them, and they thanked us in turn for teaching the children as well as the teachers in Excel and editing their website. We all said our goodbyes and had our cheers and left around 9:00. When we got back we ended the night by star-gazing one more time and heading off to bed.
Suffice to say, this has been an amazing journey where we’ve all learned so much over the past five weeks. We all would do again given the chance, as its been one of the most life-changing experiences we’ve ever had and are extremely disappointed that it has to end so soon. We look forward to heading back to our respective plans though and will be seeing you all very soon!
Posted By: Matt Tocco