I see love when I close my eyes

a week here already? that’s insane. it never ceases to amaze me how fast time goes here, and yet sometimes the days are so slow. I’ve got right back into understanding and knowing the whole ‘africa time’ thing, I had to get used to that pretty fast. here, things will happen as they will; no point rushing or trying to fasten them up, everything is just pole pole… slowly slowly. 

anyway, this week has been busy and honestly, it’s been pretty tiring. I forgot how hard it is being on your a-game at school all the time, trying to control 75 kids and trying to speak the very little swahili I remember. 

breakfast of sweet bananas purchased from the carts on the side of the road. these are the world’s best bananas, I’m australian and ‘apparently’ we grow great bananas but they ain’t got shit on these kenyan bad boys. breakfast might also be peanut butter on toast, or a few cups of tea, or milo, or really good honey wheat puffs I got from the local market. 

I head off to school between 9:30/10am and it’s about a 5-10 minute walk (depends how many people shout out at me or try to walk with me or yell and tell me to go back to my country; if that happens, it might be shorter than 5 minutes)

 

the rooms on the first level on the left is where the school is

  

  

a poster I made last time

   

I walk into the compound, up the stairs, along the walk way and into the ‘apartment’ where the school is and greet evelyn, then walk into thunderous cheers by both the baby/nursery class and the pre-unit class… every single morning without fail I walk into a huge “yay!!” from them all. by the time I arrive, the kids have usually had their first lesson of the day and it’s time to do some marking. I sit across from evelyn at her ‘desk’ (table in the middle of the first room) and start marking. lessons could be joining the dots for letters “a b c” that we’d written in their bikes the day before to prepare for today, or it could be them copying patterns from the board, or writing numbers 1 to 20 in their books. this is no easy feat for the baby/nursery class as they’re as young as 2 years old in there, so poking someone in the arm with a grey lead pencil is more fun than learning how to hold it and write the number 8 – especially when you’re two years old. 

   

 

once the marking is done, it’s usually time for uji – the porridge made of millet, corn meal and sorghum flour, and occasionally the mix has rye flour and/or oats. it’s really thick in texture and sweetened with a lot of sugar! for 75 kids, we usually go through 50kg of sugar in one month!! The uji itself is sort of purple and sludgy, but it’s really good for the kids, really filling and quite nutritious. we say our prayers, and everybody takes their porridge. except for us teachers, we take chai (which when I was here last, did used to be tea but now we take boiled milk and hot chocolate powder) and mandazi (deep fried unsweetened dough).

   

biscuits as a treat!

   

next we do another lesson. it could be anything from making things from modelling clay or colouring in or singing songs, and then writing homework off the board into the homework books. this time is usually quite hectic as the kids now have a whole lot of energy from their uji, whereas sometimes of a morning they can be quite sluggish as many may not have had anything to eat since lunchtime yesterday at school. it’s hard work, particularly trying to keep 37 kids under the age of 5 in a 3m x 4m room settled and not jumping on tables too much.

  

lunchtime is great as everyone gets a bowl of something hot, filling and delcious for lunch. it could be ugali and sukuma wiki (boiled corn flour and cooked kale), rice and beans, rice and brown beans or githeri (corn and bean stew). this is something that I started when I was first here in 2013, when the school had been forgotten about, ignored and dumped by its american founder. many of the kids may only receive very little dinner at home – if anything at all – so it’s good being able to fill their bellies as best we can at school. we say our prayers again, and time to eat. this is usually the quietest moment of the whole day; except for yesterday being friday, they were all a little crazy. 

plates for everyone

  

ugali and sukuma wiki. in my opinion, the worst meal. proves I’ll never be a good kenyan

 

more songs or maybe some colouring after lunch and it’s already time to put put the homework books in their backpacks and get ready to head home. mums, dads or guardians come to the school to pick up their kids as its too dangerous for them to walk alone in certain places or too far to walk alone. the last job of the day is to administer any medications that certain kids need. it’s the school who takes the kids to the doctor if they fall ill, not the parents, so part of the monthly upkeep of the school is also to allow for doctor visits, prescriptions and medications.  

  

 

so many funny things happen in between all of this though. one of the little boys, franklin, cried on my first day as I was a different person and I wasn’t anna. but the next day, when I was teaching the kids to do thumbs up, he couldn’t stop smiling and doing thumbs up – so much so that our thumbs had to touch. whenever the kids have a problem, they always run up to Evelyn and say “teacher, teacher, ………..” and then explain the issue in swahili. I love it though when they run to me and try and tell me what the matter is, in swahili, and then look at me with their big beautiful eyes waiting for me to fix the issue, to respond in some way. to them I’m just the same as them, I’m another human so I must speak the language they speak. It’s the kids that make me love being here, not the adults. the pure innocence of children; they remind us that love is universal and that we are born to love and respect each other. 

unfortunately as everyone grows, attitudes change – particularly towards people of a different colour as I as reminded yesterday. it happened the last time I was here, and again yesterday. walking home from school with anna, shelby and her baby braelyn, some random guy shouted across the road that us ” mzungus should go back to our own countries”. sarcastic or not, that’s the behaviour that frustrates me to no end when I’m in kenya. mate trust me, I can see for myself that my skin colour is quite different to yours but can you imagine if we reciprocated that kind of behaviour at home? the court cases, the defamation, the slander and racism. it’s not tolerated there, and I most certainly wouldn’t shout out “black guy” to one of the many sudanese people we have in melbourne, so I don’t understand why shouting out mzungu is okay here. I hated it last time – for six months I hated it – and guess what? I’m back and I hate it just as much. the kids on the street who call out mzungu is acceptable because why? kids don’t know any better. but adults? no. I vividly remember as a kid if I saw someone who “looked different”, mum always told me and my sister not to stare but here, staring is all kenyans in what to do when someone ‘different’ walks past. 

though after this rant – and I can remember writing something like this last time I was here, I remember it like it was yesterday – I still wish I wasn’t leaving Kenya in less than a week.

 

and time is forever frozen still



most of you know how much little ray of hope means to me, and if you haven’t caught on, that’s why I’m back in kenya. walking to school on monday morning felt weird; just as everything has since I got here. it definitely doesn’t feel as though I left africa two years ago, went home, got a big girl job, worked for a while and then returned. it’s as if I literally went home for a smidge of time and now I’m back – but sadly not for the same six month duration. walking up the same road I walked for months and nothing changed. I don’t exaggerate when I say nothing. the same shops line the road, the same people sit in their shop fronts, the same adult idiots shout out mzungu (maybe different idiots but idiots nonetheless), the same smell of decomposing animals, burning plastic, dumped rubbish, typhoid infested water, animal and/or human shit, body odour and smoke. 



 





I know I was teary when I saw anna at the airport, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the waterworks that flowed from my eyes when I walked up the stairs of the apartment building the school is in and into the classroom – only to be met with a huge warm smile from evelyn. I sobbed. and I couldn’t really stop. the love I have for this place, this incredibly selfless and tireless woman, and the kids, is indescribable. 

the hard part after that was then saying hi to all the kids, only to have them see my reddened eyes and tears down my cheeks – the same worried look on their faces that so many had when I said goodbye in 2013. I tried my best to explain they were happy tears; but for children who are 3 years old or younger and don’t even speak swahili let alone english, my attempts at making myself feel less like an over emotional wreck were somewhat futile. they were beautiful though, the kids. in both classrooms, I walked in and received the most thunderous cheer and when I asked if those who knew me remembered my name, it was in unison: “victoria!” yep, there’s goes the waterworks again. I have a lot to thank my mother for. 



so many new faces to learn, so many little humans with their own stories. many of the kids I knew from last time are still here, just two years older and almost unrecognisable. some children were moved into the country with their family or with guardians as nairobi has become too dangerous and too expensive to survive in.  





one of my little angels who I fell head over heels for in 2013, christabel, was only 3 when she came to little ray of hope after her very young mother (only 14 years old) died whilst giving birth to her. she had such a beautiful little grin and loved skipping and colouring in. she isn’t at the school anymore, and I asked evelyn if she knows if christabel has moved into the countryside – like so many of the little ones I knew here. she told me that the lady who was caring for her was married and her husband didn’t care for christabel or that his wife was looking after her. so he banned her from the house and asked his wife to take her elsewhere. no one has seen her since; evelyn has heard that she could be in kibera (the biggest slum in nairobi and second biggest slum in the world) or in eldoret (a town very west of nairobi) but no one is sure. my heart broke hearing this. god only knows where this little angel is, if she is safe or even alive. I hate this place sometimes; it’s cruel heart-wrenching reality breaks the hardest of hearts.



christabel giving me a huge hug before I left in october 2013



 I also got to spend the whole day with beth, the little abandoned bub who evelyn has now adopted, and was named after my sister. man has she grown, and she is definitely wary of strangers. she cried this first time I dtried to hug her, and then as the day went on, she warmed to me and ended up running (yes she’s only 18 months old) into my arms. what a lucky little girl; I would hate to think what may have happened to her if evelyn hadn’t agreed to care for her. such a beautiful natured little munchkin.





it’s been an emotional three days at school, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. x

here I go again on my own



I’m home!

you know that feeling when you’ve been to a place and it had a huge impact on you yet you haven’t been back there for a pretty long time so you’re a bit worried if it will be as wonderful as you remember it once was?

I felt so unbelievably anxious on saturday when I was about to leave to come back here to kenya, and I can only put it down to the fact that I had absolutely no idea if kenya would be as great as I remembered. although there were days (or maybe I should say weeks) where I hated lots of things about this place; I hated the fact I was “white”. I hated being the one targeted to be pickpocketed. I hated the looks and the jeers I got from people walking by. I hated the poverty. I hated the sickness. I hated seeing the harsh reality of how so many lived. 

but there was so much to love. I guess I was worried I would come back to kenya after being thrown back into my “first world way of life” for a year and feel utterly out of my touch with being the girl I was when I lived here.

well, incase you’re wondering, I have slotted right back in to my old self – getting stared at and being called mzungu and kids running to touch my hands, being covered in dust and eating mandazi and drinking chai, hearing the constant sound of horns and shouting, music blasting, vendors selling peanuts and bananas by the roadside, stepping over god knows what in that plastic bag, matatus (public buses) not caring who is in their path, preachers shouting their prayers of a morning. safe to say, all my anxieties are gone. this is how I remember it, this is my other home – in it’s most unforgiving and unrelentless form.

so I arrived sunday morning after a solid 26 hours of travel to an announcement on the plane just before landing. “passengers, you will undergo medical assessment when arriving in jomo kenyatta international airport.” that was in. I assumed this had something to do with ebola, and in my naive assumptions, thought I’d be scrutinised to a sit down medical and interrogations of where we’ve travelled in the last however many days. I was quite wrong. the airport, which has been semi-rebuilt as a fire burned it down when I was here in 2013, is really something. reminiscent of a tin shed (okay that’s a bit harsh but in comparison to heathrow, it’s quite true),  the ‘door’ we walk through has been painted bright blue with some cartoon masaai men and giraffes under acacia trees. the inside is a concrete slab where we shuffle into two lines, to walk through one by one under a thermal imaging camera to decide whether we might display any chance of being febrile or infective. but it wasn’t ebola they were screening for, apparently if you were from china or the middle east, they were going to talk quite an interest in you. have no fear, my thermal image showed I was somewhere between 36.5 – 36.8 degrees celcius. 

it appears that kenya has also implemented “customs” since I last arrived, I definitely don’t remember having to declare myself bringing certain goods into the country. I did declare I was bringing tea bags (yes I know I’m a hopeless wannabe brit who cannot curb her addiction) which anna later laughed and asked why I would do such a thing and my response was I’m australian, we have to declare everything! I’m kind of glad they just pushed me through with the other travellers who were declaring chocolates that they’d purchased in dubai as anna also informed me that when she came back to kenya over christmas, customs had gone through her bag and seen the books and things she’d purchased for the kids at little ray of hope. I’m lucky they didn’t see all the books, pencils, crayons, posters etc that chrissie and jayne had generously given to me to bring over for the kids. 

after handing over my US$50 for my visa, I was free to go out and meet anna who had been patiently waiting to pick me up! we were so caught up in a hug that my trolley with all my bags (and no brakes, because – duh – this is africa) had made its way through a crowd of people, down a ramp and heading towards the road. 

so I’m staying back at my old host family’s house, in the middle of the kawangware slum west of nairobi, and it’s like nothing has changed at all, even though everything is different. even though I’m in my old room and in my old bed; volunteers don’t stay here anymore, my host sisters are at boarding school, the shower doesn’t give electric shocks anymore. it’s quiet and strange. 

but it’s so good to be back. x

(next post about my first day back at little ray of hope!)