Our first 4 days

Wow! A 4 hours lay over in Calgary from Vancouver and only 20 minutes in Amsterdam - doesn't seem fair does it.  We arrived in Nairobi at 9 pm at night and did not want to leave the airport (for safety reasons) and our flight to Kisumu was due at 7 am the next day. So  what did the 8 of us do? We found some old office chairs and couches and made a temporary sleeping area right outisde of customs. This group has moxy:)

We were all incredibly tired as we had about 6 hrs sleep in the 40 hrs of travel but we managed to get to the Vihiga School by 11 am Saturday morning only to find they were having a sort of graduation ceremony for the senior students who were about to sit their provincial exams this week - oh yes, and we were the guests of honour.  Please imagine us totally exhausted, unshaven and being the guests of honour. Once we say the ceremony we all realized how important it was to the community we found reserves of energy and we were all soon surrounded by the many children who just wanted to chat, sit in our laps, play soccer - it was quite wonderful. Laurissa has been an incredible source of good energy for all the students and is really quite taken with the community spirit here.  Holly similarly found herself surrounded by many children and she was easily chatting to them for a long time. Nikki was playing soccer with the them and Ute and Paul were busy video taping and taking pictures as Priscilla (the director of the school) wanted us to make a video of the cermony for them.

The food has been very good and the school is indeed in financial dire - we are planning on making the presentation of our fund raising efforts tomorrow with directions on how to spend the monies. It is unfathomable by our standards the number of children here who simply do not have a parent or guardian helping them -they are literally on their own. In addition to the funds raised we managed to purchasing over $400 in school supplies and today the children are writing back to their Canadian pen pals (we had 2 schools in Tsawwassen and Vancouver write a letter for each students here).

On the health side we are all taking our malaria pills however unfortunately Holly had a quick round with the stomach flu last night but thankfully she is feeling 100% again today.

Tonight we are meeting as a group to talk about how to best allocate the extra funds we each have brought. One option is to fund some students to continue onto high school (it costs about $500 per years) and then have them pay it back upon finding work  - a micro finance model only for education. We shall see.

Thank you again to all - this trip is very powerful for all of us. Can't seem to get pictures to upload now  - will try again later -stay tuned!

Scott