Hot. It's gettin' hot.

Kenya. Thursday. What What.

We woke to the sweet, sweet chorus of birds squawking directly above our tents. Bo does the best impression of them, we’ll try to get a video and post it for you all.  Last night Logan and Cori were teaching Apin and Francis (two of the best Kenyans you will ever meet and recipients of SYEF scholarships) how to say “Parachuting in Massachusetts” because really it exploits their inability to pronunciate some of those letter combinations, and  they do the same with words like n'gnombe. A highlight from last night was teaching the guards who work for Kalama Conservancy (our camp location) how to make s’mores. Favorite quotes from their first reactions to a fresh s’more  were “This tastes like an air mattress” and “a snail”. These guys cook our breakfast and dinner, help keep wildlife out of our tents at night, and make sure there aren’t lions in the bush when we go down to the latrine to pee.

This morning we had our first serious crack at volunteer work. There is a nursery school at Umoja village that needed some serious cleaning up before school starts in a few days so we swept, took out the remnants of a previous paint job, and replaced the plastic bag “curtains” with real fabric to keep sun out of kids’ eyes in the classroom. We also worked on the shade structure Bo’s mother started and trimmed back the spiny acacia tree branches that were all over the place. We took the barbed wire off the top of the play structure in the playground and replaced it with non-barbed wire. We will attach a roof made of palm fronds we collected by the river and learned how to weave into sections of the roof.

The best part of the morning was that the SYEF students were asked to come to help out and then they came to share lunch with us. They helped us sew curtains, sweep, put the roof on the shade structure and showed us how to weave the roofing for the play structure. It was really fun to learn from them, talk with them and compare secondary school in the USA and Kenya. We are all looking forward to getting to know them more and hear their stories on Saturday, when all the scholarship recipients will come to take care of logistics before they go back to school and will tell stories about their experiences in secondary school.

Yesterday half the group got to hike the ridge behind our campsite with Dominic, the leader of our guards who does impeccable impressions of the wildlife and can start fires with pretty much nothing. He told the group about how when he was a morani (warrior) how he prepared goats and cows to eat in a cave. The other half taught girls from both villages about Colorado wildlife and played games to teach them the animals’ names and how bats use echolocation to navigate.

We’re having a blasty-blast and really enjoyed the comments from our family and friends. Keep ‘em coming, especially you, Mama (love, Karina). Hearing about the cold is refreshing in 95 degrees in the shade!

                Love to you all!