finally, a new post!

Hi there friends!

It's Saturday about midday in Nairobi, which means that we have been away for almost a week.
We arrived safely, but tired on monday arvo local time. Its been a very busy, but great (almost) week. Apologies for taken this long to make a post we've been super busy and we've had some probs trying to get into the blog- the internet at the YMCA where we're staying is unbelievable freakin slow- it took me 10 minutes to log into gmail yesterday!

On Tuesday we were taken on a tour of the city and did some cultural training, Wednesday we visited some women's weaving and craft projects, Thursday we got to hang out with some women making recycled paper cards and then spent a few hours walking through Kibera, Friday we ran a program for a bunch of young people, and then got billeted to stay with locals for the weekend.

The family we're staying with are really cool. Livingstone is a director at Church Army, the agency that is hosting us and his wife is a doctor. They, and a bunch of their relatives live in quite a big house (in local terms) on the outskirts of the city. It rained all night and most of the morning so we spent the morning hanging out the kids and have just ventured out through the mud to find and internet cafe.

This week has been so full of experiences that i could write about. On our tour of the city we saw the contrasts of this place- mansions that would be extravagant back home, five minutes walk away from the mind-numbing poverty of the slums. It would be easy to come away with an experience of Nairobi like the blind men from the story of the blind men and the elephant story (one touches the trunk, another the tusks, etc and each claim to know what an elephant is).