Big Update

About two weeks ago, we met the new boy, Guillaume. We all went for a Rongai “pub crawl” soon after he arrived. Most of the pubs we went to were small and tame, with lots of dancing and singing. Seeing as I’m not much of a party person, it was quite an experience. After the pub crawl, we joined a handful of people at the dam and had some barbecue and sat around a fire. The next day, we woke early and went to a car rally on the farm next door. In all honesty, it started off rocky. It was boiling hot and we didn’t know what to bring so we had half a water bottle and no food. In desperation, Tom, Rory, and I went through the bushes back to where we saw a few people eating earlier. Our plan was to offer a single beer (that we’d borrowed from the prepared group that brought us) in hopes of trading for a sausage. As soon as we offered the beer, the three people we’d approached broke into laughter and welcomed us to their feast. Pork, ham, cheese, water, beer, cider, chips…really everything we haven’t been able to afford since arriving. We kept them to ourselves and eventually returned to the others before leaving. Fast forward quite a bit…(I’ve been very busy and ran out of data at one point so haven’t been able to update) to the days before the schools midterm break where we were in charge of monitoring the exams all day. Very boring and tricky considering the amount of kids that share the desks. For break, we went to the Maasai Mara. For those who don’t know, it’s the most well known place to safari in Kenya. Marie and Tom went to the coast separately while the remaining four of us went on safari. After leaving at 7am with a couple quick stops on the way, we finally arrived at the camp around 4pm. Long and VERY bumpy ride…or as our guide put it, an “endless free massage”. Because it was so late, our guide explained it wouldn’t make sense to go to the park for an hour and instead suggested that we go to the Maasai village. It was definitely a bit of a touristy place, but it was still an amazing experience. We danced and sang with them, they showed us around their village, and brought us into some of their mud huts. We learned that they have to move every 9 years because of the termites and only the women make the huts. The men can have as many wives as they want, so the chief has 6, with one house per wife. Next two days, we woke up around 5:30am so we could leave at 6:00am. I can’t really explain how amazing the experience was because there honestly aren’t words for it. We were so close to the animals it felt like you could reach out and touch them. Between the Mara and Nakuru, we saw the big 5. Everything was so surreal and peaceful. We made a list of everything we saw although the spelling/how we heard some of them might be wrong. I’ll have to post the list later because I don’t have it. The last few days of our break, Rory and I went to the primary school to work in the library and to paint the chalkboards. We got a good amount of the chalkboards done and made good progress on the library. School this week was good with lots of PE classes in the hot sun. On a very sad note, the school was broken into twice this past week with a total of 15 laptops stolen along with other less valuable things. Today, we were invited to visit the next door farm, Deloraine. The pictures at the end are from the farm which was absolutely beautiful. We were given lunch, went for a nice swim, and were given a walking tour of the farm and all of the horses. Picked a ton of ticks off of horses which was definitely a new experience. Tonight, we were invited by an Indian man staying at the house for some whiskey and conversation. Allison, a woman who is living in the house with her son for the next two years also joined us.