We thought that the luggage being checked through to Nairobi would be the worst element of the journey here, but several new contenders have entered the field.

Emma & Ken were sat with an american who didn’t stop talking for the WHOLE DAMN FLIGHT. I heard Ken talking about an hour before arrival, and marvelled that he wasn’t asleep as I gather he usually sleeps on planes.

We were all seated in an “A” seat, which meant that no-one was officially sitting next to each other. Given that we were first in the queue on Monday, either everyone else came from elsewhere & checked in online or the chap checking us in did it on purpose because of the luggage allowance fracas.

We landed at Nairobi at about 4am. Or it might have been a little later than that. Debate is now raging. Here we are reunited with our luggage.

It took a while to get to the hotel because of a very long car park payment queue, and big holes being dug in the road where our accommodation is meaning that we were 200 yards away but had to do a 1 mile-ish detour. We arrived, and Ken marched purposely to Dorm A, where we had been told we would be put up, only to find 4 of the 6 beds occupied.

Oh dear.

Ken tried to go Full Ken on the night porter, but he ran away and basically hid until the day staff turned up. During which time we invaded the restaurant and ate breakfast.

So. After a couple of hours fitful kip we were up and preparing to head to Excel Emmanuel for a full team meeting.

We caught matata (a cross between a bus and a taxi – all very safe, nothing to see here) to Karen, the high class buzzing hub of this side of Nairobi – some of the houses would not have looked out of place in Formby and evidently cost about as much as the same house would cost in Ham. Then we caught another matata out to where the schools are, from which there was more walking to John’s house (the PaR representative in Kenya) which is a street away from the school.

I have no photos from “out & about” because my phone had died and the big camera feels too ostentatious to be whipping it out in general public, but I tried to make up for it once we were at the school.

It was a lovely meeting. There are 3 schools that PaR currently work with, and each was represented by the headteacher and deputy head. The meeting covered some important principals of working with the charity and reinforcing those principals and the reasoning behind them. Ken’s big reveal was a new-to-them donated laptop for Excel Emmanuel.

It’s fair to say, they were delighted.

Mary was so delighted that she did a dance – sadly I wasn’t quick-witted enough to catch this on film, but I’m sure you can use your imagination.

Also, I told Titus off for always looking super-serious in photos. Here he is not looking serious (Titus is the one on the right. No idea who the chap on the left is).

The school is doing awesome work – there are about 150 students crammed into teeny-tiny classrooms – for the benefit of my work colleagues, our small meeting room (R2/Rutland) would be a step up. I’ll try to get photos presently, but today I was occupied handing out sweets. Two of the children were spark out on their desks, and some of the younger kids looked really too young and too small to be in formal education – I suspect that when I ask, they will be a couple of years older than I think, which is heartbreaking. However, they seem happy and apart from the sleeping, to be enjoying school (at least, they did today)…

Another heartbreaking moment was when we were leaving, Mary, the deputy at Excel Emmanuel, gestured to the alleyway outside the school. It looks like this.

“We are so grateful to Ken. This was so awful before he sorted it out.”

I had no words, and just thanked my lucky stars that there wasn’t rain to reanimate the dried-out bits. It *is* much better, but in no way could be described as “actively good”.

The school entrance from the schoolyard.

PS. There are several titles I thought of for this post, but none really seemed to fit. Suffice it to say it’s been a really full day of new experiences. Also, I banged my head twice and now have a big lump on the left side of my head where I walked into the side of the school where the eaves changed height. In fairness to me, I was distracted by the much-improved open sewer I was walking along at the time.