Make new friends - sharing songs with Kenyan Girl Guides

Around three o’clock on Thursday we headed back to the school to meet the Girl Guides. All the children appeared to still be in school when we turned up even though the bell seemed to have already rung.  When we finally rounded up the Guides (all sixty of them!) and the teacher who is the leader, we stared with some singing.  We chose to sing Alive, Alert, Awake, Enthusiastic, and This Little Guiding Light Of Mine. The leader was extremely enthusiastic and made us sing the songs through many times until the Guides had definitely learnt it.

 
Following on from this we made a 'promise tree' for their promise, which is very similar to our old one. We drew up a tree with five branches, one for each part of the promise. Each of the Guides had to fill in the leaves with how they would keep that part. 

 

Afterwards, we went outside and sang some more songs – Good Evening Friend Brownie, along with Taps. We finished off the session with the Guides singing their end of meeting song and national anthem. We also gave each of them a badge, which they really appreciated.

Sanata's women's group and a designer bag

 

On Monday we visited Sanata's women's group who make clothing, jewellery, leather goods and accessories.  The group provides employment and an income to support them  and their families.   The project works with an ethical fashion label and produces items for big labels including Vivienne Westwood. 
 
 

 


We met some of the women and admired the beautiful bags and jewellery.  We were also measured up for some African skirts which the women are going to make for us. We're very happy to be supporting the project and also getting our own designer skirts!

Our First Full Day at The Restart Centre

Today was our first full day at the restart centre, we arrived at Sanchat around 9am, after a lovely breakfast and a good nights sleep.

 
The children were divided up into three groups of school ages, the youngest nursery children, the middle age group and the biggest children. We ran three, hour long sessions and the children rotated round them throughout the morning. There was a maths class run by Hannah and Zelma, a craft session run by Lizzie and Megan where the children made pom-poms, and a games session run by Ellie and Linz. Sarah floated round the groups and helped the nursery children as they required the most attention. The morning worked really well, we were very pleased with how it went and hope to run similar sessions for the rest of our time at the centre. 

After a bit of free time playing with the children it was lunch time. We were served up a massive portion of ugali- a very common starchy dish - and some cabbage type stew. 

After lunch we had some time to read with the children. Again, they were divided up into smaller groups, each of us had a table and a few books each. The children seemed to love it, listening intently and enjoying having our full attention (though some of the littlest ones fell asleep!)

The rest of afternoon was filled with more playing and hair salon run by the restart girls; they loved to plait all our hair into tiny braids. We also played a massive game of rounders with all the children that are at the centre. This went down very well until it started to rain. Luckily we had some colouring sheets as a back-up! The oldest boys stayed out in the pouring rain playing a very competitive game of football, competing in their very own tournament for the Sanata Cup. 

Very soon it was 5pm and time for us to leave the restart, it did not seem that it was nearly eight hours ago that we had got there, it had gone so quickly.  Overall it had been a very enjoyable day, but quite a lot of hard work. All the children definitely appeared to like what we had organised for them.

School time

We were introduced to St Patricks Primary School, the local school 5 minutes from Sanchat, on Friday 25^th . The headteacher kindly introduced us to each of the 8 classes (containing an average of 50 pupils!). 54 Sanchat children attend St Patricks so it was very nice to see a friendly face amongst the 800 other pupils (yes that’s right 800!!!)  

Break time started and we attracted quite a crowd.  The children were fascinated by us and wanted to hold our hands, touch our hair and stroke our skin - it was CRAZY!!!

 We sang the Banana song, Boom Chica Boom and Hokey Cokey on repeat, along with playing Duck Duck Goose ( an absolute hit) every break time we spent there.

We were back at the School on Monday 28^th. All of the teachers were in a meeting and so we were split between two classes straight away.  In true guiding spirit we pulled it together to run a maths and an English lesson with a maths shoot out, hangman, count down and Pictionary - as well as many songs of course! I think we could all say we were rather relieved to hear the lunch bell! 

We returned to school again on Thursday 31^st and all of us really we enjoyed the teaching experience.  We taught for an hour and a half, which the children all seemed to love.  Hangman particularly went down a hit: when the last letter was filled everyone was jumping out of their seats cheering (honestly looked like Kenya had just won the world cup)! 

Overall, the school a brilliant experience and it is really amazing to see so many children focused and excited to learn!!

We are in Africa, repeat after me, we are in Africa

We arrived in Kenya in the early hours of Thursday morning.  After all the months of planning we were finally here.  We couldn't quite believe it, but as we turned the corner into Gilgil we spotted in a zebra - we are in Africa!

We will be staying in Gilgil volunteering with the Sanata trust.  Sanata runs a home called the Restart centre which aims to rescue homeless children from the streets of Kenya, provide them with a home, education, care and counselling and equip them to work and flourish in their community.  The charity invests in and runs several projects designed to provide employment and funds for the children and the wider community.  You can find out more about their great work here.


On our first day we headed to the Restart centre for orientation.  We were greeted by a special welcoming ceremony in which the children performed poems and dances, including breakdancing!

In the afternoon we visited the new Restart Centre which is being built.  We were very impressed by the new building.  It is bigger, will have better facilities and enable Restart to care for more children.  

Sanata has an area to grow food and a herb garden on the site with more than 700 African herbs, many with medicinal properties.  The plants are harvested, dried and processed, and then made into therapeutic teas or capsules.  We wandered round the beautiful garden and heard about some of the plants.  Megan and Zelma discovered that Aloe Vera is very bitter and needs several polos and water to wash away the taste!

 

And we're off!

The team at Heathrow before our flight.