Day1 in Kenya

playing with the children after church

Rochelle, Jade, Millie and Emma -the Littlehampton quartet!

not all classrooms have the football goals inside, but they are all this small and bare

Briany, Clare, Laurie, Alice and Clarissa - just hanging out at Spurgeon's!

walkabout in Kibera - if you look very carefully you should be able to spot all the team except the photographer (although some folks might be hiding in front of others!).

Hi everyone its the Shannons here,

It's our first full day in Kenya and we have just visted the Spurgeons Academy. Yesterday we were travelling all day so this morning we were all zombies, several alarms had to go off before any of us moved, even though shannon managed to sleep on the plane most of the way. Then we had breakfast and all piled into the mini bus, Mr Maggs sat in the middle on one of the smallest most unsafe seats ever and we were on our way! The first thing that really shocked us was during our journey to the Kibera slums everything was the usual city scene, buildings, shops and of course roads. However as soon as we turned the corner the concrete road ended and we saw for the first time the start of the slums.

The shops were like the size of our shower cubicles back at the hostel and their homes were not much bigger! As we began driving through people waved and said hello, we shouted 'JAMBO!!'. We reached the spurgeons academy and went straight into the church for a service in which we had an amazing welcome by everyone there. This morning we were not too sure whether we'd like the church service but we loved it! Everyone was dancing and shouting, even though none of us knew what we were doing, Shannon just resulted in flinging her hands above her head, the atmosphere was great. When we all got up at the front to introduce ourselves everyone came and hugged us and one woman even kissed me on the cheek.

We then took a look at the classrooms and the rest of the school which is a lot different to ours, the classrooms were so small and dark but the walls were covered in posters with all different topics on, some of the stuff on them we can't even remember being taught which is kind of scary as we have to teach them tomorrow. We investigated the toilets, but we couldn't even open the door all the way because of the smell. A young girl grabbed our attention and soon other little kids came running up to us fascinated by our cameras. Then we had our own little photoshoot where one of the boys tried on shannons hat and glasses and posed for photos. Then we began our tour of the Kibera slums....

We can't really describe in words what it was like, but the first thing we saw was a river full of nothing but waste and little kids bare foot playing in it. We walked along a train track which ran through the middle of the slums, thousands of people were walking through too so it was pretty cramped! I nearly fell over about 10 times on rocks and rubbish which was quite embarrassing but I was too busy making sure a train wasn't coming! From the top of the hill we had a view of slums overhead which was very dream like, hard to believe that so many people lived in such a condensed area. As we walked through kids shouted 'how are you?' and shook our hands, they were so polite and genuienly happy for us to be there. One shop was selling decent tops for 50 kenyan shillings which is less then 1 english pound which is cheaper than Primark and better quality.

We all got back into the bus, waved goodbye and went off for some lunch.

shannons signing out on our first day in Nairobi!!!!!