Benny in Kenya, July 7, 2012

We have returned from another successful and very busy expedition trip to Kenya.  This year, we had a youth group, as well as a regular expedition group.  The two groups overlapped, but since the youth built mud huts in the village of Vikolani where they lived for the duration of their stay in Kenya, we had enough room for all.

The next few posts will be from the youth group.  Jami, who dreamed up the Youth Leadership Expedition, planned and carried out all the details of it, had several of the kids type up a journal entry on her iPad, which will be what I post.
 

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Written by Benjamin Cardullo

After going to bed at 2 in the morning arriving from the flight, we woke up to the smell of chapatis in the morning  (chapatis being pretty much tortillas).  After breakfast we had heard of one of the turkeys being injured during mating, so they decided to kill it.  We got to see them chop off its head.  Post-mortem, the turkey continued to writhe and flap its wings. 

When we were ready to go to the village we will be living in, Vikolani, a bunch of kids from the local school greeted us and sang and danced for us.  They then continued to lead us to the village never letting up with their song or dance.  They had about three songs, repeatedly sung, which were highly entertaining.  When we got to Vikolani, they put on an official little show for us, which included a group of boys on the drums and some kids with an organized song and dance.  It was a wonderful representation of the Kenyan culture and it was nice to get to know the villagers better.  We were also introduced to the school leaders who were all working on building our mud huts, which truly showed how happy they were to have us there.  

Benny helping mud the huts

Jacob tossing the mud

After the show and introductions we helped finish the construction of our mud huts, which to be honest were better than most homes in Mombasa.  I got to go get water with the women, and we put wrapped scarves on our heads to keep from having hard plastic on their heads.  They could walk at a regular pace over treacherous irregular terrain with these buckets on their heads without even using their hands!  These weren't little buckets either, they were home depot sized, and the children were laughing at me as I approached the mud huts, my kanga cloth and shirt soaked through with water.  (by the way, this isn't Benny any more, in case if you are wondering why i am wearing a kanga cloth and carrying water on my head like a woman).  Mud huts, as you may have guessed, have mud walls with an inside of sticks.  We throw mud at the wall to close up holes.  Apparently, I am horrible at throwing mud at walls.  I didn't even know that is something you could be bad at.  

Carrying water back from the water hole

Back to Benny.  When we were done working for the day some of us headed straight back to the KCC camp at Myenzeni but some others, including myself, took the scenic route back.  We saw how Kenya functions agriculturally and we got to see the Koins farming lands and how they help the local community.  

Kenyan farm

Youth at the baobab tree at Windridge school

When we got back we had lunch and soon headed for a hike up to the Windridge school in Chikomani.  We got to see a bit more of the Kenyan culture and life style.  Upon return we all got to take long needed showers and the Brown group helped prepare our dinner of the previously deceased turkey, and some pilau, which is a rice dish.  After dinner we had our peaches and pits meeting, which is pretty much the high and low lights of our day.  The bottom line is that Kenya is amazing, and this was a wonderful first day of our trip.