Volunteer Work and Lake Nakuru
Trip Start
Jun 12, 2004
1
9
50
Trip End
??? ??, 2005
Nairobi, Kenya
Sunday, July 25, 2004
A few days ago, I volunteered at the Soft Power project in Jinja, Uganda. This project builds & remodels schools in the Jinja area. Many of the classrooms had been condemned prior to help from the Soft Power project. In the morning, we got to visit a pre-schoold for orphans (most lost parents to AIDs). The kids were just gorgeous - and loved to crawl on and hang on us visitors. They sang us a number of songs in english & their own language. For the rest of the day, I sanded, whitewashed, and painted a mural of a volcano diagram in a classroom.
Our next big stop was Lake Nakuru National Park. This park is home to thousands of flamingos and pelicans. The banks of the lake were covered in seas of pink and white. Additionally, the park is home to lots of animals. On a game drive we saw rhinos, baboons, dik diks, thompsons gazelles, rhinos, giraffes, antelope, antelope, water buffalos, etc. We also were lucky enough to see an elusive leopard. After all the animals we managed to see, one of the highlights was guarding the truck from all the monkeys - these agressive monkeys managed to make their way onto the truck to look for food and weren't scared of humans at all. I am now infamous on our trip because I yelled "No, monkey, no!" at the top of my lungs and everyone thought it was funny to try to get the monkeys to understand this.
The weather has been quite surprising. It is much cooler than I had assumed it would be. One night, we were camping less than 100 km from the equator and we could see our own breath as we breathed into the chilly air. We get occasional rain storms, but we've been lucky that it has only been while driving & hasn't affected game viewing or other activities.
Last night I went to a local club to hear traditional music. The music was great and the words were in swahili, so we could only guess that the lyrics were funny by the reaction of the crowd. After we started dancing, the singer apparently sang a song about us because we caught the reference to "Muzungu" and the crowd had another laugh.
This morning, I went to church at the only Lutheran church in Kenya with an english service. The service was strikingly similar to services in the USA. Tonight we go out for game meat at a local restaurant. I might order the eland meatballs.
