Kenya

The taxi driver jammed in the final piece of our sizeable baggage around Tabitha's head and slammed the door of the boot shut, and that was it - we were on our way! The excitement was palpable as we sped towards Heathrow on our adventure.

We met up with the other half of Team Kili as well as the Mission Team, who were going to visit the Compassion project in Mariakani for a few days longer than the Mountain Team, at the airport and then we were off to Nairobi. We didn't spend a lot of time in Nairobi so I can't really give much of an opinion of the sights of the city. Among the highlights of the brief trip to the city were having to share a bed with King David. That was before his coronation though, so he was merely David at that point. He was a good roommate and tentmate over the course of the trip, both before being crowned and after. He didn't let becoming monarch go to his head.

Just outside the airport was a scanner which x-rayed the whole bus. We all (other than the driver) trooped off the bus, walked through a metal detector, then the driver drove the bus through the scanner, and we all got back on the other side. Genius security measure there. We drove from the airport to our hotel in the evening and then in the morning back in the other direction. The morning view from the hotel was of the sun rising over the highway, with other hotels, industrial and retail parks in the distance and the plains stretching out beneath us.

It was on the next flight from Nairobi to Mombasa that many of us got our first sight of Kilimanjaro. I however was sitting on the wrong side of the plain, next to someone who wasn't in our party and who didn't look keen to be disturbed, so I sat there looking out to the left at my inferior view, as the rest of the party excitedly took photos of the mountain top poking out above the clouds. I figured I would have enough opportunity to see the mountain at a later stage from a much closer viewpoint, and so I didn't mind too much.

On our drive from the airport to the hotel in Mombasa we saw the standing water which showed how much flooding the area had had in the weeks before our arrival. Some of the children we would be meeting in the following few days had been rehoused as their homes were flooded. This was a sad sight.

Our moods did improve when we got to the hotel and saw the beautiful view across the large swimming pools to the beach, with various thatched buildings in sight. Food was ready when we arrived too, and this was great. We had a buffet-style meal every meal at the hotel, which did mean multiple trips to the counter to try all the possible options. The barbecue grill we had one evening was the best of the many good meals!

Once we'd unpacked, we went out to check out the pool. Our first afternoon was 'free time', so we were able to play a bit of volleyball in the pool, have a beer at the bar in the pool, and go swimming in the sea. This last part turned out to be a bit of an error, as Toby swallowed a lot of sea water and fell ill. He was bed-bound for the next couple of days. On the plus side though, he was the first to receive a sticker that Tabitha had made celebrating anyone who vomited during our trip. They were mainly to celebrate altitude sickness on the mountain part, but he managed to be sick even though he wasn't on the Mountain Team!

On the Saturday we went to visit Mariakani baptist church on their normal day of teaching, and on Sunday we attended their normal church service - normal other than they had set up the seating outside because the 20-odd extra people attending from the UK plus some extra local visitors who wanted to see us meant that there wouldn't be room in the normal church building. We arrived to a sea of excited children's faces. They were so happy and overjoyed to see us, which was very touching. One or two children did have smart phones and took photos as our minibuses turned into the field where the project was located, but the majority just stared at us with smiling and joyful faces. We were greeted by singing and dancing from the worship team. One of the early songs had lyrics which sounded like, "God, you are excellent, you are wonderful, you are more than White People say" but eventually we managed to interpret as being "God, you are excellent, you are wonderful, you are more than what people say" Although the first lyric was probably theologically correct, it didn't feel like the kind of thing that the locals would sing to welcome their mostly white visitors!

Our vicar Paul planted a tree and cut the ribbon to formally open a new office building which our child sponsorship had helped to fund, then we had a bit of time helping out with teaching the children in their normal classes. I learnt a bit about the parts of a plant before sitting in on an accounting class in which I picked up a few tips about income and expenses.

The next part of the day was arguably the highlight of my time among the children of Mariakani - we got the chance to visit the homes of some of the sponsored children. As my newly sponsored child was from Mata, about five hours away from Mariakani, and I would be meeting him the following day in our hotel at Mombasa, I went with Lauren and Naomi to visit their sponsored children's homes. It turned out subsequently that the children's homes were actually really close to the project, if you walked through the fields and took the most direct route by foot, but in the minibus it seemed a long way along bumpy, narrow, wet and muddy paths. There were a few times when the bus disappeared into potholes so deep that it felt that the vehicle was going to overturn, but somehow the driver managed to keep us upright. The only error he made during our drive was driving over a water main to avoid a goat in the road and damaging it, such that water started spraying up into the air. Fortunately, he had some gaffer tape in the bus, so when he came back, he had patched it up sufficiently.

The first house we went to was Faith's house. This was the more basic of the two homes we went to - it was a real mud hut, with one main room. The cooking was done outside the house. The mud was crudely daubed over a wooden frame, such that there were gaps in the walls. One of the walls had recently fallen in, so there was some corrugated iron propped up against the wall to keep the elements out. This was my first real view of the poverty of this area, but again everyone seemed to be content and happy. The local children were so excited to see us. Faith had a few siblings, but there were many other local children cramming into the doorway of the house to see us. Both Faith and Amina whom we met next were very shy to start with, and didn't say much during our time in their houses, but later on in the day and in the following day at church they became much more open.

Amina was Naomi's sponsored child, and her house was still made of mud, but it was a lot more solidly made. It was a bit bigger and had separate rooms with walls separating them. Amina was clearly one of the more popular children in her year, as when we arrived back at the project, the other children started chanting her name. So despite her initial shyness with us, as soon as she arrived she fell back into the middle of a sociable group of her peers.

Just before we had left the UK, we had prepared a little gift pack for each child, containing a plastic cup, some stickers, some fluorescent plastic stars, a lollipop, a short tract about Jesus, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and these were distributed during a ceremony that afternoon.

In the evening we had a meal with four people in their early to mid-twenties, who had grown up in the Compassion child sponsorship programme and had then moved on to the next level - the Youth Development Scheme (YDS). To get onto the scheme, you had to be a top-performing student and show that you had leadership potential. These children were sponsored to get through university, usually by a different person from the one who had sponsored them through high school. It was such a pleasure to meet these four graduates of the YDS. They were all well-spoken, confident, intelligent individuals. George on my table spoke particularly earnestly about his life growing up and about his plans for the future. It was amazing to see the fruits of the child sponsorship and the YDS programme.

Church the following day started with some Bible teaching, which we were able to get involved in, also with a bit of football, blowing bubbles and throwing a frisbee around. Then the main service started. There was lots of singing and dancing, and even many of the mainly British repressed white people got up in front of the congregation showing our dance moves. We also had to show our acting skills as Vicar Paul did an interactive sermon about the parable of the sower. My portrayal of a vulture will no doubt go down in the annals of great acting performances.

Then it was the exciting time, although the time I had been nervous about beforehand, the opportunity to meet my sponsored child. Four children plus their mothers had been driven over to our hotel from Mata, and they were waiting in the reception for us. Two of the children were from the Maasai tribe and their mothers were elaborately dressed in orange gowns with blue robes and lots of necklaces and bracelets. And it turned out that my child was one of the Maasai boys - bonus! Leiyan is his name, but he was very shy and overwhelmed by the whole experience. I tried chatting to him for a bit, but he wasn't very responsive. I did find out from his mum that the four year-old boy whose birthday was coming up a week after our visit, was actually seven and they didn't know what time of year his birthday was. I'm not sure that he was seven though, he did seem a bit younger than that. None of this really matters though - nor does the story I found out later than Leiyan's father had at least two wives. Hopefully Leiyan will be a bit more open in our future correspondence than he was during our meeting - I am looking forward to hearing about his life as he grows up and goes through his school years. His mother seemed lovely and happy to chat to me through our interpreter. She gave a gift of a necklace to Claire from Compassion, which Claire later passed to me as my gift for sponsoring Leiyan, so I now have a proper handmade Maasai necklace!

After we had chatted for a bit in the reception area, we moved out to the swimming pool and the beach area, as we thought that the kids would enjoy going for a swim. It turned out though that none of the children had ever been in a pool before, and the children and the mothers were naturally quite concerned about the situation. I did spend a long time holding Leiyan's hand as he sat by the side of the pool dipping his toes into the water. Eventually I did persuade him to get in fully, without wetting his head, and he did walk a circuit of the kids' pool before getting out and drying off. The major thing I will take away from the afternoon though is when the two Maasai mothers - Leiyan's mother and the other lady - were standing at the fence at the perimeter of the hotel, looking across the beach and out to sea. It turned out that not only had the children never seen the sea before but also that the mothers had never seen the sea before, and they were enthralled but also terrified by it. They asked questions like, "How far does the sea go?" and "What's at the other end?". I suppose if you live in a community which is in the centre of Kenya, why would you travel five hours to see beaches and seas which have no relevance to your daily life? They had only done so on this occasion because Compassion had brought them all this way to see us. There was a brief issue as King David was dragged away from his sponsored child at the swimming pool by three large and drunk South Africans and forced to drink beer at the bar, but Tim saved the day and rescued him by talking South African at them for long enough that King David could sneak away.

Having got this nerve-wracking meeting out of the way, my thoughts and those of the rest of the mountain team turned towards our forthcoming trek up Kili. The two days of meeting children at Mariakani and at the hotel had taken our attention away from this for a bit, which was a relief, but now our minds were fully on the walk. Ben, who was in charge of the trek, now took centre stage, and that evening happily answered questions about his previous trips and about what had gone wrong. He told us a long and terrifying tale about a lady who was underprepared for the Inca Trail and had fallen into a coma. Becky ran away prior to this story with her fingers in her ears as she didn't want to hear anything in advance which would add to her already high fear of the forthcoming trip.

We said our sad farewells to the members of the Mission Team who were staying in Mombasa for a few days longer and started our eight hour drive to Marangu in Tanzania. We were kept occupied on the journey by singing along to Tabitha's ukulele playing and by the sightings we were getting from the vehicle of zebras, giraffes, ostriches, camels, cows and springboks. The most impressive sight though was of about 100 elephants, all standing in a big group waiting for us to drive past. Jackson, our local chief guide for the mountain, said he'd never seen such a large number of elephants all in a group before, so we were particularly fortunate!

After a reasonably swift and competent transit through immigration, we were all safely allowed into Tanzania and ready for the next exciting episode of the holiday. My time in Kenya had exceeded all my expectations, it had been fantastic to meet the children at Mariakani, the graduates from the YDS, and my own sponsored child at the hotel, and I hope that our visit has really been a blessing to all the children and helped to enhance the link between St Mark's and the projects.