Birthdays, bad news, and a full house

It’s been a short but busy week, I can’t believe it’s already Friday. I got back from Diani in the wee hours Tuesday morning, caught about 3 hours of sleep then headed to the centre for a grant proposal meeting. Myself, Meghan from Halifax, and 4 of the local youth have been assigned the task of writing a proposal to a few Kenyan organizations for grants to extend the current project being run out of the centre. After the meeting, Meghan and I headed back to the house to catch up on our sleep and then Meghan baked a cake for Josh’s birthday, which was the following day.

Wednesday was quite eventful. It was an outreach day, so we headed to the centre around noon to find out where we were going. We headed to a small slum about 2 kms from the centre called Kicheko. It was a rough walk through dusty fields and roads. Lots of trucks were driving by, kicking up dust. I’m curious what my lungs look like after spending all this time in Mlolongo.

We did the outreach in Kicheko, but while the play was going on, Milanne decided to head back because she wasn’t feeling well. I walked back with her and Beautiful, who was already exhausted from the walk to the slum. As we were walking away from the slum, I noticed a huge cloud of smoke behind us. There were three factories to the left of the slum and the middle one was on fire. We saw huge flames jutting out of the roof and it was only a matter of seconds until we heard the sirens coming from the highway. People were running in our opposite direction to check out the fire as we headed back to the house.

By 5pm, everyone except for Josh, Justine, and the Danes were back. Meghan went to go ice the cake only to find it had been infested with ants. They were crawling in and out of every little crevice of the cake. So she put that one aside and whipped up a new one from scratch. Salima put the cake on the stove to chase the ants out with the heat. Once it looked like they were all gone, she tried a piece. So did a few others... I abstained.

Salima made chapati and lentils, Josh’s favourite, for dinner and Don grilled some chicken with barbecue sauce. We blended margaritas with the little ice we were able to make, but they melted almost immediately, so our efforts were futile. After dinner, we lit the cake and gave Josh his present - a traditional African shirt. The cake was delicious and had no ants... bonus.

At this point, we were 18 people in the house at once. It was packed. Only one person wasn’t staying overnight. We had the 15 people from the previous night, plus Rachel - a friend of Josh’s who needed a place to crash for one night - and Alice. I felt terrible for Alice - she is the 15 year-old cousin of a girl that Josh is sponsoring to go to school. Alice’s parents contacted Josh to ask if they could sponsor her as well. He told them he couldn’t unfortunately, because he didn’t have the budget to support her as well. Well somewhere along the way, they either didn’t understand or chose not to listen. They enrolled Alice in school and sent her alone on a 6-hour bus ride to deliver the tuition papers to Josh. He would have also had to take her to a doctor to get a physical and buy her the school uniform - none of which he has the funds for. He had to tell her he wasn’t able to pay for her school, let her stay the night, and then sent her back on the bus with the return fare in hand. It was heartbreaking.

So Alice left yesterday (Thursday) morning. That evening, Rob (Josh’s cousin) and his friend Don left to head back to Winnipeg, along with Rachel who was going to meet her mom at the airport and travel some more with her. So we’re back down to 13 people and only one person sleeping on the floor. The two Danish girls leave on Monday then we’ll be back to our usual 11... I wonder if the house will start to feel empty?

This morning, Meghan and I headed back to the centre for a 9am meeting with the rest of the grant proposal group. Of course, we’re on Kenya time here, so the meeting didn’t start until almost 9:30, but we got all the feedback we needed and now I’m working on the budget part of the proposal. The plan is essentially to expand the HIV testing and education services in terms of the amount of testing we’re doing in one area, and also expanding the geographical reach. We also plan to add a Saturday “youth drop-in” sort of thing to get more youth involved with the centre and to simultaneously educate them about HIV, etc.

Our water tank is almost empty. Understandable, seeing the amount of people we've had through the house in the past week. But showers are now off limits... I normally only take one every 3-4 days to help conserve the water and today was supposed to be one of those days... We have to wait for the public water to turn on and refill our tank, but there's no particular schedule to that, so we'll see when that happens. I just hope I brought enough baby wipes in the meantime.