Well, this is my second morning in Nairobi. All is well. Manny and I got to Nairobi without any problems and had a taxi waiting for us to take us to an apartment that our friends had rented. When we got there, there were four other people waiting to greet us. Holly, who is in charge in the NGO I’m working with, Paige, who has another NGO, Jaret, who is documenting the trip for Holly’s NGO and Jacob and local Maasai tribesman who’s friends with Paige.
We arrived late, so within a couple hours of arriving we were in bed, it was a long trip.
Our first day in Nairobi was action backed. I’ll try to keep all the details to points because my time is limited on the computer. Some of the things I did on my first day in Nairobi are:
- I signed Jacob (our Maasai friend) up to Facebook. I know that sounds weird, but he already had a cell phone and an email address, so why not Crackbook as well.
- We met up with some of Holly and Paige’s friends and they acted as our guides. You automatically get more street cred on the streets if you’re hanging out with locals. If we were a group of white people by ourselves, it would have been dangerous.
- One of tasks for the day was to help Jacob buy goats for his tribe, but we eventually left him alone to do this because the goat sellers were jacking up the price due to the fact that he was hanging out with white people, they were jacking up the price.
- Our local guides showed us a couple of the slums and it’s quite a culture shock, but the kids are friendly.
- We went to a school to check out the Umoja performance. There were a lot of kids there so as we waited for the show to start, we were playing with the kids. It’s amazing how amazed they are by a digital camera, they keep asking us to take their picture.
- We rode around in a handful of shuttle buses to get to places in Nairobi (called Matatos) and they are an experience in themselves. They play loud music, they’re crowded and their exteriors are painted with bright colours and hiphop artists, Snoop, Dre, etc.
That’s it for now. I think we’re planning to check out a show today and on Tuesday we plan to head over to Uganda to work with Holly’s Charity, Caleb’s Hope.
So far I’m enjoying my stay here and I’m really glad we have a few locals to hang out with us, I couldn’t imagine visiting Nairobi without them around. It would be a lot more dangerous, but with them, I don’t feel as threatened.