Pictures from Kenya..

Some of the many pictures taken whilst on our expedition:

Album 1


Album 2


Album 3

And the adventure concludes

After a long night of travelling we have landed safely back home.

More pictures will appear here soon

Our final few hours of our Kenyan Adventure

Hello from Kenya

Firstly apologies for the radio silence, it has been an action packed few days traveling between Nairobi to Niri and back again.

In the past few days, we have shopped, visited a traditional Kenyan dance show, visited the elephant orphanage, been on Safari at the Ark, visited the Niri Scout Project, visited the slum in Niri, visited the Niri Sikh Temple and last night we for an amazing all you can eat meal at Carnivore.

It has been an incredible few days and we all can't wait to tell you about it in detail very shortly! On top of all of this excitement there was further excitement at the Ark when Colin proposed to Gemma (and of course she accepted).

Today, we have the remainder of the day in Nairobi before starting our long journey home, we look forward to seeing you all very soon.

We have arrived in Nairobi

Yesterday we struck camp first thing in the morning and spent the majority of the rest of the day on the coach to Nairobi, ready to catch our 7pm train to Mombasa. As with all good plans we had allowed considerable contingency, however our journey took much longer than expected and we arrived into Nairobi just after 7:20pm.

So sticking truly to the words of Baden Powell 'A Scout is never taken by surprise; (they) know exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens', we we have relocated to troops to a hotel in Nairobi. Spirits are high  this morning after a warm shower, proper toilet and a nice breakfast.

I need to go and eat mine, will update you all with the Plan B soon.....

Paul

Merry Christmas from Kenya!

Today our vision of taking Christmas to Kenya was fulfilled, and we celebrated Christmas today, together in Kenya, in between finishing everything off before we travel to Nairoboi tomorrow.....

Today we woke up with high spirits after a late night celebrating and church adventure. It was Delta’s day to run activities and the first of these was tie dying t-shirts, despite the lack of dye we managed to improvise, Kenyan style (permanent marker and water). We then sat and made Christmas cards together and particularly enjoyed the use of glitter glue. Meanwhile foxtrot were painting their mural of a London bus with kenyan animals in the windows. Team Echo changed their main project again which consisted of building a new store room for the centre but as the builders did not turn up so we helped out around camp and painted the swings.

Charlie finished their gate and is now revitalised and like new, they also finished the new sign for the camp site. We have also exchanged secret Santa presents and opened presents from our presents (some of us got socks J which was lucky considering all our feet smell) the kenyans also had a visit from santa where they all received their own individual stockings and clothes from all the donations. 
 

During the day we had a sermon which was led by Alf we sang songs and listen to a christmas poem, we also received a holly each to wear so that we remembered the serman about holly being prickly and that everyone has a ‘prickely’ day but everyone still get on well.  At the end of the day we had a massive christmas meal where the kenyan Scouts and the GLSE Unit sat in a large circle and ate dinner together. 

To close the camp in a special way, when the darkness drew, the Units patrols joined forced with a Kenyan Patrol and released a chines latern in the sky. Within no time at all, the sky was full of the latterns, which we all attached our wishes to for the coming year. A truly special way to finish the camp.

Written by Ben and Summer from delta and echo with help from Emmanuel (a ten year old kenyan Scout).

 

As we unfortunately did not get a chance to write the blog yesterday, here is a brief summary..
Yesterday was Alphas Project Day and for this we did First Aid and communication. We started the day by showing the Kenyan Patrols what skills they would need in order to get the English first aid level 2 badge.

This included:

·        the importance of wearing gloves while dealing with an incident

·         showing them how to deal with minor bleeding (which involves using a Biro to draw a minor cut rubbing it clean with an antiseptic wipe and covering it with a plaster)

·         major bleeding (showing them  how to attach a bandage properly and then putting the in pairs and getting the to put them on each other, which ended in them mainly wrapped around their heads, which was quite amusing)

·         checking that a casualty is breathing, recovery position (and checking the scene) and dealing with burns ans scalds.

Before giving each of them their badge, we did a First Aid relay, to see how much of that we had told them they remembered.  Each one answered their questions correctly and ended in each Alpha member looking ridiculous covered in bandages and looking like mummies!

After receiving their badges, we played a few games in which to improve their communication. The first was pairs football, normal football but with two people linking arms and working together. Although this is not how it went; it started with them all in pairs and after a few minutes they had all  separated and were playing normal football. The other game we played was Chinese whispers. Starting in patrols with single words, and working our way up into a massive game including all Kenyan Patrols.

Written by Alpha (Hannah, Naomi, Jack and Sam)

Day 4 in Siaya: full of challenge for all

Throughout the week the patrols are completing different activities, here is the latest from the guys. Keep your comments coming, they are being reviewed over breakfast!

Armani Orphanage

Today a few of us took a trip to the Armani Orphanage, it was a long and very bumpy road but we arrived safely. As we arrived there we could see around 20 children outside the building all happy to see us. We got off the bus and were greeted by Rev. Kenneth who then gave us a talk about the orphanage and then took us inside to show us the various rooms. He informed us of some of the background stories behind the childrens lives. Majority of them have only ever known anything other than from living in the orphange as that is where they have grown up. The stories told make you come to terms with the realisation of the lives of the children here.  As we were walking around the orphange the children would hold your hand or want picking up to go with us.

Once we had finshed walking around the site we had an hour to play with children and interact with them, the smiles on their faces were amazing to see. The happiness and joy from them was outstanding. Before we had got there, Ben had taught them the ‘high five’ and they were walking around giving us all a high five. Everywhere we turned there was a smiling child wanting to hold your hand and give you a high five. We were taking pictures with them and a few of us we teaching them how to use our individual cameras and we let them take them and take pictures of what they wanted. They all loved using cameras and taking pictures of themselves and others.

Some of the thoughts from the groups that went out:

‘The Armani Orphanage inspired and showed us how grateful the orphanes were for our help and donators, the work done at the orphanage is amazing.’

‘Looking at the children and realising how happy they are but then looking at their situations makes you value your family so much. While I was there it made me think how lucky I am to have my family around me but it also saddens you to think they may never have that experience.’

Project Day Golf (Water Buffalos)

For today’s project we ran the Scout creative challenge badge. We spent the morning helping the children to earn their badge and the afternoon playing games.

The badge criteria involved making posters promoting Scouts, where each of the Scouts were invited to draw something on the campsite. Most of the children chose to draw the flags we had dispayed int the campsite; the Kenyan flag, UK flag and World Scout flag.

In the next activity the Scouts were asked to make up their own games. The games they were doing mainly involved singing and dancing as it is a major part of their culture, but one game everybody enjoyed, both from Kenya and our unit, was a game where 3 sticks were laid out and each person had to take one step between each set of sticks, and gradually the sticks got further apart. Watching the Scouts do it was quite incredible as even the smaller children were covering extraordinary distances.

The final part of the challenge badge was to make paper aeroplanes. We taught them a variety of styles to make and when they were all made we tested them all to see which went the furthest.

In the afternoon we taught them a few games including trust exercises, and passing each other through gaps between pieces of string. Quite quickly excitement escalated and it turned into a mass game of football. After all the activities each of the Scouts was presented with their Scout challenge badge. All in all, the project was both successful and enjoyable.

Fun: the theme of the today as Team Extreme put Sports Day!

Hello, Bravo (Team Extreme) here, today we held our project day, which was a sports day. We held it for the Kenyan scouts and the group from the Amani Orphanage. The day consisted of us starting at 10am (Kenya time i.e. late) by splitting them into their patrols. We then walked over to the sports field across the road and started the children off with t-shirt decorating, the children really enjoyed this as they got to decorate it the way the wanted to and got really excited and started clapping when they realised they could keep them.

After this we played a couple of quick games to warm them up, these were an egg and spoon race, followed by relay races. We had a quick break before playing two games of football, which the Kenyans were really good at and were not bothered if the ball pelted them in the head/body. The first session was then over and we came back across to the scout site to have some lunch before resuming with our sports day.

At 2pm (UK time i.e. on time)  we walked back to the sports field and got everybody sorted back into their teams. Another two quick games were played, tunnel ball and cones & domes. The children picked these up very quickly, and enjoyed themselves very much. Then we had another quick break before teaching the Kenyans how to play rounders, we struggled to explain some of the rules, but adapted the game and everyone still had a really nice time and throughly enjoyed themselves. At about 3:30pm we let the Kenyan patrols teach us some of their games, we soon realised that they were similar to some of the games we played, but still had alot of fun playing them. We then walked back over to the scout site and held a mini presentation, each Kenyan was given a medal as we believe we were all winners.

Lots of love from,

Team Extreme!!!!

(Holly, Hannah, Mel, Becki, Clare and Bert)