Afternoon all! Kenya is still keeping me busy and, so far, out of trouble. Plenty to talk about again this week, so I will dive in and leave your weekly Swahili lesson til the end.

So on Monday, we were straight back to work, in the Forest this time. This pleased me for 3 reasons. Firstly, it is cooler in the forest with the shade of the canopy. Secondly, it is a remarkably nice forest, inexplicably better than a bog standard boring, british forest. I think it had something to do with the atmosphere inside the forest, the sound of exotic birds and monkeys along with the tall, tropical trees just seem to make the forest more exciting (as well as the handsized locust we encountered) and a nice place to be working. Thirdly, and by far most importantly, was that I got to play with a machete all day. Other volunteers considered this hard work, or at the very least work, I considered this play time. I had been given a machete (called matilda, i wear her in my belt) with the specific purpose of chopping stuff, and the knowledge that this was work that was helping the community. Excellent. The bits we were supposed to chop were along the solar powered electric fence, which keeps the elephants off the local farmer's land. Unfortunately this only lasted 3 days and we had gone along the neccessary length of fence. On the Tuesday we encountered our first exciting animal, in the forest. A group of black and white monkeys greeted us from the trees at the edge and jumped about screeching at us below.

On the thursday, we had a change of scenery at work. We went to a member of the local conservation group's house, Moravi's, where we were to dig a small fish farm. the plot that needed to be dug was approximately 3 metres by 5-6metres, and about a metre deep. We needed to clear the area first of a few tree stumps and then got down to it. By the end of the day we were shattered but had more or less dug the hole. The fish that Moravi can farm will go to helping him support his family and local community and will serve as a feeder to other fish farms that later platform2 groups will be making.

On Friday we had another change of work and went to a local school that 2 of the other volunteers are living at. We were split into groups of 3 and put into classrooms, where in my case we were expected to teach or "do anything really, whatever you want". So to cut a long story short, havoc entailed and we tried to teach them some maths from their books but none of us could quite work out the deranged division method they were supposed to use, let alone the sums (it didnt help of course that sums were in money, ie. shillings and cents, but we didnt realise tha there are 10 cents to a shilling...). So we gave up on that after a bit and just went outside and played some games with them. Apparently we got off lightly, the other volunteers had literally been used as climbing apparatus. So we entered the weekend a bit traumatised and ready for a day or two off.

This morning, just before coming to the internet cafe, our Kenyan mum took us to a friend/colleague of hers whom just happened to be the former finance minister for Kenya until his defeat in the 2008 elections. He is now the director of KWFT (Kenya women's finance trust) and therefore has dealings with some of the people in our local groups and the people we are staying with. He lives pretty close and we were told we should be honoured that we got into his house, not many people get there. The chat we had with him was fascinating, and I wished that we had more time. His major chat at the moment is over climate change and the damage being done to Kenya. It seems a shame that he is not in power anymore as he struck me as a decent, honest bloke and the scoundrels in charge at the moment are corrupt and couldnt run a mile let alone a country.

Anyway, thats just about my week in a few paragraphs, so keep it real and Kuwa na siku njemba (have a nice day).