What a day!!! It was group project in the morning as the projects in Nairobi and the organised trip to the village market were cancelled again. Today's group project was a killer... Honestly was back breaking! There was 8 of us who had to help build a cow shed/chicken coup at a local school.

To start with we had to bag up hardcore and carry the bags into the already made troughs, I ended up doing the shovelling and filling the bags and the others carried the bags. The sun started coming up and it was really hard going in the heat. A few carried on with this but Jess, Vince and I were moved to help mix cement with shovels.

Last week we were human washing machines and this Friday we were a human cement mixer!!! It didn't stop there, we had to then transfer the wet cement into buckets and carry the buckets to the two local men who were building the walls. Wet cement weighs a ton, you probably won't be surprised to here that I decided to carry the last bucket of cement myself as it had no handles! This is where it all went wrong, I went down the side of the new wall where the men were working but the ground was very muddy, I slipped but managed to stay on my feet, keep the bucket up right and not knock down the new wall but by doing this I majorly did my back in - whoopsy!!!

Of course the men needed the bricks in order to build this wall, that was our job too, to carry crazy huge blocks about 20 yards to where they were building. We did this for a good 45minutes and by this time it was about half 11, i was also pretty sore but then a few of the others spoke up about how unsafe it was etc. It was true though, the blocks were ridiculously heavy for humans to be lifting them, even though we were carrying 1 block between 2 o us. The co-ordinator that was there translating for us, then very reluctantly called the bus to pick us up. By this time it was 12pm, we'd all been doing manual labour in the hot sun since 8.30am without a break or any water, u can imagine we were all done in, also covered in sand, wet cement and dubs! Definatly not the prettiest sight!

It was all good though as we had the afternoon off :) and as a group we decided to go into the Village Market which is on the outskirts of Nairobi. I had not been to this place yet due to the trips being cancelled for safety. We all went in on the public transport service of Matatu's at our own risk!

The village market was a shopping centre, with a massive food court in the centre. It looked like you were in big hotel really, as it was full of westerners and there were waterfalls everywhere. On the top floor was a Masai market which was really good, you have to bargain though and it was full of lovely souvenirs. Then there were loads of little boutique shops and a large supermarket that had everything possible! After we all had lunch, we went and shopped ourselves and agreed to meet at 4pm next to the entrance. I sat for 35mins and none of the girls I was meant to meet showed up, needless to say I was slightly annoyed. Luckily I'd met in with a couple of the younger ones so knew they were all heading to the ten pin bowling, cinema and pool area. It all worked in fine in the end, as went and met Jess and Vic instead and we had drinks together and tried some shi sha!! I did not get the point of this stuff at all, but it was an ace laugh.

We went to the supermarket to stock up on some alcohol for the weekend before attempting to get a matatu back to Brackenhurst. It was 6pm on Friday afternoon so all the matatu's were crazily busy, ended up bargaining for 2 cheap taxi's straight back to the cottage :) Much more civalised compared to the public transport!

I just had a quiet evening and missed going for dinner, was still full from lunch. The girls that didn't meet me at 4pm got back just before us but they didn't apologise and said that they looked for me.

I was meant to be working all weekend at the immunisation clinics in the Slums in Nairobi but that has also been cancelled for safety so it's a quiet weekend before I start my big trip next weekend!

Off to sleep after a lovely long viber chat with Andrew! Totally shattered after a hectic day xxx