Star-Gladiator and the elephant of time.

Gearing up.

we woke up late today, and the girls were packed and off somewhere else. They were packing stuff up, and carrying around benches and stuff. To be fair, they had just climbed a mountain and this contributed to their beastliness.

Sam, was pestering Louise again about handing on the little note. This, we were told, would be the last group we met on the trip.

Before lunch we split in two groups with me as team leader. Bwahaha. This means I have to write today’s collective diary entry as well as this. Anyway, our team went of to cut grass. This doesn’t sound to engrossing.

But we are doing it Kenya-style.

when we were given swords, the last thing on our minds was grass-cutting. it was either re-enacting 'Gladiator' or 'Star Wars'. or, mixing them up and having 'Gladiator Wars', or 'Star Gladiators', or...

We saw a guy doing it before outside the Camps International building with a oversized machete. We were given these ungainly blades, led out to the elephant wire(thankfully, turned off), and told to hack at the ground until there was just red soil either side of the fence. Therapeutic, almost.

We were happy with our first real day’s work. The other guys were digging irrigation ditches.

Later we went out to the local school. The kids are great, with an active(cheeky) sense of humour and the school was pretty well maintained. We were shown the ‘Nature trail’ the kids had set up, and a couple of the kids read poems.

We proceeded onwards to a Swahili lesson, which was fun…

We suddenly found ourselves dispersed amongst the students in a small classroom and told to repeat after the teacher and then speak to the students in Swahili. Then we were thrown into the deep end. They made us do heads shoulders knees and toes – to the kid’s amusement.

how did we get here?

Outside, we played volleyball with the kids, where I pretended to be awful, to make the kids laugh. And when I say, pretended, I mean just play it as I usually would.

The kids speak surprisingly good English, and I had a long conversation with a kid called Saleen, about English schools and such.

When I got back I wrote a bit of this, sitting at the end of the huge straw canopy building were we had lunch and just generally hung out. The bench I sit on looks over most of Mwaluganje.
For a while Nikki was there too, the camps staff member and mountain guide, who was also writing her diary. everyone can talk to Nikki, she's really easy to get along with.

you mean, this part of the diary was being written as this was taken? woh. mind'splode.

Then we saw a grey dot on the edge of the river. I could make it out pretty well, but opted for the binoculars for clarity. A huge elephant bathing in the stream, spraying itself with water.

-Quick entry, everyone’s playing poker, and I still don’t understand it.