Mural Project

After the Saturday night dance party, we did a Sunday project with the kids: painting a mural of the Big5. Beforehand, our faculties from the Thiiri Center (they stayed at a different location then the students) visited the place. My pharmacy faculty gave them maize-blue pon-pons which got them very excited. At first they were just waving them around but I instructed them to say yell "Go-Blue!" in the second shot. It was quite amusing what I got :) Unfortunately we only had 7, not enough for the 14-15 kids there so it was a tough call on who gets to be in the picture. But I am so glad the kids shared it with other kids that were staying in the courtyard.

It was very rewarding for me to see such bright smiles on these kids and how excited they were to visitors like us. Every one of these kids would wave to our vans when we would roll in and walk up to you and extend a hand out for you to shake. Their favorite question: "What is your name?" I have to pronounce my name one syllable at a time: A-le-na because Swahili is broken up in syllables too. For instance, Matt was a difficult name for them, it tends to be M-ot. Same for A-man-da and A-dam. But Chelsea was easy because here, there is a soccer (football) team called Chelsea. What are the odds!

So I did not get a chance to take too many pictures of the place but I did get the outdoor 3-stone fire for making large pot stews. You can't see it, but to the right in the picture, there are these mini-green house semi-dome shape things. They are house cow dun-dun that gets fermented into CO2 or maybe it is methane? to be used as a fuel source.

 These in the girls room. One of the medical students is a freelance graphic designer. She created these murals for the kids to color in. You can see how creative they got in the second picture.
 

The boys got jealous that the only mural was in the girls' bedroom, so our medical student quickly stretched another mural. This time, the king of the jungle: Simba! This time, the color was quite fitting.