Karibu tena

I arrived back in Kenya at the beginning of April and my first few days involved cutting out frogs and other things for craft activities for the easter holiday clubs. I didn’t quite factor in the fact that usually there is a team of nine of us preparing for holiday camps in the summer and that’s why it only takes an afternoon to prepare everything. It seems to take a lot longer when it is only one person, I didn’t think of that when I turned down Jo’s help. Luckily I enlisted some help from some unsuspecting friends who thought they were just coming over to watch movies.

So last week was a full on week of easter clubs, usually we spread it over two weeks and just do it in the mornings but for some reason we did it all in one week doing full days which was absolutely knackering. It was a shame for the older kids who came in the afternoons because we were all flagging by that time so they didn’t have quite as much fun as the little ones who came in the morning.

What was cool though was the helpers I had to run the club. Jo and Jon weren’t around so firstly a volunteer called Jackie, a Kenyan who comes to our church came to help which was brilliant. She has a lot of experience of working with kids in the refugee camps on the Somali border, Pastor Shadrack was sick all week so she offered to help Pastor David with some of the teaching which she did excellently. She is much more interactive with the kids than our two Pastor’s style. The kids engage a bit more that way so hopefully David got some tips from her, he was certainly very impressed.

Equally exciting was having Hussein help with the leading, Hussein has been one of the TP kids for ages and has now started secondary school so is getting a bit old to come to clubs. I put him in charge of drama as he has such a flair for it himself, he did a great job and took all sorts of initiative stepping up and asking to sort out other bits and bobs. It was really cool to see him step up, he had a bit of a hard time in the afternoons with the older kids complaining because they are mostly his friends and were convinced he was rigging the points, which he was not, he is a man of integrity and he stood his ground really well.

The project is closed now for Easter holidays until the start of May so I’m doing joyful office things when there is power and when there is not, I nap.