Raila

So in Raila- remember this is 1,000 kids, they feed them porridge in the mid morning and a lunch early afternoon. The porridge is made from water and maize and millet flour I think they said.  The lunch is always maize for the kids.  For the staff it varies.

This school is not a Christian school so there are Muslim children there. I can't remember if I mentioned that 85% of the people in Kenya are Christian, but this is down from 95% several years ago.

The classrooms are packed with kids, 60-70 per classroom.  This class of 4 year olds has 40 kids with one teacher!

The first day we taught the kids about Jesus, The Good Shepherd. We act out a skit from a bible verse, Linda (she and Tom run First Love) explains the verse and teaches about what that means, we sing songs and the kids made a sheep craft.
A lot of them don't get a lot of opportunity to use art materials, I don't think they have art classes in Raila.

These kids were pretty creative and made some cameras out of mud.

We're only working with the Standard 6 & 7 students (grade). This means that we don't work with a lot of the kids at the school so sometimes they're peeking in the windows to see what's going on.  Today we used crayons and watercolors and I'm pretty sure none of them have used watercolors before.  Today we taught about Jesus as the Bread of Life.

I got to watch the cooks making one of the meals today.  Can you imagine cooking for a 1,000 hungry kids plus staff!?  They have huge cooking pots.  This is a smaller pot.

This is my roommate Meg playing with some of the kids during a break between our bible lessons.  The little kids fight over who gets to hold your hand.  And then they just stand there holding your hand.  There's not  a lot of conversation because they're too young to have learned any english and they may be a little shy.  The kids here just roam around by themselves in the streets- it would be like Benjamin or Addy, just walking around down the block.  No parent in sight.

The kids eat with their hands- no silverware.
And washing the dishes means dipping them in cold water to rinse them off.  Then they just reuse them!

This is our view looking back onto Kabira as we leave in our huge bus.  It's a pretty tight place to be navigating this thing around, but I guess the key to one of the vans broke off in the ignition yesterday!

And this is us at dinner Wednesday night.  So while we are surrouned by poverty all day, dirty faces and torn clothing, dust and not enough to eat- there's a mall right down the road.  This is often what I find when I travel.  Right next to the tent cities in Haiti were extremely fancy hotels with pools and spas.  Same in the DR. The rich right next to the extremely poor.  We pass a polo field and a dirt bike park and huge houses on the way to Kibera too.  Is the corruption that reigns in these countries the cause of such disparity?