It has been eye opening being out here in rural Ngong of Kenya where I am awakened by the birds chirping at exactly 6am every morning, the dogs bark at hyenas through the night, I see a cute little newborn lamb following its mother sheep everywhere and how the mother protects it dearly and I get to work with the kids to lead and shove a distressed baby calf to its mother in the grazing fields while cuddling a baby rabbit in the backyard the very next moment. A thriving and sustainable livelihood of living off the lands, right here in the humble Shelter Children’s Home. What with a vegetable and fruits garden beside a fish breeding pond, all cared for and maintained by the children themselves, this is really community living at its core.
The only problem is, reality bites and it took this Kenyan farmstay to make me realize how urbanized this city girl has already been, that everything I believe and have always advocated in theory, is actually a kind of life that cannot fulfill me, and it is actually quite depressing to come to such a realization.
On a side note, I enjoyed taking the matatu (public buses) while in Nairobi city over the weekend and enjoyed the kindness of the locals aboard the same bus. I think to truly know a country’s people, perhaps we should always take the local transportation of the country we are in.
So school was supposed to reopen for the children on Tuesday this week but on Tuesday morning, we woke to the news that 4 out of the 6 teachers were not going to come in to the school anymore and suddenly we, the volunteers, had to take on the class of nursery children, entertaining them with stories and origami artwork. There is only such an amount of time one can occupy little kids though, and before long, restlessness got the better of them as they started hitting each other and crying. So we rounded them up and got them to go out to the playground. I tried getting them in a circle to play circle games but clearly, they were too little to understand my instructions and soon they drifted to the playground while some collapsed into little naps on my lap and on the grass around me until the bell went for lunchtime.
