And the rest...

So other stuff that has happened....

Work is pretty crazy busy. Workshops have started which was weird experience. ‘Madame Director’ opened with a prayer (??!!) and made us all do coconut where we had to stand up and spell out coconut YMCA style getting faster until we were falling about laughing , 2 truths and a lie and ali baba and the forty thieves (i’d have to demonstrate that one) – all aimed at encouraging participation and energising the room.

Culturally it’s very interesting. Nothing seems to start on time which was half expected. There’s a pedantry about vocabulary which leads to a lot of confusion. Email is really there for show – no one seems to use it. Meetings have to be set up through a series of memos which have to be signed by just about everybody then physically given to people to request attendance. Everyone is super friendly and we've had lots of recommendations of where to go/what to do while in Kenya.

There’s a lot of excitement generally about what we are doing at the moment from our more senior stakeholders but think the user base is still unclear what’s going on but that should start to change over the next few weeks as we ramp up workshops. Interestingly our most senior stakeholder is being called to the Hague on a charge of war crimes.

Had my first Keswahili lesson this week so am now able to introduce myself properly at the start of my workshops :)

The rain has started here and is pretty bloody impressive. It just suddenly opens up and buckets down for a couple of hours in the afternoon/evening and everything literally grinds to a halt. The traffic is shocking anyway but when it rains you can’t get anywhere. We got a taxi back from lunch today – about a 10 minute walk – but in the pissing rain it took half an hour in the car. Last night we thought we wanted to go into town and our trusty driver, Peter, was just like “No”. Took me a while to get my head around the idea that we just couldn’t go because of the rain!!! Very funny scenes though, particularly a truck crammed full of people because all the matatus (little buses) were too full.

Have had a couple of good nights out, dinner at fogo gaucho (or frodo graucho) which is basically a churrascaria. Carnivore is the better known restaurant like that in Nairobi but apparently Fogos is better. A bit of No Woman No Cry Karaoke last week at Black Diamond (they didn’t have any Mr Cash), Kengeles for Paddy's Day last night which had a good band and AMAZING HEAVENLY meatballs and a couple of poker nights – sadly unsuccessful so far.

Taking it fairly quiet in Nairobi this weekend. Pool lounging tomorrow before the rugby, then Sunday think we’re headed to the national park before somewhere called bomas or something which was recommended to us for food and ‘cultural’ (?) dancing.

Next weekend is another big one – off to Rwanda on Friday with a few other folk to go GORILLA trekking!