Canadians, Carnivore, and Celebrating my 19th

Happy Birthday Me! :)

So I arrived yesterday and actually managed to meet some lovely people over breakfast who invited me to tag along with their plans.
Our little day trip was made up of:

2x Canadian women – Jan and Robin who had only met recently to travel together and were heading off to see gorillas next!
1x A local student called Martha who studies and works at the National Museum and was showing the Canadians round.
1x an NGO worker called Robert who spends most of his time in Africa working for ‘Hope for Children’ but is actually from London.
And me :)

We spent the day wandering around the Massai Market (which was a little big like a carboot sale without cars and with added hassle from guys looking for commission), the National Museum, and the Snake Park.

The Canadians had plans to go to Carnivore that night and invited us along too. Obvously there wasn’t a lot I could eat but I went for the experience - and the chocolate brownies turned out to be amazing!!

Today I’ve had one of the most unconventional birthdays… I spent the day in Eastleigh Slum where Robert was doing some work at an orphanage. I was able to visit the orphanage and the girls there and had happy birthday sung to me by them and then visit some of the families in the slum that the orphanage outreach programme was working with. The conditions and the houses were not great, and the families were obviously very poor, but they are some of the happiest kids I’ve seen.

A lot of the people living in the area were hostile to Muzungus (white people), because people visit on ‘Slum Tours’ and they promise help or money – and maybe these people do donate to a charity or they do join an aid organisation, but rarely does that go back to the same slum they visited and so the families just end up feeling exploited.

For the same reasons I didn’t take a camera so no pictures sorry!

The evening was more of a normal birthday – drinking on the patio at the hostel. I also met James and Maria and Marc and Kylie who are joining the Oasis trip tomorrow too.

written by

JL1 on November 7, 2010 from Nairobi, Kenya

from the travel blog: African Travels

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