The sun can't shine every day...

Dear friends, 

without the „downs“ one would not realize the „highs“. Today is probably one of those days, were Kenyan culture just doesn’t seem to match.

My favourite...And one of the 250 reasons to get up in the morning...

We needed to get some money from the bank to pay for the toilets and other investments, so we went to the local bank early in the morning. First surprise: a big queue. Well, no way around so we line up. After a quick 20 minutes it’s our turn. “How much do you want to withdraw?” the officer asked incredulously after we told him the amount. He goes to the back office and after a few minutes he comes back: “There is a limit of 1000 Euro per day”. “Ok, we’ll just be queuing for the next five days then…” (we need the money to pay the land). He disappears again (followed by looooooong waiting). The little branch is overcrowded, even three employees sharing the same desk. After 45 minutes he reappears. Meanwhile, we had the brilliant idea to distract money from two different accounts (Alex and Agnes) to half the time spend in banks… So we hand him a second credit card and guess what: loooooooooong waiting.

We got out of the bank after nearly two hours. Tomorrow same procedure again… :)

We left to go to the police station. The officer in charge is a board members friend and when we met him, he urged us to see “his police station”. Some handshaking later we leave again heading towards the school.

Still no running water, but the water man is supposed to came at two. At that point, we are still confident that we will have water by the end of day. 

We head back into town for lunch. Tomato pasta and fruit salad with mango juice. We are tired and somehow we seem to feel, that we didn’t have a day off since we arrived in Kimilili, quite the contrary: we got up early in the morning during the weekends to build fences, school benches and to smear cow dunk. We take an hour off to relax before heading back to school. 

Still no water. The water man was on the ground but somehow water is still not running. The water guy has left again and no one knows what’s going on. Apparently the pipes that passes our land belong to our neighbor (how can water pipes BELONG to someone???) and he doesn’t want us to use these pipes… A few phone calls later we get the okey: tomorrow morning we’ll have running water. Ahaa... Ok…

But the new school building made huge progress today. The structure is built up and now only the mud walls are missing. We decided to hold a community event this weekend to engage parents to support us with building the wall. So hopefully we will have enough volunteers to finalize the building over the weekend.

The student's toilets also made some progress:

And we found someone to start with the teacher’s toilet. (A big thank you Anna and Marco to fund this investment!)

Our daily IT training is progressing well and our students are fast learners. (Tobi, thanks for you donation, you made it possible for them to come as you are paying for the transportation for the whole group for the four weeks!). Very soon we can start a D.-office in Kimilili as our students will be perfect in Word, Excel and Powerpoint! 

We decided to take two days off and head to Kisumu tomorrow. Kisumu is the 3^rd biggest city in Kenya and is located close to lake Victoria. “Humid shores, untouched national parks and tranquil islands” might just be what we need right now… :)

We will be back on Friday night (in time for the community event on Saturday).

A big hug to everyone

Alex and Agnes

PS: Andy, I was right today in my email: you were the highlight of my day!