Hey guys,

Sorry we haven’t posted anything new in quite a while! All of our projects are going along well now, but we have had a couple of difficulties along the way. One such difficulty was caused by our fantastic worker Wayona, who, although being an absolutely awesome and trustworthy guy has a habit of underestimating the time required for the labour of our projects!

Nevertheless we have started a number of projects around the orphanage that we didn’t even begin to mention on our donation page. Sure there are some big projects around the orphanage such as the new school building and tourist camp, but there has been no progress with these projects since we have been here (these projects are all handled by the orphanage director who is currently waiting for further funds before he continues development). Instead of attempting to fund these projects and not being able to see much happen while we are at the orphanage we have ended up starting a few small and some actually quite large projects.

1) Courtyard Renovation

This has been our biggest focus at the orphanage. As you can see on the photos of our facebook page it has been progressing nicely and hope to have that finished this week.

2) Disabled Children Bungalow

This project was one of our newest developments and has seen the most amount of progress in the shortest amount of time. It’s starting to look like a fantastic improvement upon the old tent that was used to help look after the disabled children.

3) Girls Dorm Renovation

Over time the girls dorm became a bit neglected so we decided that it would be a great idea to brighten up the whole dorm with a fresh coat of colourful paint!

4) Children’s Playground

Liv has decided that she would fund the construction of a small playground for the children. This will be fantastic as there isn’t really much to do around the whole orphanage.

Just a week or two ago we had a number of items stolen from our room. $60 USD, $50 AUD, 15000 KES and my laptop. So in total the equivalent of about $400 AUD in cash and my laptop. It turned out that Ian Castleman, the director of the orphanage, actually came across the children at a local bank trying to exchange the American and  Australian money into Kenyan Shillings! After hours upon hours of investigation we uncovered part of the story from the children. There were two boys involved. One about 12 years old and the other about 19. The younger boy claimed that the older boy had instructed him to fit through the tiny window of our shed and grab the money & laptop. But still the 19 year old boy kept lying! It took a further two hours of interrogation by the police the next day to get him to admit to the story. We lost the $200 AUD equivalent in Kenyan Shillings, but were really lucky to get the laptop back from a local school which was about an hours walk away.

So there’s only about one more week left of our time at the orphanage. We are going to have to work extremely hard to try and finish off all of our projects, but it’s possible we won’t get the see the finished products of one or two of our projects. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had any fun recently! Tim has spent hours working at a local market, Tim & I have gone donkey surfing and we have even put a tortoise in one of the volunteers beds! We still really enjoy going to Mission In Action on the weekends, driving cars around and in general just having fun with our friends Rachel & Sarah Can’t wait for safari!

Thanks everyone for all of your support!

Bentley

 

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 23rd, 2010 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Second Last Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.