Hey guys,
Today was our last day at the orphanage. Even though there were good times and bad times we feel fulfilled with the work we have done for the children to better their lives and in some way better ours. We’ll miss them all very much!
We have 2 weeks of safari to look forward to now. Would any of you be interested if we continued to do the occasional update and uploaded safari photos?
Bentley
Look at the photos for like 6 seconds :p
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
Hi everyone,
I figured this would eventually have to happen… I think it’s about time we started begging for donations!
As some of you might know we just started our first big project at the orphanage. Until last week we had just been focusing on fixing up gardens, hacking down cacti, digging massive rubbish pits e.t.c
However! As mentioned in our last post we just started work on the courtyard.
So far everything has been going great. We’ve removed all of the bricks from the floor, ripped out the old clogged drainage system and began leveling the ground. Today we just received an extra 20 tonnes of sand to use for concreting purposes.
We have high hopes for this project and would love to complete at least one major project of our own before we go back home. But… As per usual (especially so with Kenyan builders) the quote has been blown out of the sky… Yay…
We are about $1,000 AUD off having the funds to complete the courtyard and doing a good job of it. It would be great for the kids to have a clean and bright play area!
Any donations (through our donation page), no matter what size, would be greatly appreciated
Bentley
Hey guys,
We just started work on the courtyard renovation yesterday. So far we’ve ripped up all of the ridiculous bricks, cleared rubbish and removed an age old tree. This is something we have been completing with the help of the new volunteer Levea. So far Levea has been lots of help with all of the physical work and is helping to fund the courtyard renovation in conjunction with us
P.S. There’s new photos
Heya people,
I suppose I should let you guys know what our plan is for the next couple of weeks. We are currently working towards fixing some of the management problems at the orphanage. At the moment the staff are largely unorganised and we find that they aren’t actually working quite a lot of the time. Unfortunately this means that the children at the orphanage get the wrong idea about working and well… Not much happens sometimes.
Although Tim, Clay & I have pretty much no experience in managing staff (other than just being employees) with a bit of common sense we should be fine. So far we have written an action plan (not just for staff management, but to improve life at the orphanage as a whole) and a formal “management reform” to help ensure staff are working.
Don’t worry though, we are still doing lots of physical work. We planted tomatoes yesterday and this week we will finally be starting work on one of the projects! The tourist camp has been set to a lower priority at the moment due to well… Reality… But we will start transforming the courtyard. Our plan is to remove the brick flooring, plaster the walls, add drainage, concrete the whole area, add a garden and paint the walls with some colourful designs. It’s going to be a lot of work, but it should be really rewarding.
Bentley
We finished the weekend in the back of a Hilux with a ginger-ale and Tim’s sweaty wife beater wrapped around my freshly shaved head… Loving this country.
Three days earlier:
“I hate this damn country”, was the thought rolling around in my head as the three of us piled into a mutatu (the most popular form of transport in Kenya) – a Toyota Hiace on a set route with a 14P capacity, but about 20P crammed in – on our way into town for lunch and to meet with Ivan the owner of the “Mission in Action” orphanage which is located just out of town.
Lunch was sub-par and I’m pretty sure the meat on the burgers was rat, goat or something not sanctioned by the FDA. After lunch Ivan met us in a nice Toyota Prado and we left for his orphanage at a somehow even crazier Kenyan/Australian speed narrowly dodging cars and trucks alike.
On arrival through the orphanages gates it was like we had travelled through the epic fabric of space and time. We were no longer in the crappy Kenya we had grown used to. Our first thoughts were of how it seemed exactly like a nice Australian orphanage. “MIA” is beautiful and has an extremely well maintained compound with a huge house, regular bright & colourful classrooms (with more on the way), proper plumbing for the children’s toilets, tourist bungalows, a restaurant, caring & dedicated staff, 45 fantastic English speaking kids and Ivan’s family by his side.
Ivan and his two daughters, Rachel & Sarah, invited us to a movie night the next weekend. We had to quickly remind ourselves that we were in Kenya the next morning, as we had to catch another mutatu back home. We left “MIA” inspired and full of ideas about how we can help to improve Ian’s orphanage.
Monday came with the cramped space and stench of yet another mutatu. We were heading into town as it was Ian’s birthday and Ivan recommended that we should go to the “Merica” the grandest hotel in town. The Merica hotel offers a fantastic buffet and beautiful swimming pool that is open to the public. Us youngsters couldn’t wait to go for a swim (after we bought our berets of course). We enjoyed a good lunch followed by a ridiculously over-the-top cake-giving parade, something that substantially cheered Ian up after he had quite a bad morning. The three of us plus Rachel & Sarah hung out by the pool until late afternoon swimming and getting to know our new friends.
PS Guess how we got home.
This is just a post to test whether Facebook integration is working!
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