Over night in a legit mud hut

Last night, we stayed at Gilbert's house (one of the Kipepeo members). We took a matatu there and had to walk through corn crops in the pitch black to get there. He built his own house out of mud and logs. It had 3 rooms but we managed to fit all 15 of us there. We all sat around a table and for dinner, we had ugali, local vegetables, fruit salad, cabbage, beef, a mixture of tomatoes and onions, and more ants. This time it was actually fried. EW. After dinner, we sang some Swahili and English songs, played some games and figured out riddles. It was a great evening. I actually had an amazing sleep under our mosquito net. I was lucky that I got to sleep on a wooden bed frame with my sleeping bag. My dad wasn't so lucky as he slept on the dirt floor. After a fairly peaceful sleep, I woke up to the sound of birds chirping and chickens clucking. It was weird how loud and close the chicken sounded... I later saw it was because there actually was a chicken in our room! He was tiny and so cute <3. We took a matatu to a micro-finance group meeting where Scott, my dad and Matias spoke and taught the leaders of the various groups some business skills. We then went to meet the Luanda Town Council: the clerk, the treasurer and the social services representative (CDA). It was neat to see how the Town Council just dropped everything to meet us. When our short meeting was over, we walked over to the Luanda market where we had a small lunch and I got to see the huge open-air market. There were hundreds of vendors selling everything you can imagine. The Luanda open-air market is the 2nd largest market in Kenya. They were selling dried/fried bugs and those gross flying ant things, they were selling meat with flies everywhere (extra protein!), and they were also selling what looked like burnt fish smeared with charcoal... I'm not too sure what it actually was though... Anyway, though there were some gross things, there was also lots of really cool ideas there. I saw some people selling a bunch of cans tied together with string. I later found out that they can use that as a kerosene lantern which is really cool. I saw a lot of vendors selling  omena (a kind of small fish). Now we are on our way back to Kima to help Kipepeo with their 2012 business plan. It should be a lot of fun and should have very interesting ideas.

Until next time,








~Nikki :)