Because I enjoy shooting myself in the foot (that is the only explanation I have), my trip from Vancouver to Nairobi consisted of a gruelling 40-hour journey that spanned four flights, and included a bizarre overnight stop in the Middle East where a local girl invited me on a walk with her dog along with her husband (or maybe she was walking her husband along with the dog).
Christi took the same arduous route through the Middle East, Rob, John and Jo stopped through London and did a 5-hour power tour through the city, Amanda, Sarah and Nadia went through Seattle and Amsterdam, Les flew through New York and Zurich, touring along the way, and Mike went to LA for a couple days to visit family and then to London and Nairobi. Mike arrived Thursday night and stalked the halls looking for any team member who might have been lingering in the guesthouse. He eventually gave up and made friends with the animals...
On the first official day (Friday), our team met for a dinner. Since we had all taken wildly different routes to get ourselves to Nairobi, it was a relief to see everyone again in Nairobi and all in one piece. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for our respective luggage pieces – two of our team members suffered from lost luggage. One of the two is still tracking her piece down, which is drifting somewhere between Seattle and Nairobi at this very moment.
On Saturday, we spent the morning at the Maasai market. It’s a fantastic, bustling destination of tourists, locals, and friendly/hard selling/energetic/aggressive stand owners who give new meaning to the word ‘persistent’. Nancy (our professor) gave us a quick Bargaining 101 session, and an hour later, we emerged from the market hoisting a few select art pieces. In the afternoon, we met with our student partners at Strathmore University for the first time. For those unfamiliar with the program, each UBC student pairs up with a Strathmore University student to teach the business curriculum over three weeks. That night, the Strathmore students invited us out to enjoy the best of Nairobi nightlife. They were incredibly welcome, made us feel very comfortable, and showed us a great time in an evening that included copious amounts of fried chicken.
We spent all of Sunday touring the three sites that our group would be teaching at. First we visited St Aloysius School in Kibera (east Africa’s largest slum). St Aloysius is a school for youth orphaned by AIDS. This is the location where the team will be running the social entrepreneurship pilot project. This site will be focusing on developing enterprises, which will in turn help the community and the individual starting the business. We had the pleasure of meeting Barlet (the school’s principal) who described a bit about his background and the school.
- Candy, Rob, Mike, Christi
No comments:
Post a Comment