hey folks. back from our trip to the country. it was pretty amazing. beautiful countryside. we went to embu and my friend sara and i stumbled on a little ngo there so we went inb and talked to the people and got a lot of really interesting info on the challenges to ngo's in the area and what kind of stuff is getting done. we stayed there in a really wacky hotel that looked like the town in edwaqrd scissor hands. then we went to a school that is being built somewhere outside of mehru. they gave us a tour of the campus, and what they're building and we met with some of the students. we played games with them like soccer and frisbee and volleyball and that was fun but then i stopped playing volleyball and got mobbed by a crowd of girls who were nice at first and then they all started grabbing my butt. i'm still not sure why. but it was pretty terrifying. they like to pet my head because my hair is short and they say "smart. very smart." that means you look good in rough terms. then the lower school got out and a whole crowd of little kids came outside and hung out with us. we're like celebrities in these areas because most people have never seen a white person before or maybe they have once. so they crowded around the bus and talked to us and waved at us and held our hands. then when we had to leave they ran after the bus. then we went to ehru to our hotel and the next day we went to a museum, not that interesting, saw a crocodile. i kdon't know how to spell that. mehru wasn't that interesting. from there we went to a town called Isiolo which is virtually at the end of civilization. past that point it's not safe to travel at night without police escorts and aparently there isn't much of a road anymore. isiolo is predominantly muslim and a lot of people on the street were speaking in arabic. in towns outside of nairobi where there are efforts made to keep street kids off the street, there are these kids who have run away from home and they are hungry so they sniff glue to make the hunger go away. so you can imagine when a whole bus full of white people rolls into town all these kids come out and crowd around the bus and put their faces to the window and beg for money. and other people come up with bracelets and carved animals and try to sell them to us.
from mehru we went to a town called nanyuki which is close to mt. kenya. we had a really pretty view of it from the hotel and we all got up in the morning to watch the sun rise behind it. don't worry i have pictures of all this stuff and i'm going to get them up this week sometime. in nanyuki we went to a grave yard where there are people burried from the conflicts that happened here during WWII as well as the mau mau emergency. so much more to tell but i have to leave now so i'll pick it back up in a couple days.