Seed of Hope #kenya

Day 2 (pic captures some of the donations from Hill of Beath Primary School in Fife)!

Today we didn’t meet as many animals, but we met the amazing staff and people who work within Vision Africa. After all of the donations in to piles of ages and relevant to the projects that will be visited next week, we all headed over to the Junction Mall, which is host to the Maasai Market each Thursday. The Market was an experience, I thought I was a gifted negotiator, but feel I might have met my match with the Kenyan patter! The market was vibrant and full of wonderful home made items, there was even a dance troop and live music to entertain and distract us from how much we are haggling with the price.

The people at the market were all super friendly and take a great deal of time talking to you and learning about where you are from and take great emphasis on greeting you as a customer. The man who I bought some things from, Sammie, was from the Maasai and as given a start up grant of 10,000 shilling (which is roughly £71 to start his business).

After the market we received our official welcome from Kirsty, one of the Vision Africa Staff and fellow Fifer and we were given a tour of Vision Africa HQ, it's amazing the potential a shipping container can have when converted in to classrooms and facilities for children to learn and grow in - theres even space for a tiny well designed office to keep overheads low. We will visit other Seed of Hope projects next week when our tour of the charity continues www.vision-africa.org/seed-of-hope/.

The Nairobi base has a mechanic school which has practical elements (Dad, the years of your car/motorbike chats have paid off, I could name the part of the engine underneath the bonnet and recognised the motorbike engines that they take apart of but back together again) and theory of engineering. The second element to the Seed of Hope project in Nairobi is fashion design. We placed a huge order for crafted items and chose the materials!

Home, dinner and time for bed. I go away on safari tomorrow, for 4 days, with no connection to the outside world! We fly out of Wilson Airport, straight in to the Maasai Mara, where we meet our guides and vehicles (one of which I have named Rafiki).