Starting A New Routine

Orientation was held at Hekima College: Institute of Peace Studies & International Relations this last monday. It was fun to meet all the Kenya volunteers. Most of them are placed all across the country in different towns and villages. I am based out of Nairobi. Housing is nice. I have 5 housemates plus two Kenyan ladies who take care of the cooking and general wellbeing of us. It’s nice to have running water, although right now as I’m typing this, the electricity is out. Not sure when we’ll get it back.

It’s been raining like crazy these past two days. Someone told us that we were the lucky ones who finally brought rain, because it had been so dry and hot.

Today, my placement started. I met with the headmaster of Olympic Education Centre in the Kibera slums, the second largest urban slum of Africa. We had a great conversation. I’ll be developing a photography project over the course of the next few weeks. Hopefully, I’ll be able to take portraits of all 300 students. My goal is to get prints of all of them and give them back to the students. Many of them don’t have a picture of themselves, so that’ll be nice. And the school can use the digital versions for their developing website.

The students are in the middle of exams right now, so most of my time was just spent getting to know the teachers, some students, though I did end up teaching English for two hours. The kids are so cute. I taught 5th graders. Did some reading comprehension exercises and some grammar stuff. This coming week is actually the Easter holiday, so I won’t be working there, but the following week, it sounds like I’ll be taking over a 4th grade and a 5th grade class for a teacher who will be gone for a while. Science and math, funnily enough the two subjects I did worse in when I was a child. Ironic.

I’m going to hold off on bringing my camera until everyone’s more acquainted with me. Taking pictures in Kibera is a sensitive subject. I have heard of slum tourism tours before, and I am somewhat indifferent about them. I think it’s a great way to get people to see what’s out there and for them to raise awareness, but at the same time I don’t want my subjects to feel like zoo animals. I told my new friend James, a Kenyan who works for volunteer organization, that I’d really like to just get to know his Kibera friends. And if after some time they’d feel comfortable to have their picture taken by a new friend, then that’d be cool. And if not, no big deal.

I’m kind of exhausted. What a day…