Jambo!

Finally back in Kenya - my second home! We arrived in Nairobi on Thursday and got to the Children and Youth Empowerment Centre Friday evening. Felt great to be back with these amazing kids! I'm happy to see that many of them are still there, and others that have left have moved on from the Centre and have found jobs! The kids look much healthier too - no distended bellies! So they are getting more nutritious food more often :-) I didn't recognize some of them from how much they've grown! All great signs.

Tonight I will start my work with the older youth who are involved in a hay baling business through the CBO at the Centre. Hope to find out how things have been going, who does what within the business, where they'd like to see the business go into the future, and address some issues like the importance of trust in their peers and delayed gratification. The rest of the week I'll be helping them define the business direction, and will TRY to help in building tools like the manual hay baler, hay rakes, and pitch forks. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had already built 1.5 balers before I'd even arrived!

Now to back track about Mozambique...

A very different experience than the majorly developed South Africa: the non-Africa part of Africa.
Our mode of transportation throughout the country was a big pink school bus that just barely fit our entire group in it. We were quite the spectacle - a bunch of Americans riding around Mozambique in a pink bus - needless to say we got a lot of weird looks!
Thurs May 17 we finally arrived at Catapu - a forestry concession that works to employ locals in sustainable jobs related to forestry plantations, the timber industry, wood work, and beekeeping. We stayed in cabins in the woods and made friends with lots of spiders and geckos! I learned a lot about beekeeping that I could take back to the Centre, since beekeeping is a major enterprise we are trying to start in Kenya as well. We rode around through the forest to learn about the trees there in a "bucky" - the back of a pick-up truck! We also went to the Zambizi river to watch the sunset - lots of amazing African sunsets on this trip!!
After a couple days at Catapu we went to Envirotrade - a carbon trading & sequestration group outside of Gorongosa game reserve. Gorongosa is "Africa's lost eden" - a civil war destroyed the land and nearly all the animals. Now it is a major restoration project. It was really good to see the contrast of Addo Elephant park and Gorongosa - could be compared to the contrast of all of SA to Moz.
We stayed in tents under thatched roofs at Envirotrade and our hot water was heated with a wood fire! We had a tour of the villages around Gorongosa and visited a school - really wanted to talk to the kids, but none of us could due to the language barrier - people in Mozambique speak Portuguese!
I hated saying goodbye to our SA/Moz group at the Joburg airport, but I'm excited for a reunion with everyone in a few months or so. The entire experience was amazing and unforgettable!

Thanks for reading! Asante sana!