Dorothy's blog ..Jambo

A team members blog is below...so much happens every day...its hard to remember it all...its so amazing here.....i'm finding it hard to get near a computer...so to save time..someone is waiting to use this....Here's Dorothy's blog....

JAMBO,
Our first day in Karen...
We had a slow start today, dealing with jet leg and getting to know everyone in the group. After breakfast Lois organized us ladies into groups. This week we will all be at the Compass School for 280 children. Heather, who is Lois's niece has been here for five weeks already building a relationship with the teachers and students at the school. Its is a school for orphaned children, they don't sleep there but for most of them the lunch that is served at the school is their only meal. Irene, Marlene, Linda, Ursula and I are the Kuku (chicken) group. Others will be creating a lockable cabinet to store the books we brought, renovate the school kitchen, music/crafts with the children and we have 4 nurses in the group they will be doing "check ups" for all the children that are identified as sick by the teachers. There are apparently some very ill children that have not received medical attention. That group will identify what children need further medical attention and Lois will have them come to the University Clinic to see the doctor here. The kitchen is in very poor condition, they don't have proper pipping for the kitchen oven and the whole kitchen fills with smoke everytime they cook, they also don't have any kitchen supplies.

Everyone took out our donated items and layed them out on the lawn. I could not belelive that all that was jamed into our bags...pictures will come later.
Most of the ladies went shopping today for supplies they will need tomorrow on projects. The Kuku group however went to the school to scope out the situation. We were told by Heather that we could reuse a rabbit cage as the rabbits died from a fungal diesease. We were sceptical about reusing the area in the fear of transfering the disease to the chickens. So Heather took us to the school with Anthony our driver. Compass isn't very far from the Univerisity...we drove past markets and passed a donkey that was pulling a wagon without a driver. He was on the right side of the road just walking along with looked like a barrel of water on the wagon.
Once we pulled up to the school and walked passed the classrooms you could hear the excitement from the children. I watched as one little boy stood outside his class room and with his fingers counted the number of white women that were walking by. The shed is mostly tin and wire mesh and the rabbits were housed in cages made of scrape wood, tin and wire. We decided we could reuse the main structure, its very sturdy and large (~ 2.5meters wide and 6 meters long). The head mistress of the schools, Anastasia, informed us that her in-laws raise chicken. We asked if we could go see their set up and off we went. James and Grace were very helpful and asked us to come in for tea...however we had to graciously decline as we had 40 minutes to get to the giraffe park to meet the rest of the ladies (30 minutes away).
We kissed some giraffes and went back to the University for supper. Tomorrow we will need to get an early start on the day to get this project done in 2.5 days! PS chickens arrive on wed and we are getting adult chickens YIPPEE
Kwaherni