Our Amboseli safari.

Hello everyone!

Sorry that it has been a while since our last post. Hope our parents are not too worried about us. We have been extremely busy at the slum - four children (John K, John M, David, and Isaak) went to school last week after getting our help with uniforms and basic school fees. One of the boys, John was so happy to be back in school. He and his sister Ruth have been coming to the pseudo-school that we run in the field at the slum, learning basic math and English lessons. They are fairly new to Gioto - they have only been there about 2 years since their father locked their mother and both children out of the house and told them that he could into support them. The father would not even let them back in to collect their things. Despite this, Ruth and John are two of the most optimistic children at the slum. They welcome us every morning with a handshake and a smile.

The four boys showing off their new uniforms. John is on the far right.

Ruth! One of the nicest girls at the slum. She reminds us of Erin, Kyle's sister.

So, John went to primary school last week and this week we are hoping to get Ruth into a secondary school. We are facing challenges with that though, as you need your test scores from primary to get in to a secondary school, and everything she had was left when they were kicked out from their home. One of the other volunteers will try and go her primary school (about 2 hours away) and ask for a copy of the original test scores. We want so badly for Ruth to be in school, so we are hoping that this works.

After our busy week, our safari man Joseph called and asked how soon we could get to Nairobi, as he would be able to take us to Amboseli and Kilimanjaro the next morning. Kyle and I rushed home to shower, pack, and hop on a matatu to the big city. After sleeping at the volunteer house, we were up first thing and ready to go. The drive to the park was about 3 1/2 hours, but Kyle and I enjoyed it because we had never been southwest from Nairobi before. The landscape was amazing, and very different from that of Nakuru and the Rift Valley.

When we got to the park gate, we immediately were excited, Joseph told us that Kilimanjaro is a pretty shy mountain, and not to get our hopes up for seeing it. I was pretty bummed, and we could see that the cloud cover was pretty thick. As we entered the park and began to drive toward our tent camp, we saw ostriches and some giraffes. It was so cool to see them in the wild. We also saw some elephants! And this was only on the way to lunch.

After taking a delicious lunch of fish, chapati, and fresh fruit, we were off on our first game drive! We saw so much, and the clouds covering the mountain top started to part - perfect timing! We even saw lions, which are rare for Amboseli. More cool things we saw - trumpeting elephants, baby elephants, and a standoff between a hippo and a gigantic elephant (the hippo retreated, and the elephant moved around his pond). W even saw the largest group of elephants in Kenya - a group of about 200!  Joseph called us the lucky couple after seeing all that we did in only 24 hours. Other animals we saw - jackals, zebras, hyena, warthog, impala, thompson's gazelle, grant's gazelle, gnu, wildebeest, lizards, eagles, and lots of other birds. I took roughly 400 pictures.

After our short safari we are even more excited for our 3 day one - and we will definitely be going with Joseph again - he was an amazing tour operator and so knowledgeable about the animals. I cant even begin to describe how amazing it was, so here are the pictures:

trumpeting elephant

Lion!

elephant line up

our tent accommodation

me and the mountain at 6 am

Some zebras and Kilimanjaro

We decided to go on safari on a Friday and Saturday in order to get back for Sunday, a big day at our house. Pastor has his ordination at church. Now we live with a Reverend! Reverend Anthony. There were about 1000 guests at the huge church, we had cake for Anthony and a meal afterward. It was nice. Also, we saw some of the children that we know from the slum there, as his new church is quite close to Gioto. One of the kids we know is even in the church choir. His name is Peter. I even took a video of him singing and dancing! It was great. We will have to share that video once we are back, because the internet is quite slow here for uploading. Here is a picture from the 6 hour long ceremony. yep, you read that right, no typo.... SIX hours.