Day 4: 
Today it was an early start considering that we were still jet lag. Christine (CARE employee)called us to the office for 9:30 we could not quite understand why! For a while we thought we were in North America … working on Saturday after a long journey! Once we got to the office we were told we had to meet on Saturday because George Odo was leaving and that was the only chance we had to meet him! Also we were introduced to the Kenyan students, Wangechi, Alex, Naomi and Kennedy. Furthermore we met two of the Kenyan staff that oversaw the logistic of our trip Christine and Lynette. First impressions were good all around even tough we realised that our Kenyan counterpart unlike us hadn’t gone through any training and had very little knowledge about the projects and CEP. This made me think. I guess cultural work differences were highlighted by this episode. But it felt good to finally be in Nairobi and getting to know people on the field. George gave a superb presentation and seriously impressed me; he was very “charming” and knowledgeable and moreover he made me feel very welcome.
After the morning meeting we were given the afternoon free and we decided to go to a mall. The experience was quite disappointing since the mall looked exactly like a Canadian mall. I guess the trip had its benefits since we all needed to pick up few things that would not readily available outside Nairobi.
The evening of Saturday was very interesting since one of Dave’s friend, Trevor, told us about a club downtown called Florida 2000 which we then discovered is described by the lonely planet as the “mad house”. So armed of some adventure we ventured to this club mainly populated by locals. We felt very out of place since we were the only white people in the club but the experience was interesting and fun. We obviously attracted the attention of the local female population we had several drinks and we chatted till late in the night it was very interesting to find out how young people from Nairobi enjoy themselves. In honesty it is not much different to what is going on in Canada every Saturday night. That I guess gave me an indication that even though Nairobi looks a bit run down it is no different from any western city.
Today it was an early start considering that we were still jet lag. Christine (CARE employee)called us to the office for 9:30 we could not quite understand why! For a while we thought we were in North America … working on Saturday after a long journey! Once we got to the office we were told we had to meet on Saturday because George Odo was leaving and that was the only chance we had to meet him! Also we were introduced to the Kenyan students, Wangechi, Alex, Naomi and Kennedy. Furthermore we met two of the Kenyan staff that oversaw the logistic of our trip Christine and Lynette. First impressions were good all around even tough we realised that our Kenyan counterpart unlike us hadn’t gone through any training and had very little knowledge about the projects and CEP. This made me think. I guess cultural work differences were highlighted by this episode. But it felt good to finally be in Nairobi and getting to know people on the field. George gave a superb presentation and seriously impressed me; he was very “charming” and knowledgeable and moreover he made me feel very welcome.After the morning meeting we were given the afternoon free and we decided to go to a mall. The experience was quite disappointing since the mall looked exactly like a Canadian mall. I guess the trip had its benefits since we all needed to pick up few things that would not readily available outside Nairobi.
The evening of Saturday was very interesting since one of Dave’s friend, Trevor, told us about a club downtown called Florida 2000 which we then discovered is described by the lonely planet as the “mad house”. So armed of some adventure we ventured to this club mainly populated by locals. We felt very out of place since we were the only white people in the club but the experience was interesting and fun. We obviously attracted the attention of the local female population we had several drinks and we chatted till late in the night it was very interesting to find out how young people from Nairobi enjoy themselves. In honesty it is not much different to what is going on in Canada every Saturday night. That I guess gave me an indication that even though Nairobi looks a bit run down it is no different from any western city.
posted by Riccardo Cosentino at 11:30 PM
1 Comments:
local femal population ... do you mean girls who are in 'the trade?'
2:06 AM
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