Day Six

Today was a rest day because of the exhausting travelling we experienced over the past couple of days. We relaxed, played and even got to sleep in! It was amazing. We didn’t even have to cook for ourselves. Our breakfast entertainment was a Kenyan soap opera, which quickly inspired us to write our own soap featuring the contingent members; however, we soon realized that while we were perfectly happy to write the soap, we were far too lazy to actually film it, but it at least distracted us for a while.

Having little to do, we fell into camp games like Darling If You Love Me, the Hand Slappy Game and Mafia. Mafia lasted the longest, a game that involves three secret ‘murderers’, one doctor, one detective and a bunch of civilians. As the game goes on, the Mafia try to kill everyone while the citizens and detective made accusations and the doctor tried to save the civilians. We all enjoyed the extremely gory and at times unfortunate “death” situations the narrators developed. You may draw your own conclusions about the mentality of the group.

Once done with games we went on a tour of the camp. The tour took us to the main office where everyone went crazy taking pictures of the many flowers on the property. The highlight of the tour was a real footprint of Lord Baden Powell set in concrete. We also met a group of little Kenyan kids, who were adorably excited to see us. There was a chain reaction of high fives between the Canadians and the kids, along with many cute pictures. They loved to see their own pictures on a camera screen and would pose for a photo with their friends, then make fun of each other’s expressions.

Near the end of the tour, we found a large group of baboons living in the trees in our camp. They provided an amazing photo-op and much amusement for us Canadians, most of whom had never seen a monkey outside of the zoo. We wandered back behind base where we could see the Kibera slums. It was shocking and fascinating at the same time. Fascinating because we could see how resourceful the occupants were, but shocking because of how different it was from our Western definition of comfort. The sprawl of the slum really brought home the real reason we are here - not just to play around with monkeys and hang out with our new friends but rather to make a difference in the world.