Imlah: what a week!

Thursday was a mad day, just like the day before and the day before that …

…Jus kiddin’ – it was great, very good. The kids at Kitagwa Primary school are a right bunch of bright lights. With English being their second, third and in some cases their fourth language it was sometimes hard to hear or understand some of their queries and questions through the broken accents. But they managed more or less fine.

The kids at John Gulson were all well rehearsed and greeted the Kitagwa children with the “Jambo” song which the Kenyan kids loved, and as many of them have never spoken to anybody on the phone before it was that little bit extra special for them.

Throughout the session there was a mixture of shy and outgoing children in all of the groups and, yes, there was a few language barriers but the children were still interested and asking lots of questions like: How old are you? and How many brothers and sisters do you have? etc.

Both the John Gulson group and Kitagwa kids seemed pleased with the responses given and questions like do you have animals? and if so what animals? where extremely popular, especially as the Kitagwa kids mostly all own goats, chickens, cows, some donkeys even, but the John Gulson kids mostly had none, which the Kitagwa kids found weird.

We spent the rest of the day playing with the kids and taking a couple of short lessons in Maths, etc., as they are heavily understaffed so often 2 or 3 classes are left unattended at times throughout the day.

They loved quizzing us about England and what we do and what its like there. I enjoyed it too.

Then all hell broke loose when one of the girls spotted my gold tooth. They have poor dental care and practices so none of them have ever seen a gold tooth before. They all wanted to see and touch – obviously I only granted them one of the above privileges,

But it was nice to be able to talk to them about something that comes from Africa and is so expensive in the western world, hopefully that alone planted a seed in their heads about how rich and natural Africa really is and how much we crave African things.

All week has been magical.