As you would be well aware, at the conception of our adventure we set ourselves several volunteering challenges. The first being to assist with a GAPS volunteer project in Kenya, the first port of call and where we were to eventually purchase and deck out our gorgeous Landcruiser, ‘Helga’, and the start of everything. You may remember that we initially discussed working with GAPS Australia on womens handicraft and micro finance business loans in Kenya. Fortunately this fell through, and we signed up to another GAPS program, the Brydges Centre orphanage located in Ngong Hills, just south of Nairobi.

Why fortunately? Because we have fallen in love with the orphanage, the staff working there, the sustainable projects they are undertaking, and more importantly we are head over heels for the children. Brydges Centre currently supports 150 children who are orphaned, destitute, abandoned, abused and street children. As well as small children, the centre supports around 40 youths each year through skills development programs. Their broad objective is to provide shelter, food, education, counseling and moral rehabilitation, health care and clothing and to provide support for childrens rights activities around the country. After spending a mere 6 weeks with the staff and children at Brydges we have developed a very close relationship. Helping develop their website (www.brydgescentre.net), teaching business classes in their skills programs, and providing advice on sponsorship and bridging the gap between this sponsorship and the people of Tasmania (through facilitating contact and encouraging friends and family to sponsor) we are now committed to helping Brydges become fully self sufficient in supporting their children. Over the past few years, Brydges Centre has had a dream to build an all encompassing home for all of their children and staff in the one location. Brydges currently has centres spread out around Kenya in places such as Ngong Town, Bungoma, and Dandora to name a few.

Recently, Brydges have been able to announce the purchase of their very own block of land and with it the realisation of the first stage of this dream! Building plans have already been completed, the five acres has been fenced to protect the property, and a toilet and temporary storage shed has been built. All that remains for the first phase to be completed is for trees to be planed around the fence and for a borehole (well) to be drilled. Stellar news!

But, they still need our help to be able to progress the building project further and for building of the school and dorms to begin. If you haven’t yet checked out the Brydges Centre website, please take a look here: www.brydgescentre.net, and click on the ‘Building Project’ link on the homepage. Brydges needs your help through volunteering and monetary donations to assist with FINALLY bringing all of their children together from across the country. Not only does this project provide longterm financial assistance through the collaboration of housing, teaching, and utilities, it also brings over 150 children together, back into one massive family. You can help through donating via the instructions on the Brydges website or sending us a message through this website. Also, if you are not yet sponsoring a child and are looking for any way you can help the children of Africa, Brydges Centre is desperately seeking child sponsorship. Every little bit goes a long way in Kenya, and everything we can do will help save another child’s life.

For the last week , we have spent time at Uganda Lodge through the Ruhanga Community Development Project. This, as many of you know who contributed to our fundraising efforts, was the primary reason for our visit to Uganda. We were devastated that our time here was cut short, mostly by the delay in our purchasing the car in Kenya and a dedication to meeting others on a time frame later in the trip, but we were happy to have been able to make it to the Lodge at all this month. For those of you who don’t know, we stumbled upon this project via Lonely Planet’s Thorntree forum and Ann Macarthy, who is the UK Ambassador and the lifeblood of this project, got in contact with us to give us more information on Uganda Lodge. We found out that it was in it’s infancy, and that she fundraises in the UK to develop the project further each time she comes to Uganda. Uganda Lodge is owned by a man by the name of Denis Kasiba Aheirwe, and as a local in the area, also identified the need for a development project for his local community. Ann and Denis teamed up and the Community Project was born- the community development art and crafts centre and computer room having recently been finished. You can read more on this project on our ‘Volunteering’ page.

Uganda Lodge itself operates as a bar and meeting place for locals, and accommodation place for visitors. We had heard mention of other events like video nights and functions being held in buildings onsite (a big open area where we did our morning yoga!), but were given the impression that these haven’t happened for a while – though they hope to get them organised more regularly. We stayed in one of the bungalows – of which there are four on the property and it was perfectly lovely. It was a big room, with a double bed and a big double mosquito net that protected us from the many insects in the area (drawn by the light – not many places in the area have electricity), and a small area off to the side that was set up as a shower. Unfortunately no toilet down that end of the property yet, but a perfectly good long drop further up towards the road. As funds permit, Denis is in the process of constructing a toilet right next to our set of two bungalows at the lower end of the property. People also camp – we had one group come through while we were there: Stuart, Fiver and Merryl, and their perfectly fantastic Landrover Defender on an overlander trip from South Africa to Germany. We have since run into them again, all because of our meeting at Uganda Lodge.

The setting of Uganda Lodge is fantastic – most of the staff are wonderful, and attend to your every need with a smile amidst the stunning rolling hills of the area. Denis took us both on a hill climb not long into our stay, and it truly demonstrated how amazingly beautiful Ruhunga is. There isn’t much else in the area for potential visitors, but it is on Kabale Road, on the way to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and the mountain gorillas and makes for a good rest stop on the way.

The Lodge has a bit of an identity issue at the moment – it’s at the time when it’s defining where it wants to go – of course there is the bar and support for locals, but the community centre and schools are also deemed important and there are not enough resources to finish each of them around the same time. Some parts of the Lodge look a little tired, and they are hoping to fix a huge hole in the ground that sat directly outside our banda (and is currently being used as a rubbish bin) but the area has ENORMOUS potential and with development in each of these areas, by staying here you’ll be supporting local community projects and local business. Definitely watch this space.

When we first arrived, we were unsure as to where we could donate our skills. We knew of the community centre, and we knew of the nursery school that Denis had built on his land to help neighbouring family’s children attend school from an earlier age than they had been previously. What we didn’t realise was that Denis was also keen and in the process of building the next stage of schooling –the first two years of primary school in a P1 classroom, also on his land. To this, you can also add a project of building new toilets for the nursery school (also to be utilized by the primary school children on completion). Now the way it is in Uganda, and many other African countries we’ve come across, is that you buy materials for building when you can afford them, and labour you pay whenever you have the materials AND the money to pay for labourers/engineers services. When we arrived at Uganda Lodge, we found that Denis had engineers working on the building, but had run out of materials. Given so many of you voiced your hope for the money you donated to go towards education, we thought the primary school building was the perfect opportunity for us to help with this very thing. Over $AU1000 was spent on hard stone, bags and bags of concrete, timber, thousands of bricks, trailer loads of sand and reinforced steel rods to reinforce windows. These materials will now put the primary school room close to completion when the labour is available and there are the funds to help pay for the engineers. But we’ve donated solid materials and these will be used to help Ruhunga and the local children in the area develop their education.

Initially our focus was to be on the community centre, but we found the education of children at the critical ages of 4 and 5 to be of higher importance at the time. Having said that, we still helped out with the centre. Ben in particular, put his IT skills to good use and re-programmed and de-bugged all of the donated computers, and instructed the newly appointed computer trainer on some of the programs he intends to teach. To that, we also printed signs to go in each of the bungalows advertising the internet access at very reasonable rates to both guests and volunteers. Although these were more practical, we found that we had come at a time when we could not do much more than what we did in the time we had – although it was a lot of fun helping Denis source and purchase the building materials from local stores and markets. The community centre is ongoing, and will always be able to use a hand if you want to volunteer in Africa, and particularly Uganda. There will be the computer room, a sewing centre to help teach local women tailoring (still in the pipeline), and of course, the Ruhunga Community Development Nursery School and soon to be Primary School as well.

We promise to add more photos as we receive them from Denis and/or Ann on the progress of the primary school. The photos attached are of the site and some of the progress already made with the materials we purchased on behalf of all who donated money. We hope you’re happy with the decisions we made – the children were beautiful and deserve every chance of education in the world. Thanks to you, they’re one step closer to getting it!

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On Saturday the 8th of August the annual birthday party for the kids was held at BC-B house where the high school girls live in Ngong. Another birthday party was going on simultaneously at the Bungoma part of Brydges in the west of Kenya. When we first arrived at Brydges we were told the birthday was to be the following week, and on finding that the budget was nowhere near what they expected, some of our volunteering fundraising went to helping these kids get presents for the big day. Even that didn’t cover it though, so we wrote home to all of our amazing friends and asked if anyone could pledge $30 – we needed 20 of our friends to pledge that money to make up their budget. Overnight, we had 15 people pledging, and the final amount was 36 – so we all of our amazing friends and family went above and beyond by helping these kids get birthday presents, cake, meat, rice and vegetables for lunch, soft drinks for treats, chocolates and other sweets for a treasure hunt.

Some of the Maasai kids had their ‘guardians’ (generally blood related uncles or aunts, or relatives of their late parents) bring along a goat to be slaughtered… alas, we had already put some of the raised funds towards two goats for the Ngong house and one for the Bungoma boys, so plenty of goat had been sacrificed. At the time of writing he’s still bleating in the BC-B house with the high school girls, but we know that his days will be numbered. Every part of the goat is eaten here – waste not, want not.

The treasure hunt and presents were especially fantastic, and the singing and dancing on the day is a good example of how energetic and special these African children are. They have so much life, especially having come from so little and having such hard lives. The photos are attached, and videos will be uploaded to YouTube.

A HUGE thank you to the following people who pledged to the Brydges event:

Lucinda and Peter Gillon, Hana and Anne Patel, Lesley and James Cavill, Janne and Rob Millar, Mich n’ Dave, Dean Giosio, Rick and Elise Snell, Carly Hyland, Lisa Butler, Terese Henning, Juin Ng, Rob Meredith, Matt and Gery Muir, Marni Robinson, Steve Torley, Kurt Singline, Barry Wheeler, Seb Griffiths, Sam Perkins and Bodi Jacobs, Tim and Lucy Larby, Tim Devinney, Chris Delpero and Michael Bowen, April Waddington, Noeline Foster, Alice Knight and Mum (sorry Mrs Knight, we will add this on when I find out your first name!), Kym Fitzpatrick, Loraine Jackson, Leigh Gray, Marie-Paule Leroux and Raeline Newman. You made the birthday and even allowed for some help towards the back to school packages as well!

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Before we begin our tale of the past couple of weeks, we should firstly explain that the program for our time with GAPS is different to what we had initially planned. The Women’s Handicraft Support Program is still being set up, and so our time will instead be spent in an orphanage and centre for disadvantaged children in Kenya. There is still an element of small business, with lessons in entrepreneurship ready and waiting for us in the ‘Skills Centre’ of Brydges, but more on this later. We agree that the program is more rewarding and fulfilling than either of us could possibly imagine.

But, to our first day in Kenya….

We landed to the soon-to-be familiar sight of Duncan, one of the GAPS representatives here in Kenya. He whisked us away to a café where we ordered our first Kenyan coffee (being the airport it was nothing spectacular…) and waited for Wambua, the Country Director of Kenya for GAPS. We had a fantastic bus trip from the Nairobi airport to Karen Camp, one of most popular places for travelers to stop over outside of Nairobi. Karen is a suburb dominated by the British colonial families who live in rather large estates all over the small area of Karen. There are beautiful gardens, large shopping centres and it quickly became the place where we would do our shopping and begin our search for cars. We spent one night in Karen Camp, met lots of great people and the next morning had our safety briefing on ‘Nairobbery’, or so the saying goes, by Wambua. We knew of the dangers of the city, having heard from a lot of friends that we needed to be careful. The safety briefing gave us information on how to behave, what to look for and some of the tricks that people use to steal from others, particularly tourists. We took very careful note!

Then it was off to our first experience of a matatu ride, the common form of transport just outside the city centre of Nairobi and all over Kenya. The matatu can be anything from a regular sized van to a large bus, and operates on a ‘jump on anywhere, jump off anywhere’ system. You share a van with up to 11 other people and that’s with your own seat. A few years ago the matatu system was regulated and now all drivers have to have ID, theoretically everyone has to wear seatbelts (though noone does, and most don’t even have them) and the door has to remain closed while driving (I kid you not, these people hang out of the door, with it completely open as they approach a crowd, sometimes the horn is tooted by the driver, but the ‘conductor’ can often whistle as well… so having the door shut whilst driving is a pretty big change!). Another big difference between Kenyan and Australian public transport is the matatus play really, really loud music, generally American hip hop, or R&B, so loudly that the windows shake. Every person who travels on the matatus has to put up with it – but it’s the most economical way to travel. You can pick a good matatu by how loud it’s painted on the outside, how good the music is (if you can call it good… some like it) and sometimes there are LCD screens on the backs of seats and/or overhead. All for generally under a $1 per trip, sometimes 30c. Wambua took us into Nairobi from Karen on a matatu, we bought a sim card, had some lunch and then headed off to the animal orphanage that sits just outside Nairobi National Park. It was a fantastic day, admiring all of the growing animals who had been brought to the orphanage as babies – leopards, cheetahs, lions, warthogs (pretty animals that they are!!), among others – and wandering through the park. We headed back through Karen to pick up our things and were brought to Brydges Centre, about 40 minutes out of Nairobi, and ten minutes away from Karen Camp, in the small township of Ngong.

Brydges Centre is made up of a number of buildings in three main areas in Kenya – the main house with the under 13s, another with high school girls and the Skills Centre for older girls is based in Ngong, a drop in centre is based in the slums of Dandora, outside Nairobi and the high school boys are based in Bungoma in Western Kenya. We are staying in the main area in Ngong, with the under 13s and we’ve made some amazing friends with these children and the staff. The staff – Auntys Mary, Knight, Everlyn and Hellen, and Uncles Frank, Ben, David and Joe the driver – have all looked after us like royalty. We are served hot Kenyan tea, that’s warmed and spiced in a pot on the stove and poured into flasks that hold their heat for up to 12 hours, and we’re greeted with this up to four times every day. The food has been amazing!! The kids are fed on mass and although their food is very basic – generally maize and ugali, or kidney beans – they are all receiving the nutrients that they need and are healthy little kids. They have porridge in the mornings, and we treat them with snacks sometimes too. Our food has been amazing. Breakfast could be as much bread as we want with peanut butter, or it could be an eggs, or what Aunty Knight calls ‘chapati chai’ – small chapatti but a little sweeter to go with our tea in the morning. Lunch is served with big chapatti and if often a vegetarian stew, made up of potatoes, tomatoes, French beans (the long green beans we have in our supermarkets), lentils, and a number of other ingredients. We’re not sure we’ve ever eaten so much, but the food is strong and simple and we are feeling more fit and healthy than we have in a long time! Dinner is often with rice, and a different type of stew, and sometimes we’ll have meat – chicken or goat, or mince – and it is all heartwarming and sturdy. Tea follows every meal, and we both look forward to the sight of the orange flasks that mean we have three or four cups of their brew ahead of us. Sadly, a lot of the Kenyan tea is sent away to England to be repackaged and then is sold back to the Kenyans at a drastically higher price – we’ve had many a conversation on this!

Since we’ve arrived we’ve been involved in a few different areas. Ben has been putting his web design skills into play and is creating the Brydges Centre website. We’re hoping, as well as the director of the orphanage and others, that this will help give the Centre a bit more exposure and so the unsponsored children that we have been spending our days with, will get the chance to have their school fees paid the way the sponsored children do. At the moment, it’s a relatively informal process, with well wishers and other volunteers who pass through deciding to sponsor school fees and/or food and board for some children. While this has worked for a long time, a lot of the time, school fees have to be found in infinite places, and at the very last minute. We really want our time here to help increase the sustainability of these kids. While Ben has been coding and writing up the website, Kate has played teacher and takes taking the ‘Skills’ girls for their entrepreneurship class. The ‘Skills’ girls are not necessarily orphans or abused like many of the others in the younger years, though that may be the case for some of them. These girls have gone through an assessment program and come from the poorest and most disadvantaged families in Kenya. Of course, there are never enough places, but the 20 girls each year who attend this ‘exit program’ take classes in tailoring, computing, entrepreneurship and then can choose between catering or beauty and hair training. They’re being taught some very simple skills, but it has become fantastic training. It’s not an accredited education program, but nonetheless, it has an 85% employment rate on completion. If it were accredited, the girls would not be able to enroll, as most haven’t been able to finish high school, or even primary school in some cases. This program really gives them a chance and we’ve been so grateful to be a part of it. Another part of our work here has been to help with developing a sponsorship strategy, to try and make sure there is constant sponsorship that other, larger orphanages are able to develop. We just hope that what we do allows others to see the benefit in contributing to these kid’s school fees!!  Of course, if anyone wants more information you can contact Ben or Kate, make a comment on this update or eagerly await the launch of the new Brydges website.

Our job is not finished here yet! We officially finish our GAPS experience on Friday the 14th of August. We then head off on safari for 5 days to the Maasai Mara and Hells Gate National Parks and come back to our adopted home at Brydges for more time. Then it’s off to attempt Mt Kenya, and again, back to Brydges before we visit the western boy’s home in Bungoma and over the border to Uganda.

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