So that’s it. We’ve completed our last coaching session and our time in Kenya has drawn to an end. Here’s a quick update on our activities over the past couple of days.

On thursday morning we visited a couple of orphanages. The first one was a small project with around 15 children. It had a very relaxed, family type atmosphere which was nice to see. We played some ball games and even managed to get a basic game of cricket going in the limited space we had to work with. The second orphanage was larger. Disappointingly, when we arrived we found out that all of the kids were in class and were not allowed out to play any games. Nevertheless, we took a quick tour of the classrooms and helped the young children with their ABCs, in the conventional sense this time.

This was followed by a well earned afternoon off. Six of the team decided to go on a safari tour around the Lake Nakuru National Park. We were lucky enough to see a lion, a couple of rhinos, loads of buffalo and zebra and a giraffe. However, Carl was gutted not to see a mamba, having spent most of the trip looking for one.

Friday represented our last day of coaching and our last full day in Kenya. The 70 we’d been promised for each hour of the two hour session at the first school soon doubled to 140, but after two weeks of getting used to the African system of counting, we took this in our stride. The session ran smoothly, apart from Beth’s wardrobe malfunction as she managed to split her shorts from top to bottom in a somewhat compromising place. Luckily, for the only day in the past two weeks, I had a spare pair on the bus and she returned to the fold.

We then took on another two schools in the afternoon. Again, the 70 kids we were expecting turned into many more. After doing the CWB intro, we got them into lines and counted them up. As the count flew past 70, Carl went to double check with the head teacher that it was around 70 he was expecting to take part. He shook Carl by the hand, looked him in the eye, nodded and said “yes, see there’s 80”. We had 160.

Thankfully, we had acquired some extra help for the day in the form of a number of young local coaches that play for the local under-19s team under the stewardship of our Nakuru contact PJ. This almost doubled our coaching capacity and made it possible to get some good quality coaching in despite the inflated numbers. A big thanks goes from the CWB coaches to all the guys who helped out on Friday and it’s good to see high quality coaching already established in the area.

Session complete, we moved onto our final coaching session of the trip. We set up Kwik-Cricket for around 80 girls. However, somewhat fittingly, the session was drawn to an impromptu close when rain stopped play after half an hour. Having been coaching in blazing sunshine and 30 degree temperatures everyday for the last two weeks, it seemed a sure sign that our time in Kenya had drawn to a close. All week we had spoken about sprinting to the finish and ensuring we went out on a high. The energy in yesterday’s sessions was really good and the team can be proud of what we’ve achieved in the last two weeks.

Please keep an eye on the blog over the next couple of weeks as there is still more to come. I plan to write a final entry summarising the whole of our trip and picking out some highlights. We’re also going to begin the task of filtering through the thousands of photos we have to find the best ones. We’ll post a selection of these here once we’ve done it, plus a few videos as well.

Callum