We have arrived! Well actually we arrived yesterday, but after about 40hrs without sleep I hope you’ll forgive me for not writing sooner – sorry to my girlfriend & Mum who might have spent the last couple of days thinking the worst (and Tim’s!)

So much has happened since we left our homes in the cold UK that it would be difficult to mention it all. We arrived in to glorious sunshine in Nairobi airport, an airport so Westernised it could easily have been in Birmingham…

CWB are looking after us logistically while we’re out here and it wasn’t long before our driver, Linc, was there to throw all our bags in the back of a bus and take us to our hotel. The first thing worth mentioning is Kenyan driving. As I understand it, there are no rules. Sometimes you drive on the left, sometimes the right. Sometimes you give way, mostly you don’t. There’s nothing wrong with over-taking 5 cars on the outside of a bend because if another car does come the other way, everybody will just squeeze up/get pushed off the road and everything continues until the same story unfolds at the next bend! People here have a special skin-armour that allows them to walk through traffic without fear of injury, that can be the only explanation for some of the things that go on there. Having said all that, Linc seems very cool under pressure and slows down significantly for speed-bumps/pot-holes bigger than graves so he obviously loves his bus.

After a quick stop at the hotel we went off to MYSA; a project run mostly by volunteers in the Mathare slum region just outside of Nairobi. We arrived to see Sherlock running a game of Street 20 Cricket and it was nice to get back to some normality – kids hoiking across the line looking for home-runs and not softly driven boundaries!

We spent the afternoon visiting a couple of orphanages. I’ll let my co-blogger, Nish, tell you more about that but from my point of view I was struck by how happy these kids were. There were so many of them in a moderately sized house, at least 7 to a bedroom and yet they had some of the biggest smiles I’ve seen. In particular there was one small girl aged 2-3 that just looked with complete wonder & joy at the dolls we brought along for them, I am quite sure they’re still filled with the same pleasure now, a day after we left.

We spent the evening in the hotel bar & restaurant for convenience, and stories of how dangerous it is to go out after dark in Nairobi. In probably the most dimly-lit room possible we just about managed to read the menus and had a pleasant evening chatting away. I think we were all so tired that not many of us will remember much of what was said, other than Sherlock coming out with another gem when talking about the fish course some of us had ordered, “that looks like a real fish!”