Day 43 (10/17)
This morning we had a lecture on invasive species, which is one of my favorite ecology topics because its so interesting and complex. After that we headed off to Loitokitok. It took almost 2 hours to get to where we were going …which is farther outside of the town than where we usually go. This time we didn’t go to the AIDs clinic, we went to a school to help with the nutrition project. Basically we weighed kids, and measured their upper arm to assess if the kids are overweight, underweight, or an appropriate weight. And then we give them Vitamin A, de-wormer, and necessary supplements if they need extra nutrition. Then there was a clinic set up for people with small issues, such as a hurt foot, or stomach ache.

For the most part, there were too many of us to all have jobs the entire time, I helped to weigh kids which was a done with scales that look like grocery store scales. We put the little ones in cloth baskets and the bigger ones hung off a hook. Haha, there were lots of screaming, crying babies hanging by the scale. There were people recording weights and giving out vitamins. We didn’t have anything to do, so a couple of us made charts for them to use.

We played soccer against their 8th grade team and they won, 1 to 0. It was a pretty good game though, their field is pretty huge so there was a lot of running. During the game, the girls on the side lines got their hair braided by the school kids (mostly girls.) They braided it so there were lots of medium sized braids that were going every direction and people looked absolutely ridiculous. But the girls loved to braid our muzungo (foreigner) hair, most girls have shaved heads.

We went to the market, and we were allowed to have about an hour in the market. Kyle and I walk through the gate, and literally 3 steps into the market 3 little children come up to us and start asking us how we are, and following us around. So then, they started to talk to us and helped us find things in the market. They were really cute, and literally did not leave our side, for the entire hour. We also saw Adam, the guard who saved me from the mama a couple weeks ago. He was so happy to see us again and we talked for a while.

We drove back and roads are always so much more terrible than the drive there. The road from KBC to Kimana has actually been redone, but the road from Kimana to Loitokitok makes up for the road that was repaired to Kimana (because you have to go through Kimana to get to Loitokitok).

Haha, the kids tend to yell to us while we are driving by “wazungo” which means foreigner, and we’ve started to yell watoto which means children. They don’t mean it in a bad way, its kind of like saying Hi, but the few that we have yelled to are stopped in their tracks and are shocked that we know any Swahili at all.