Day 7

The second last day of our trip to Kenya. I miss Taita Hills so much. The dusty and polluted air of Nairobi makes it hard to breath and everything is gray and dirty. It's huge contrast to Taita Hills fresh mountain air and the vivid colours of its rainforests. Maybe it just takes some time to get used to it. When we first arrived to Nairobi it was the most intresting and exotic place, and I'm sure it still is. Just in another kind of way.
We would have finally gotten the chance to sleep long this morning but the rooster at Scripture mission woke us up at 06.00 am. I kind of hope it was him we ate to dinner this evening... Just kidding. But I could really use a good night sleep.
Our buss-driver arrived only 2 minutes late this time, suprisingly enough since following Kenyan time means two hours late is close enough. We headed towards Matare Special Training Centre trough the kaotic traffic of Nairobi.
I'm not sure what I had expected. Some breafing of the School system and meeting the students maybe. But I sure was not prepared for the emotional experiense this visit included. The handicapped children of Nairobi are facing the hardest kind of life. They have been left outside the community and some are even abandoned by their parents. Some are kept tied inside, hidden by their family so that noone can see the abnormal and humiliating beeing they have brought to this world. But theese children we met today had been so lucky that they had gotten the chance to go to school, even though coming from the slum of Matare. When walking trough the classes the teachers spoke of their students with such pride and love in their voices. The teacher of the wood-workshop told us how everyone of these students werer worth just as much as anybody else. That boy over there was the best at sweeping floors. The other one wasn't able to do that but he was an expert on counting woodsticks. They were all experts on something. All the best. But this school is really the only place they meet this kind of treatment. The headteatcher told us about what treatment they face in their everyday life. They have to have their one schoolbus, the common ones won't take them up when they see that they are different.
In the end of the visit we even got to meet with the parents. The room we gathered in was so filled with emotions it was a wonder I was able to breath in there. I think everyone had a hard time keeping their emotions to them selves when realising what hard a life theese parents and their children are facing. They should be praised for beeing so brave that they bring their children out to the community, for being so brave that they bring them to school. There are few that is. The feelings were mixed. In the middle of all this poverty and unhappyness, this school represented a hope of something better, something good people are ready to work hard for.
After leaving Matare behind us we moved from the dark side straight to the opposite. We drove trough the centre of Nairobi and ended up in one of the wealthiest parts of Nairobi. The houses were enourmous, the roads broad and clean and the people few. But we just drove through to a shopping mal to look around for a bit. But I didn't feel like shopping. Buying unnecessary things for lots of money didn't feel like the right thing to do when you just had seen all the people in need of it on the other side of town.
Have to go to sleep now if the rooster is going to wake me up again. Really need some sleep!

// Nora