My plans finally fell into place after 3 days of running around Nairobi with my parents in order to meet with Raquel from AIESEC Kenya, find an apartment, and slot in visits with all of my parent’s family and friends that they have here. Although my parents were doing anything BUT being tourists, they saw a very decent portion of what Nairobi has to offer due to my frantic search to find a place to live and something to do for the next 3 weeks (or I would be sent home and I was not ready to leave Kenya yet because I felt like I had to do some stuff on my own, rather than have had the CFSIA program dictate everything I did while in East Africa).
Soooo in my efforts to find some place to stay and something to do, we ended up traveling to “Karen” which is an expat suburb of Nairobi to visit an orphanage called “First Love Kenya” that has its roots in the slums of Kibera but has branched out to an orphanage for 45 kids. I was made aware of the organization by my dad’s friend’s mentee… (thanks Michael and Ken… I know you are both reading). This orphanage is run by Kenyans but is funded by a well established organization in the USA that also funds an orphanage in the Philippians. So my parents got to see some of the development efforts going on in Kenya as well. Then we were taken to the Kibera slum to see the other work of First Love Kenya, which is a feeding program that feeds approx. 1000 children every day. As a result, my parents were introduced to the “other side” of Africa, rather than just the touristy side, and I was happy that they got to experience some of what I had been learning during my program…
In addition to that, we looked at some apartments on “Ngong Road” and in “Westlands” (which is the Indian area). My friends eventually found an INCREDIBLE apartment in the “Hurlingham” area, which is the NGO area, and it is quite possibly the nicest apt that they will live in during their careers as students. It has a hot tub/Jacuzzi thing. The reason why I say MY FRIENDS are living there is because I am not, as I chose to work at this orphanage for about 3 weeks so I am currently living up in Karen with 45 kids and helping out with the feeding program at Kibera (but I did go to their apt for a really lovely dinner and to catch up on the GOSS that I missed out on while they were in Zanzibar and I was on safari.)
Now that you are updated, I’m ouuuuut. Goood night!
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