Friday 27 May 2022

Every day when we leave our resort, ‘Kunste Hotel’, and head to our school, we immediately drive past Nakuru Station and despite having recently been redecorated, it still still has remnants of its historical past but now looking to the future of rail travel in Kenya 2022. At present, trains only travel to and through the station three times a week.

Kenya has recently opened a £1.1 billion railway project funded and built by China running the Mombasa to Nairobi standard 480km railway. Aimed at energising the movement of goods and people, it unfortunately doesn’t include Nakuru. However, as the fourth biggest city in Kenya, and the growth of the country, lets hope that will change.

At ‘West End Academy’ and as per the cricket term ‘rain stopped play’, it happened again for us. Just as we were in the final stages of the framework for the kitchen, the rain came down once again. We have to remember that this is Nakuru’s winter, so this weather should be expected. 

As a person who wants to work as hard as I can for every minute that I’m at the school, it is so frustrating. That’s part of my personality that I certainly need to work on, the weather can’t be helped and we can’t work in the rain for many reasons, and I need to accept that more. It’s certainly the same trait that I feel after each trip, I always feel that I could have done more, when I know we as a group have achieved so much. I need to use part of my CBT (cognitive behaviour therapy) that I learnt from years ago and accept things that I can’t control and be happy with the outcome.

The double storey classroom is really starting to make great progress. The Kenyan workers and volunteers have worked extremely hard and the foundations are now in place. Strict guidelines from the Kenyan government need to be enforced after seven children died after a classroom collapsed at a primary school in Nairobi in 2019. No classroom in the country can be constructed by wood and iron sheets, which was the cause of the tragedy.

Although it is sad that it’s a Friday and we won’t be able to see these beautiful children, a two-day break is truly needed to ease the aches and pains.