Welcome to the Marine Mammal and wildlife Research and Community Development Expedition blog where you can keep up to date with all the happenings and information from Kenya

Monday, November 8, 2010

Painting on Jomo Kenyatta Day!

Yesterday was Jomo Kenyatta day which meant schools were closed and contrary to us communitians thinking we should have a lie in we were given the fun task of painting the local kindergarten classrooms with alphabets and numbers. Simple, right? Most definitely not.
We arrived to find kids everywhere around the school and as soon as we got the keys they swarmed into the classrooms playing with any potential toys they could find, making our job a little more tricky. Still, we got started and after what seemed like a long time measuring and pencilling we finally had all the letters drawn. While the artistic in the group got started on drawing the pictures to accompany the letters, we slightly less-artistic people threw ourselves into painting the letters. Although we may of been taught to stay in the lines at primary school it was slightly harder to apply when painting with sponges we found however we came to the conclusion the children were small so they wouldn’t see our slightly shoddy handy work!




After a quick lunch break we returned feeling full of energy and ready to get stuck in again however now our paint stock was slightly depleted and our colour options were pretty limited we needed another plan to ensure these classrooms got finished. Us community geniuses put all our heads together and came up with a master plan.... Crayons. Crayons definitely saved the day.
We coloured in the amazingly artistic pictures for a couple of hours before stepping back to witness our masterpieces. With the lack of supplies and the distraction of the kids we were very proud of the job we did so with paint stained hands and aching arms from reaching up high we went back to base and crashed and burnt. Painting is tiring work!



A group of us have just returned from the kindergarten where Save Shimoni, the local health group were performing an outreach which consisted of hanging the children in a harness in order to monitor their weight. Thoroughly entertaining to watch though I can’t say the kids were enjoying it much. But the main point was that the head teacher was so happy with the school (apparently the children refused to go outside they just wanted to look at the classroom all day) that he said we could have free reign on the school meaning we can paint or build whatever we like. Yayyyy!

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