At home, Mondays during the school year seem to be everyone’s least favorite day of the week — the first day of school after the weekend and the promise of 5 whole days in school before Friday night rolls around again. In Kenya, some of the feelings are the same and some are different. For students, it is different here — school is a privilege, not a dreaded task. However, the same chaos as in America also ensues as the first alarm rings (4:30 for Lucy who is in form 1). The schedule for the 3 of us was a little more relaxed as we woke up at a ghastly late time of 8:00 and headed over to the Okuya house at around 10:00. We spent the day with Yvonne, who does a part-time tailor training program.

She asked us if we knew how to walk distances, and we said yes, we did. She seemed skeptical and made the walk seem very scary. The walk to Chesil’s school was very long, but we enjoyed it despite Yvonne’s worries. It is very interesting to travel the same long distance that Ches and Lucy go every day to get to school (they usually take a Boda Boda but sometimes end up walking the whole way). We made it to Ches’ school and got to see him in his cute little uniform. He was so proud to have us there and we knew he would be the popular guy for the rest of the day after we handed out sweets to all the class 1 students.

Next stop on our journey was Lucy’s secondary school which was even further away than Chesil’s primary school. We spent time with the Deputy Principal and then went in to Lucy’s English class and spent some time answering questions from the students. Then, we caused a riot. It was an accident, but it was still a disaster. We went to give out sweets to the students but we didn’t realize that class 1 students are more well-behaved than form 1 students. At first everything was fine and then all hell broke loose and we were mobbed. Somehow in the process the class ended up getting around 300 pieces of candy. There was some tension with the teachers after we managed to escape the classroom. This is not to turn people off of Kenyan schools or to make them sound like hooligans, but more to show the immense excitement they got from some simple lifesavers. Later, we tried to think of what would make American students act in such a way and couldn’t think of anything. It shows the great unequal distribution of wealth that still exists in the world.

The rest of the day was spent seeing Yvonne’s tailoring school and hanging out around the house with Tansy.