First RhinoArt lesson in Nairobi

13 May Monday

We were off to a good start this morning with lots of enthusiasm and a bit of nerves to be honest. We have our first RhinoArt lessons today. As Nairobi is listed as one of the worst cities for traffic, we left the house just after 7 am and obviously landed up in traffic for an hour. Its insane, you get through about 5 km in half an hour, only moving every few minutes. However, the car was full of chatter and excitement. Dad, Pippa, Chris and I were off to meet Hamideh, a lady from Green Africa who we've been in contact with and organized two schools for us to speak at. She is the most wonderful woman and the work she does in the Nairobi slums is incredible. Her NGO Green Africa does amazing community upliftment projects and her passion for making change is inspiring. We had a good breakfast at the Java House, which is the equivalent of our Wimpy and made our way to St Austins Primary School. Now I was starting to feel really nervous but having the team supporting me was really encouraging.

St Austins Primary warmly welcomed us and were thrilled to have us visiting them. The school is a more upmarket goverment school with children coming from middle class families. The school has fun posters on the walls and a playground with jungle-gyms. We were shown to the Year 6 classroom with about thirty 11 year olds politely greeted us in an orderly manner. I introduced ourselves with a brief explanation of what we doing and got right onto the hot topic of why we need to conserve our rhinos. A few of the confident students raised their hands and attempted to answer questions before we got stuck into colouring in their rhino art. One of the tasks is for the children to name the baby rhino in the picture and it was fun and interesting to see what names were given. Each child had coloured in and created their own picture - it was so wonderful and refreshing being around such happy, smiley children. Once the lesson came to end we handed a certificate to the class for participation and a plaque to the school as recognition that the school supports rhino conservation. It was so great to have Pippa with us, shes so interactive with the kids and has a way of being able to communicate to them.

Kayla and Hamideh doing RhinoArt at St Austins Primary

The K2K team with the Year 6 RhinoArt at St Austins Primary

Right after St Austins visit, we went to Lavington Primary which was a big contrast to the previous school. This is a goverment school with children from the slums who really have nothing. As they saw us entering the school there were lots of waves and children bouncing up and down with excitement and curiosity. The school grounds were bare and the paint peeling of the walls. The classroom is literally just a square room with old broken chairs and tables. We began our talk the same way as the first one and all went well. Not as many hands eagerly went up answering and asking questions but overall the interaction with the children was a success. It was interesting here as another one of the tasks is for the children to write a message about what they feel about rhino poaching and in this class, this task was completed much quicker and more children had written messages. We really got a feel that the children understand what rhino poaching is and are really wanting to stop it from happening. Another contrast to the other school is that the teachers were interested in the talk at St Austins and were making conversation with us afterwards whereas at Lavington, none of the teachers sat in the class with us. The depty head mistress joined as at the end and we handed her the certificate, and although very pleased about our visit, that is where it ended.

Kayla doing RhinoArt with the Year 5s at Lavington Primary

Children at Lavington starting their RhinoArt

The nerves wore off quickly and our school visits and RhinoArt was a success. We loved hearing and seeing how the children feel about rhino conservation. The K2K team were also able to learn from today’s experience and hopefully will continue to learn as we go through all the different schools in the different countries.

We now had to face the traffic back out of city centre. We met Pauline and Erick for lunch, enjoying our last greasy meal for the next while. We game-planned, organizing meals, did grocery shopping and returned home to finalize preparations for the departure tomorrow. We going to try have an early night so we well rested and ready to ride.