day 3 in kenya

Friday july 13

It’s 4 am and i’m wide awake..... which sucks cause at 5pm tonight i am going to be dead tired. The jet lag is annoying this time. I guess i always forget about it. but we have an hour and a half bus ride to the tumaini orphanage and all i want to do is nap during that time. I should have brought some caffeine pills.

It’s day three of being here. We are in a town called varnaisha which is about three hours north of nairobi. We are staying at a hotel that is simple and pleasant.... holly and i have a full size bed that we are sharing which has been delight.

Our team is working at the tumaini orphanage. The orphanage is two buildings which houses about 50 orphans. Most of these kids have become orphans because their parents have died from AIDS. They figure that there are about 1.2 million orphans in kenya due to AIDS, which is a staggering number.

The team is split up into groups and people are doing a variety of things. Most worked in the field planting crops. One of the great things about kenya is that you can plant food all year. The orphanage is very into sustainable gardening.

My job has changed over the last two days. I thought i was coming in a doing about 6 days of work with kids – art lessons and having them make pieces that we can sell in the US. Now i have three days to work with them, they want us to repaint the walls in the room we are meeting in, i’m doing a heart for africa mural, and i’m painting three nights during speakers. This is all fine and doable. I think i just get lazy when the jetlag hits in. last night when i was painting during the sharing time, i felt dizzy and nauseous... not fun when painting.

The kids we had yesterday were great. I ran some of the older ones through some drawing exercises and they did awesome. i would like to do more but we don’t really have the time. And i was thinking that learning to draw is hard, laborious, and it can be boring. It’s not boring per say. It’s more like, to play in a concert which is awesome, you need to have hours and hours of practice to get it right. Learning the skills of art is practice practice practice... which looks like a lot of eye studies and learning how to see the world and translate is to a medium. Anywho, i don’t want to bore the kids.....

I’m not sure what to even write about right now. This trip hasn’t been anything epic for me. Not that it should be but i guess there is some part of you that believes you should be having these “ah” moments all the time. Others who have shared have had them.... i guess the poverty for them has been very eye opening, and that’s great. What do you do though when you’ve already experienced it? i feel like i’m here to accomplish a job and i want to do it well. frankly, i don’t feel like i’m that stellar of an artist to do it, but that’s just the artist self-doubt creeping in. or the enemy.

I just wish i could sleep so i could be 100% today.