Lilian and Vivian

Vivian is the girl on the left. Ever since the first night we arrived, she stood out to us, not to say that we don't love all the girls. She's always by our side translating swahili into english for the girls that don't speak english as well as she does. She's only nine years old but is so bright and is always eager to learn new english words or teach us swahili. This is fitting too because she's told us that she wants to be a teacher when she grows up. We have full confidence seeing that she's already taught us all the swahili that we know. Vivian's best friend, Lilian, is the girl on the right. Lilian has surprised us in such a great way. Unlike Vivian, we didn't really notice her in all of the constant excitement of all the girls because she's more quiet and less all over us than many of the others. But as we've gotten to know her through teaching her and her sister, Betty, in the highest level class, we've come to love her so much. Whenever we're teaching the girls anything from English and world history to new american songs, she's always concentrating and focusing entirely on what we're saying. We can tell that she has such a strong drive to learn new things. Both girls have such great spirits and we enjoy every minute we spend with them.

We spent this weekend away from all the girls for the first time, and it was so much harder than we had expected. We said goodbye for the girls as if we were leaving forever, although in reality, we were only leaving for two days. We spent the entire Matatu ride from Machakos to Nairobi looking at pictures of all the girls and talking about how much we already missed them (a matatu is the most popular form of public transportation in Kenya. It's like a large van run by any person who can afford to buy a large van. People are constantly getting on and off and it's usually very squished).

The girls were definitely on our minds the whole weekend although we were very busy. On Saturday we went to the Nairobi open market and saw more "mzungus" than we had seen since we first arrived here. We went with Joseph's sister, Hannah, and her friend, Alice. It was definitely helpful having them there to pretend that they were the ones buying things instead of us. The prices that we ended up paying for most of the items were about one third of what they originally offered us. We also went to Kibera, which is one of the largest slums in Africa. After walking around Kibera for about an hour, our little room in Machakos seemed like a palace. Today we went to the Lake Nakura National Wildlife Reserve and had our lunches stolen right out of our hands by huge baboons...while we were in the car.