Turtles

There’s a round hole in the white sand, deep, the size of a large bucket. An elderly man is bent over it, a pair of surgical gloves pulled over his bony hands, delicately brushing the sand away from the centre.

He uncovers what looks like a flat black pebble, the edge pointing upwards. It moves, lifting up out of the sand towards the light. A newborn turtle emerges from its sandy nest followed by another, and another.

The old man continues to brush away the sand, unearthing a heap of flippers and outstretched necks, moving for the first time. Their heads push forwards, sensing the ocean nearby. They scramble up to the rim of the hole and slide down the slope towards the sea.

Their movements are wobbly, clumsy, child-like, comical. A footprint in the sand becomes a crater to fall into, a pebble knocks one onto it’s back, four flippers waving desperately, it’s whole body arched in an attempt to right itself.

On either side the crabs are gathering, eyes alert, waiting for their opportunity to attack. It will not come today, there are too many humans on guard.

Others in the nest are dopey, lacking the strength to pull themselves over the edge. And some are dead. We stroke their silky smooth shells and velvet necks. They fit into the palm of my hand.

The old man gathers the weakest into a bucket with the remains of the round white egg shells, evidence of how many hatched from that nest. He will release them tomorrow or the next day, once they are strong enough to make their journey to the sea.

The first turtle has reached the shore line and stops, hesitates. The sea pulls back from the beach and draws itself up into a wave, towering above the turtle’s head. The vulnerable turtle confronts the all powerful ocean, tiny in the face of this immensity. Trusting. The wave comes rushing in, the turtle disappears inside it. Gone.

Black cotton

We are driving through Lewa, on our way to spend the night with Al’s sister Caroline. It is hot and Lila, Uma, Evie and Lali are sitting on the roof of the car, their legs dangling down through the sun roof.

Out of the window we pass Acacia trees, zebra grazing on the dry, silvery grass, giraffe. Out of the corner of my eye I see two golden mounds of earth, smooth and rounded. One lift’s it head. It is a male lion, a pair of them, huge, basking in the sun.

Al drives off the dirt road into the bush to get a closer look. As we stop a lioness lifts herself up out of the long grass where she has been sleeping, just a few meters from us. She eyes us sleepily, and walks slowly over to join the other lions.

We are spellbound, even the children fall silent. The male lions only glance over at us, not bothering to get up, turning their heads instead to gaze at the distant herd of buffalo.

We are late for lunch, so we drive on, crossing a small river and up into the dusty hills. Al tells me how the rains have failed, the watering holes are all drying up, the grass is yellowing. We pass the cracked dusty basin of a dried up lake. A solitary zebra watches us go.

But now, as we drive, the sky slowly darkens, brilliant blue sinking into a deep, bruised purple. The grasses begin to glow with an electric light, the low rumble of thunder moving closer. As the temperature drops we start to shiver.

Suddenly it starts to rain, hard. Within a few minutes the dusty dirt road has turned to black, slippery mud, known as Black Cotton. The car tyres struggle to grip it’s surface, slipping and sliding, skidding in circles. The roads are hump-backed, with ditches on either side, and it takes all Al’s strength not to fall into the ditch.

Up ahead we see a land rover horizontal across the road, it’s back tyres sunk into the ditch. There is no way past it. We decide to drive out into the bush, over the grass where there’ll be more traction, following the direction of the road.

As we draw level with the Land Rover it’s driver walks towards us through the rain. He is a friend of Al's, and has called for a truck to come and tow him out. We offer him a lift, but he doesn’t want to leave his car, which is full of provisions.

The tyres are managing well on the grass, but the ground is rough, full of dips and holes, and now large rocks. We can’t continue, and have to try and get back onto the road. But there is now a ridge, dropping down into a ditch, between us and the road, and the rain is getting heavier.

Lali and Evie are unperturbed, they are Bush Girls, they tell me, and have seen it all before. “Bush Girls aren’t scared” says Evie excitedly. But Lila and Uma don’t see the adventure of it. As Alastair attempts to drive up the ridge for the fourth time, the wheels spinning wildly in the mud, the car lurching over to one side like a ship in a stormy sea, Uma and lila start to cry.

“Are you trying to kill us?” Lila screams, as Uma sobs into her hands and begs us to let her get out and walk. I take the wheel while Al gets out and tries to position large boulders under the wheels of the car. I rev the engine, but nothing happens.

We are stuck, the belly of the car resting on the hump of the ridge, with only one front and one back wheel touching the ground. With no mobile signal, and still a fair way from Caroline’s house, there is nothing to do but sit and wait. Hopefully, she’ll realize something’s up and come and rescue us.

She does. We see her reversing down the centre of the road towards us, slipping from side to side. She later told us she had reversed as she knew how hard it would be to turn around in that mud. Lila and Uma scramble up into her solid Land Rover, feeling braver now, managing a smile.

Al and Caroline fix up a tow rope and haul Al’s car off the ridge and back onto the road. It is towed all the way back to Caroline’s house, its wheel arches so clogged with mud the wheels can barely turn.

Addis Ababa

We are walking down the street in the centre of Addis. People smile, nobody stares, Ossian gets a kiss and then another from passersby. Women walk by in traditional white dresses and shawls, majestic hair braids, passing young girls in skinny jeans and big hairdos.

Rubbish fills the gutters, piled up on the sides of the dirt roads, trodden into the muddy ground. A light rain falls, severed goats heads lie in the dirty puddles, leftover from the end of fasting celebrations over the easter weekend. This was one of the first countries in the world to adopt christianity as the official religion, and orthodox christianity remains the dominant religion.

Donkeys and emancipated horses pull wooden carts, a heard of goats walks through the traffic. Blue and white Lada taxis, remnants of Ethiopia’s communist era, drive by in varying degrees of dilapidation.

There are beggars, old women, children, a naked man curled into the fetus position, whole families begging. Buildings of corrugated iron sit beside four star hotels and palaces, Ethiopia had one of the oldest monarchies in the world.

Now here is an open space, the debris of doors and windows pressed into the dirt. We are told there used to be houses here, a whole community flattened to make way for a new road. There has been no compensation, and people are picking through the debris, looking for anything they can salvage.

We stop for lunch in one of the many pizzerias, the influence of five years of Italian occupation, the closest Ethiopia has come to being colonized. Next door there is an ice-cream parlor.

A group of men in overalls stand on the pavement welding seats into a parked car, arabic-sounding pop music playing from the doorway behind them. “Salama” the people greet us, “peace be with you’”.

Kapsoi

Adharanand and I are walking home from the Mitumba. We step off the tarmac road onto the the dirt road that leads to our neighbourhood, Kapsoi. There are people walking, familiar faces, a boy with a stick herding two cows, an old man. We great each other as we pass.

At the end of the dirt road is the kiosk selling milk and sweets. Lila is sitting behind the counter with a young baby, Mercy, on her lap, while Mercy’s mother serves a customer.

Just outside the door to the kiosk, Uma has set up shop on rickety bamboo table, usually used for selling cabbages and spinach. She is selling a selection of stones. A few children are gathered in front of her stall, pretending to buy them.

A neighbor, Sarah, stops to talk. I tell her we are leaving Iten in a few days time. She asks about my house in England. “Do you own a cow there?”

“No”

“Why not?” she looks at me with a mixture of disbelief and pity, “You must buy one when you get home”.

Back at our house, there are voices coming from the vegetable patch. Ossian and Flora emerge from the tangle of vines with pockets full of passion fruit and tree tomatoes.

We sit on the grassy slope in the garden eating them, watching mousebirds flying in and out of the vines. A neighbours' cow is mooing, a baby crying.

As the sky darkens Adharanand goes to look for Lila an Uma. He finds them down a narrow pathway, inside a small wooden shack, drinking sweet milky Kenyan tea and watching Kalenjin music videos with their friends.

School pick up

I am collecting Lila and Uma from school today. I wait for them to come out of class in the little grass square in the centre of the school buildings.

Uma comes first, holding firmly onto Hilda’s hand, talking and smiling. “We learnt that there’s air in the soil today” she tells me, taking my hand. She explains how they took it in turns to pour water on the soil, watching as little air bubbles burst on the surface of the soil.

Lila is a while coming, so we watch the children leaving to go home for lunch. A teacher comes over and greets us, taking Uma’s hand “hello again my friend” she says.

Then we see Lila, looking pleased, walking with Maureen and Brenda. She spots us and slows down, taking the long path round the square to avoid walking with us.

Uma and I walk ahead with Hilda, Uma chatting away, her rucksack on her back like all the other children. Lila is behind us, lingering with her friends, waiting for us to move out of sight.

The wind is blowing the dust around, in our eyes and mouths. We cross the main road, children fanning out across the road and disappearing into doorways and down alleyways.

Lila runs over to us, “Maureen wants to show me her mother’s shop”. Mama Maureen has a kiosk set back from the main road, selling sodas and secondhand running trainers. The girls get a soda each.

On the way up the hill I stop to buy some food from the little supermarket and the girls walk on home together. Here even the youngest children usually walk to school without an adult, accompanied instead by older friends or siblings.

Back home Lila and Uma show me their exercise books in which they have been copying lines of Swahili off the blackboard. Brenda has helped Uma with hers. The teacher sat in the staffroom marking, the children bringing their work to be checked and then returning to class to continue unsupervised.

Although Lila and Uma have enjoyed school, it was a long day for them and they are both tired. Too many questions and stares from the other children. It is a few days before they are ready to go again.

Rose

We are sitting, Adharanand, Ossian, Uma and I, on a small sofa in a dim room. Light is pushing in at the open doorway behind us, and from a window on the wall by the door, but the back of the room remains in shadow. Opposite our sofa, in touching distance, is a bunk bed, the top bunk missing, broken. A mattress is rolled up in the corner under the window. In the shadows, a water tank, gas cooker, some bundles. Overhead, an energy saving light bulb. A stool, covered with a cloth, acts as a table, an old sweatshirt is a doormat. We are at the home of Rose and her four children, Mark, Joseph, Jasmine and Natasha.

We first met Rose on an old school bus, driving to the start of the women's race organised by the Iten town council. She squeezed through the crowd waiting to board the bus, climbing on behind us, and sitting down on the empty seat next to me. Little, slight, with a shy smile, she told us she was in training as an athlete, despite an injury to her left hip that caused her to limp slightly.

The bus pulled up at the start of the race and the engine stopped. All the passengers leapt up from their seats and started pulling off their clothes, stripping down to lycra pants and vests. Excited, chatting, they sprinted off the bus and over to a lone shed in the corner of a field, the loo. Before the last of them had managed to get off the bus, the race organisers were calling for the race to start, and within seconds they were off, disappearing down the road we had just driven along, Rose struggling along near the back.

Rose gets up before 5 o'clock every morning to go for a morning run with her training partner, a Ugandan lady called Jen who runs for the Ugandan national team, leaving her children sleeping at home. Her husband has left her. Jen is talking now, sitting on Rose's broken bunk bed, answering my question about how things are now in Uganda. There have just been peaceful elections for the first time in many years. She tells us that people have had enough of the fighting, especially the women. When there is fighting, she says it's the women who suffer the most. The men simply run away, but the women cannot leave their children, and cannot run carrying them. There are women in Uganda with no eyes, others with no breasts, or no nose, no ears, sometimes no mouth. Cut off during the fighting.

We sit drinking milky tea and eating slices of white bread. Rose's daughters fall asleep on the bottom bunk. They are not well, a fever. They came round to visit us the other day, sitting quietly on the sofa in our sitting room staring at Lila and Uma. They do not speak English, most people learn English in school, and Lila and Uma know only a few words in Swahili. They played with the dolls for a while, then all went outside to play catch with a ball. Rose told us she had no food at home that day, that they had only had tea to drink for the last two days.

Rose's home is in a courtyard made up of identical, single-room dwellings. Cloth's hang over the doorways, women come in and out, slow and busy. One is washing the dishes in a bucket outside, another washes clothes and hangs them up to dry. In the centre of the grassy courtyard is a water pump, below it a muddy ditch, a makeshift swing, sheep, rubbish. It is raining gently, above us a rainbow.

Uma is delighted with the swing, made from a wooden frame with a loop of rope. Mark lowers if for her, he speaks English well. Ossian is delighted with the sheep. He trots after them, throwing stones and laughing. Now Uma is jumping back and forth over the muddy ditch, a group of small children watching her with surprise. One of her shoes falls off and gets covered in mud. Mark pumps some water from the well and cleans it for her.

We finish our tea and step outside to say goodbye. The children are playing with a football. By the front door stands a collection of old containers and tubs. Rose has planted flowers in them, "I love flowers" she tells me. We walk home at dusk, kerosine lamps lit in the shops, the streets busy, bustling still. Uma is chatting away, "Was Mark the first born?", "And who was the second born?", "Mummy, don't tell Lila about the swing, I want to tell her first". A choir is singing in the little park, a crowd has gathered to listen. We arrive home in the dark.

Market

On the other side of the town's playing field, behind the District Works Office, is the fruit and veg market. Open air, the wooden stalls shaded by corrugated roofs, it is open everyday from dawn till dusk. At the entrance sit the charcoal sellers. Two women perch on wooden stools, their hands working away at some crocheting while their eyes watch the passers-by. Their children sit next to them on the ground, waving to us. Behind them, a line of huge white sacks, the tops stuffed with leaves to stop the charcoal from falling out.

You enter the market through big, wide metal gates. Stalls run all around the edge of the square, one row in the centre. The pitches by the gates are brimming with food, the pitches at the back end are almost all deserted. On our first visit we walked the full circuit of stalls, interested to see what each one sold. They all sell the same. Our progress was slow as each stall-holder, all of them women, was keen to greet us, wanting to know our names and where we came from. We stopped to talk with a lady called Virginia, her two young children sleeping under the shade of the tin roof while she worked. She told me that they accompany her everyday to the market. This will be their playground until they are old enough to go to school.

Now we are regular customers at Filomena's stall, a few pitches in from the gate. From the roof hang bunches of bananas, bags of carrots and garlics, and piled up under it's shade are mounds of tomatoes, green oranges, mango, papaya and sweet potatoes, bunches of spinach and chard. Standing off the ground on wooden pallets are sacks of grains, rice, millet, kidney beans and tiny dried-up silver fish. She tells me she buys the produce direct from the farmers, who deliver it to the market in their vans. One day we saw one of these vans arriving, and a tug-of-war broke out among the stall-holders at the far end over the bags of grain.

Ossian loves to dig his hands into the grains, letting them spill over onto the floor. Usually one of the market ladies will come over and try to pick him up, making him shout out crossly and forget what he's doing. Filomena chats to us as she serves us, offering Uma a banana and asking her if she will stay and help her with the stall. Uma shakes her head shyly, watching in amazement as Filomena keeps a tally of how much we owe her, scratching the numbers onto the back of her weathered hand with a knife.

The lady next to her is knitting a jumper for her son while she waits for customers, expertly working a Fairisle design onto the front of it. Some of the stall-holders stand chatting to each other, watching the shoppers walking in through the gates. Others are busy talking on their mobile phones. All of them are wearing skirts and long aprons.

We load our shopping into a bag and set off, walking down the path to the playing field and the shortcut home, followed by curious stares and excited laughter.

Mitumba

A woman sits in the centre of a small square of grass. Encircling her, piled up as high as her head, are mounds of clothes. Beyond her small fortress sit other women, sometimes a man, each on their own small patch of grass, criss-crossed with narrow dirt pathways. This is the Mitumba, a clothes market that comes to town every Saturday. Each stall-holders specialises in a different type of clothing; sweatshirts, women's blouses, dresses, baby clothes, trainers, children's jumpers etc. It's the ultimate jumble sale.

One of our neighbours, Evelina, Maureen's mum, specialises in trainers. Over tea at her house one morning, a catholic music video playing in the background, she tells me how she started selling trainers to pay for her niece's school fees. Her sister died a few years ago, and her brother-in-law disappeared, leaving her to raise her sister's children as well as her own. She travels to Nairobi to buy the trainers from a warehouse filled with sacks of donated clothes and jumble. It's cheapest to buy an unopened sack of trainers, but Evelina prefers to go and choose the pairs she wants, 'that way you don't get any you can't use" she tells me.

Walking through the patchwork of stalls, people, mainly women, are busy rummaging while the stall holders call out their prices, "10-10" (each item is ten Shillings), "40 Bob". They stir the mounds of clothes with their hands, bringing the bottom layers up to the top, as the shoppers work their way methodically through each item. Lila and Uma dive into a pile of girls clothes, pulling out a sparkly pink cardigan and a fairy dress.

Down on the main street a man sits by the side of the road carefully unpicking the sole of an old shoe. Behind him rows of new soles hang neatly from a line of string, waiting to be sown on. Next to him, another man is intent on polishing up an old pair of brogues, readying them for sale in the market. Re-use. Re-cycle.

A man walks by wearing a stack of hats. Around his waist are slung dozens of beaded belts, from his outstretched arms hang bracelets, necklaces swing from his neck. He is a walking display cabinet, a portable shop. Adharanand stops to look at a stall of running trainers, laid out in pairs on the ground in front of a rubbish-strewn ditch. Running trainers are big business here in Iten, Evelina told me she sold a whole sack of them during the course of one Saturday.

Over there a woman is selling corn, cooking it over charcoal. Next to her another lady has sugarcane. We buy some, and she slices it with a machete, quartering the stalk so we can suck on the woody insides, the sticky juice running down our fingers. A man cycles past with a sofa strung to the back of his bike. The market goes on all day, until it gets too dark to see.

Sunrise

It's 6am and we are all awake. Outside the kitchen window the sun is spilling over the distant mountains. Lila and Uma's bags are ready, waiting at the door, their clothes laid out on the end of their beds. Today they are going to school in Iten.

Last Friday we all went to visit Sunrise Academy, a church-sponsored primary school that Maureen, Brenda and Hilda, our neighbours' children, go to. We were given a tour of the school and an enthusiastic welcome from the children, and arranged that Lila and Uma would come and spend a day or two in the class of their friends.

Perhaps their welcome was too enthusiastic, because now Lila is saying she doesn't want to go. She tells me she's scared. Scared of hundreds of pairs of eyes staring at her, hundreds of curious hands wanting to touch her, and of the noise of hundreds of shouting, laughing, overexcited children.

We arrive just after 7.30am, but most of the children are already in school. A few late-comers, who can't be more than three or four years old, run in behind us, wide eyed at the sight of these strangers. We walk over to the staffroom and greet the Deputy Head. He is seated in his office, a bare room with two simple wooden tables piled with paperwork and marking, a couple of white plastic chairs, a timetable stuck to the wall.

Hilda and Maureen come to take Lila and Uma to their classroom to prepare for assembly. Uma runs off with them, arm in arm with Hilda. Lila wont let go of my hand. She starts to cry. The Head Teacher, Henry, comes over, and puts his hand on Lila's shoulder. "It is normal" he says, "it is a new experience for her". Lila decides to wait with Ossian and I until after assembly, which is taking place on the grass square in front of the staffroom.

We are brought a chair and sit down to wait. Ossian wanders up and down the veranda picking up stones and throwing them onto the grass. Lila sits on my lap. From behind closed classroom doors comes the sound of chattering, laughter, bustling energy. The doors burst open and children parade out onto the pathways. The square in front of us is filling up quickly as they organise themselves into rows. I spot Uma, a big grin on her face, holding the hands of Hilda and Maureen. She disappears into a row of children, her head lost behind the row in front.

The entire school is now gathered in front of us, facing the veranda where we are waiting with the teachers. The youngest class of three and four year olds stand at the front, dressed in winter coats, their hoods pulled up over woolly hats. The strong morning sun shines in our eyes, it feels hot already.

A group of eight older children march out in front of the assembly, following orders shouted to them by another child. In military style they turn on their heals and salute the assembly. One of the group steps forward and raises the flag, everyone starts to sing, lead by two tall girls. The group salutes again and swivel on their heals to leave, marching off down the path.

Henry is addressing the children. Ossian starts to cry, the sun is too bright for him. As I carry him into the shade of the staffroom I catch a few words of Henry's talk. He is telling the children that we are all the same, that there is no difference between us. I wonder if this is for Lila's sake, to try and calm the children's overexcited behaviour at the sight of two little blond girls in their class.

Assembly is over, the children file out of the square and back to their classrooms. Uma reappears, still grinning. The sight of her seems to cheer Lila up, and she runs over and joins in the line behind Uma, glancing back to make sure Ossian and I are still there. We follow them into the classroom, a corrugated metal building with no windows, light streaming in from the gap between the walls and the roof. Pairs of wooden desks are arranged in rows, facing a large blackboard. Handmade posters are stuck on the walls.

Uma is sitting down at a pair of desks, squeezed onto the bench between two children. She is busy unpacking her bags. Maureen motions for Lila to come and sit down next to her, a small crowd gathers around as Maureen helps Lila to put her things inside the desk. A shout goes up that Teacher is coming, and the crowd disperses to find their desks. Lila seems to be OK now, so Ossian and I wave goodbye to the class and walk home.

Homecoming

We are sitting in our white Toyota Corolla with the engine running, unable to drive forwards or reverse. We are stuck in the driveway of a village primary school, surrounded on all sides by children in their school uniform, a swarm of red jumpers, buzzing with excitement.

We have been invited to attend the homecoming of four junior athletes from the school who won gold medals at the recent African Cross-country Championships. Godfrey has come with us, but he's just gone off to find some water. On his return, he can not get back in the car, or even anywhere close to the car. The swarm is reaching fever pitch now, shrieking and shouting hysterically, hands thrusting in through the open windows, pulling at our hair, grabbing hold of us. Godfrey shouts out to Adharanand to reverse, and starts to pull children out of the way. Slowly we inch backwards, winding up the windows as we go, Lila and Uma clinging on to each other in the back seat.

Godfrey takes us up to the centre of the village, a strip of dirt road with a handful of wooden shops on either side. We walk into a small blue building marked 'Hotel', which is actually a cafe. There are a few men seated at wooden tables, rickety chairs, benches along the walls, dusty red floor, blue painted walls, a framed quotation "failure is just a setback on the road to success". A wooden counter stands in one corner, a pile of solid-looking buns on a shelf behind the glass front. In the other corner, a butcher's shop shares the tiny room, the headless body of a cow hanging from a hook.

Just after one o'clock, three hours later than scheduled, a parade of cars arrives carrying the junior athletes, their families and local dignitaries. The schoolchildren line the driveway to the school, chanting and dancing as the athletes wave down at them from the back of a truck. The homecoming has begun.

Two marquees have been put up in the field by the school, shading rows of white plastic chairs, one for guests, the other for the athletes and their parents. A wooden table stands on the grass in front of the marquee, and beyond this sit the schoolchildren. Villagers sit on the grassy slopes behind them.

We take our places on the white plastic chairs, and as special guests are handed tinsel wreaths to hang round our necks. Ossian immediately begins to pull mine apart, keeping himself occupied for a good ten minutes or so while a group of children perform a song. And then the speeches begin.

An hour later and Lila and Uma are getting restless and hungry, wriggling about on Godfrey's lap. They've finished reading all the books they brought with them and there is no end in sight to the speeches. I take Ossian to play on the slope behind the marquee. Below us is a secondary school playing field. The children are coming out of class, wandering into the field. Suddenly they are running over in our direction, pointing and waving. Ossian and I wave back.

In our field, a group of women come over and ask if they can take a photo with us. I agree, and we soon find ourselves posing with one lady after another. Each one wants to hold Ossian for the picture, but he won't let them and starts to cry when they insist. After a while, the smile muscles in my face start to ache, so we get up and walk back to marquee. A cake is being presented to the children by six women. Now even Godfrey's making a speech. Where will it end?

It is past five o'clock, and there are still several more dignitaries left to speak before "lunch", which is the last thing on the agenda. The hot sun and eternal speeches have subdued the schoolchildren sitting on the grass. They stare at us with glazed eyes as we get up to leave. Lila and Uma have had enough, but before we can go, more photographs have to be taken with people we've never met.

We walk back to our car, waving goodbye to the schoolchildren in the other field, who are still standing, cheering.

It's a beautiful drive back, green sloping fields, wooden fences, round thatched huts, pine forests and the escarpments of the Rift Valley. No speeches in sight.

Nairobi Waldorf School

Ossian and I open the heavy metal gate onto the street. It is wide with red dirt footpaths running along either side, no pavements. A steady trickle of people are walking on the footpaths in the shadows cast by the trees that tower overhead, trees belonging to large tropical gardens, one after another after another, flanking the sides of the road. A elderly lady is walking towards us carrying a big bundle of firewood. It is tied to her back with a strap that passes over her forehead. She greets us as she passes, stopping briefly to touch Ossian's head.

Lila and Uma come running from the house, their rucksacks on their backs, hair brushed neatly back. Adharanand follows behind them. Ossian and I give them a kiss and wave them off as they slip into the stream of commuters on the footpath, off on their way to spend the day at the Nairobi Steiner Waldorf School. Today is the first of three days they will spend as guests of the school, Lila in Class 1 and Uma in Kindergarten.

Curious to see what a Steiner School in Kenya was like, we all spent the morning at the school yesterday. Lila and Uma seemed to feel at home as soon as we arrived, and were keen to join their respective classes. The school is only two streets away from where we are staying, set in one of the large tropical gardens. As you enter from the main street a security guard walks over to the gate to let you in. Nailed onto his wooden guard hut is a plaque stating that the hut was built as part of a class project by the children. Placed amongst the trees are wooden cabins, each one a classroom, with tidy footpaths linking one to another.

We are shown round and talk to a few of the teachers. All have trained and taught in the Kenyan state system, re-training in the Steiner curriculum when they join the school. Many of them knew nothing about it before, applying to a job vacancy at the school without really knowing what a Waldorf School was. Out in the countryside to the south of Nairobi is another, larger Waldorf school, where they receive their training. I am told that this other school has many of the local Masai children in its classes, as well as children from further afield who board at the school. Although the children in the Nairobi school are mainly black Africans, there are also several Asian and European children, and Lila and Uma do not stand out.

Much of what we are shown is very familiar to us, the insides of the classrooms, the toys in the kindergarten, the colours of the walls. But unlike in the Steiner schools in the UK, uniform rules seem more relaxed here, with logos and cartoon characters popping up on clothes and rucksacks. There is also a football pitch and regular matches against other schools in the area.

We join in circle time with the Kindergarten, and amongst familiar nursery songs are some traditional Kenyan ones, with the teachers chanting and clapping as the children dance and stomp. Afterwards the children sit down to share a meal of ugali, spinach and fish, prepared by the cooks in the school's kitchen. As we leave we are invited to an upcoming festival to celebrate the start of the rainy season.

A few days later I ask Uma if she liked going to Kindergarten. "No" she replies, "I didn't like it". She has a big grin on her face. "I loved it."

Karen

We are sitting on the veranda looking out at the view of the Ngong Hills. On the table in front of us stand two large silver teapots, china cups and saucers, and a tin of homemade lemon biscuits. Our host, Peter, is discussing the various options for dealing with the frog infestation in his ponds. His garden is magnificent, soft lawns shaded by towering trees, Red Hot Poker, Jacaranda, Bougainvillea, Hibiscus, Water Lilies, and the distant hills.

Ossian follows the dogs through the open door into the darkness of the house. A large room, wooden panels, heavy with oil paintings, a grand piano. Peter turns on the light above a canvas of two life-size figures, Mary Magdalene, with a look of disbelief on her face, and a friend, olive skinned, barefooted, the empty tomb of Jesus in the background.

"Shall we play?" says Peter as he gathers up some tennis rackets from the hall and leads us back out into the late afternoon sun, across the lawn to the tennis court.

Lila and Uma had planned to swim in Peter's pool, but were put off by the dark green water, and the suggestion they would have to share it with the frogs. Instead, they decide to be ball girls for the doubles tennis match, Peter and Ray against Adharanand and Jill. Adharanand is the youngest by at least 30 years.

Leaving Peter's house, we drive down the wide residential streets of Karen and back out onto the main road. Children are walking home from school, as people with bags, coming home from work, shout and jostle for space on the matatus. Hawkers hold up bags of tomatoes, pirated DVDs, while men push bicycles laden with firewood, and women sit hunched on the side of the road selling second-hand clothes.

We turn left onto another shaded side street, and drive up to a large metal gate which is opened by Thomas, the house boy. Inside is the home of Ray and Doreen, who are kindly letting us stay in their guest cottage. All is peaceful in their rambling garden, as night falls on the suburbs of Nairobi.

Evening Stroll

It's six o'clock in the evening, the sun is fading away, the air cooling. We decide to take a stroll around our neighbourhood. Ossian is intent on finding the source of the mooing noise, and we end up walking down a footpath near our house, a trail of small children behind us.

A lady calls out to me from her garden, and I recognise her as Anne, who has a kiosk in her front garden selling vegetables and milk. She calls us over to meet her cows, who are standing in her back garden eating hay from a makeshift wooden feeder.

While Ossian inspects the cows Anne tells us how she was widowed when her husband died of cancer, how she struggles to get by working in the local hospital at night and opening her shop during the day.

A group of children have gathered in the garden, sitting on the wooden fence and giggling as they stare at us. A girl carrying a young boy brings him over to meet Ossian. They are of a similar age. While Ossian is wearing a long-sleeved top and a pair of shorts, the young boy is wearing fleece trousers, several jumpers and two woolly hats. I am told it's to protect him from the cold and the risk of pneumonia. Even during the heat of mid afternoon, young children and babies are dressed like this. By Kenyan standards, Iten is considered a cold place to live.

The night is coming on quickly now, and we walk back out onto the path. Anne waves us off, 'Goodbye' she shouts, 'leave me to my struggle'. Lila and Uma are playing chase with the children in the lane, stumbling over the stones and rubbish as they run after each other. As the sky darkens, the game becomes rougher, the children start to push and hit each other, playfully at first, but it soon turns to self-defence.

In the semi-darkness we walk back up the path, waving goodbye to the children as they disappear into doorways, into the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of crickets, dogs barking. The kerosene lamp is lit in the shop near our gate, a few figures sit on the wooden counter, gazing at the people walking home from town.

Alex (our night watchman) is outside our gate in his uniform, patrolling up and down to let people know he's there. It suddenly seems ridiculous that we are employing someone to guard us.

Small Visitors

Lila and Uma are living in the garden. They tell me they will only be coming inside for meals now. The walls of their home are made from a couple of large plastic yellow barrels and some crumbling bricks. They had Ossian round earlier on, but he made the mistake of trying to walk off with one of the walls and got chased away.

Now Linda has come to visit. She comes everyday at this time, around 5.30 in the afternoon, after she's changed out of her school uniform and done her homework. Her visits are usually chaotic; the contents of the sitting room are examined and scattered on the floor, only to be cross-examined and re-scattered by the two or three smaller children who trail behind her. But today Lila and Uma have invited her into their game. This is unusual.

Soon after we moved in, we began to get small visitors calling at our house. Every afternoon, after school, cries of 'how are you?' or 'mzungu!' came from the hole in the gate. For the first few days Uma was keen to run out and play, taking Ossian's large red beach ball with her, to the delight of the crowd of children gathered outside. Lila would follow hesitantly, suspiciously, reluctantly joining in.

But soon our visitors grew more confident, opening the gate and pushing each other into the garden, laughing and whispering to each other. Lila and Uma would disappear under

a storm of hands wanting to touch their skin and stroke their hair. They became exotic objects to be wondered at, prodded, poked and discussed. They also became intimidated.

After a few weeks of this, they would run inside and hide whenever they heard calls from the gate, pretending they were tired, or were too busy playing their game. Only Linda still insisted on coming in, but eventually they began to ignore even her, hiding away in Flora's room wh

enever she came.

Today is different though. This morning Lila and Uma spent four hours in a salon in Iten having their hair plaited with long extensions, the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition for both of them to have long hair. And as their hair has grown, so has their confidence. Like Samson, their hair has given them new strength to go out and play with the children, or maybe they just feel more like everyone else with their African braids.

So now Linda is here, and they are pleased to see her. They don't even seem to mind when she dismantles their house, and with a flick of their pony tails they chase after her, out of the gate, to join the other children playing outside.

Volleyball

It's Sunday afternoon and since the morning the sound of shouting and cheering has been drifting over our garden wall. There's a volleyball tournament on in the big playing field in the centre of Iten. After lunch we file out of our gate and take the short cut, down a narrow winding path that comes out just by the field.

A crowd, mostly men, have gathered around the game. It's the final. They are leaning in, shoulders touching, intent, their feet marking the boundaries of the pitch. Every so often the ball flies into the crowd, striking somebody in the face or arm, an eruption of laughter follows, and the ball is thrown back in.

Beside me, a young girl is playing with a ball of string, pulling it behind her like a dog on a lead. Three boys play football with an empty plastic bottle, another runs past rolling a tyre with a stick. Beyond them a football game is in motion, cows grazing a few feet away.

Something has amused the crowd, there are peals of laughter, people keep glancing over to one corner of the pitch. I walk around the outside to get a better view, heads turn like a Mexican wave to stare at me as I go. I find an opening and squeeze in between two men, looking over to the source of the laughter.

I see Adharanand sitting on the ground, right on the sideline, with Lila and Uma next to him. Each time the ball comes in their direction, a man jumps in front of them, shouting out, pretending to stop the ball from hitting them. More raucous laughter.

I ask a friend what he is saying. "He says he is protecting the two little dolls from the ball".

The game ends, and Adharanand stands up to leave. I try and walk over to him, but it's like trying to get close to a celebrity. He and the girls are surrounded. The winners of the game walk past unnoticed.

We make our way back to the start of the path, a swarm of children around our legs. The attention has been too much, and Lila and Uma insist on being carried. We retreat to our garden and close the gate behind us.

Mrs Koila's house

Today we were invited round to our neighbour Mrs Koila's house for tea. We bumped into her on her way back from work, at the Iten Post Office, and walked home with her, down the red dirt track past scruffy chickens and sheep tethered to weeds. Her house is similar in design and layout to ours, set in the middle of a small plot of land.

Mr Koila is a former runner who helped to find us our house, and their youngest daughter Linda has befriended Lila and Uma. Linda was there when we arrived, just changing out of her school uniform and, after a little nudge from her mother, she showed us her room. A bed in one corner, a net curtain nailed up at the window, a cupboard with the door missing, an old chest of drawers with clothes spilling out of it.

Linda lay on the floor to do her homework, copying text from a test paper with a red 80% scrawled across the top of it. The floor had some tiles missing. Lila and Uma sat down next to her and watched curiously.

Adharanand, Ossian and I sat with Mrs Koila in the sitting room, on sofas neatly covered with white squares of embroidered fabric. Ossian insisted on jumping from one sofa to the next in his big walking boots. I tired to stop him, worried that he would muddy the crisp white linen, but Mrs Koila didn't seem bothered. "Let him" she said, "we can wash them".

Her 'house girl' came in, sharply dressed in a pristine white skirt and t-shirt, and pulled a table cloth off one of the coffee tables, putting down a thermos flask of sweet, milky tea. She shook our hands and left the room. "She's been with us for seven years," Mrs Koila told us, leaning back in her armchair, smiling.

Low budget music videos flickered across the TV screen, people gyrating in front of trees and patches of grass. Mrs Koila was talking about education; "These", she said, waving at the TV and the computer in the corner of the room "the children want to play with them when they get home from school, they get distracted and don't perform well". For this reason her three older children have all gone to boarding school, where life is more focused. They are going to visit her nine-year-old this Sunday.

Ossian padded around the room pointing at things, a calendar on the painted wall with a shoal of fish on it, a toy rabbit, a fireplace covered over with fabric, a picture of a sunset bearing the quote "It's not where you are but where you're going to that matters".

I followed Ossian out into the kitchen. The room was empty. No cooker. Bare work surfaces and only a packet of millet flour in a cupboard on the wall. A door lead out into the garden, beyond it a wooden shack with a bed, bare mattress, earth floor. Smoke and the smell of cooking wafted from the shack.

We left Lila and Uma playing on the computer with Linda, and walked out into the front garden. Mrs Koila showed us her huge avocado tree and vegetable patch of bananas and maze. She told us about her farm, on the other side of Eldoret, where they grow millet and keep cows.

"You will come round for supper one day, when Mr Koila is here," she said with a firm handshake. We thanked her and walked home with Ossian, leaving the girls to play for a while.

Water

Over the last 10 days we've had just half a day of running water, where you turn on the tap and water comes out. For four of those days, the whole of Iten had no water either. So we buy bottles of drinking water, and our landlady brings us emergency 70-litre barrels of water, which stand outside the kitchen door where they are closely monitored. For most other people though, they have to go and fetch water, either from a neighbour's bore hole, or from the river.

Even though I knew we had no water, it took a few days before I stopped instinctively going over to the sink and trying to turn the tap on. We've had to prioritise our water usage, with cooking and washing up at the top, and making perfume, a favourite game of Lila and Uma's, at the bottom. Even so, it's surprising how quickly we get through 70 litres.

The clothes washing has come to a halt. Flora washes the clothes by hand (very few homes have a washing machine here), and this also uses a lot of water, especially as Uma and Lila like to wash their dolls clothes at the same time. Bath time has become tin basin time, like the olden days, with a tub in front of the fire, except without the fire.

One night there was an almighty thunder storm and the rain came pouring down. In our new water-conscious state we were busy putting out barrels to collect it in. For us, all of this is a novelty, part of our 'Kenyan experience', but for many people here, including some of our neighbours, there is no running water, ever.

Toy gun

I was sitting in the car today with Ossian on my lap and Lila and Uma playing in the back seat, waiting for Adharanand to come out of the supermarket in Eldoret. We were in the car park, the Uganda Highway fuming by behind the fence in front of us.

A street kid came up to the fence and tried to get my attention. I tried to ignore him. He started to pull faces at Lila and Uma, sticking his tongue out and waving his arms around, his body jerking as though he was trying to dance. He was about 14 years old and had bare feet.

He looked back at me and lifted up his shirt. Tucked into his trousers was a gun, the handle lying flat against his stomach. I couldn't tell if it was real or not. He started to touch it, looking over at Lila and Uma again and putting his finger on the trigger. From the look on his face it was impossible to tell whether he was about to break into another dance routine, or pull out the gun and shoot at us.

I went over to the security guard from the supermarket and pointed to the kid. The guard laughed: "Just a street kid, toy, toy, just relax." The kid walked off. Adharanand came back to the car, and as I was telling him what had happened, the kid came back. "That one?" Adharanand asked. "I gave him some money just now." We watched as he pulled a small glass bottle from his jacket, took a swig, and swayed off down the street.

Iten

We have moved into our own home in Iten, down a dusty dirt track, past a little wooden roadside stall selling sweets and mobile phone credit, opposite one of the few two-story buildings in Iten. Behind big black corrugated iron gates lies a large lawn, covered in sheep poo and spiky grass.

The house sits in the middle of the plot, the big sitting room facing the gates, the tiny kitchen, shower and loo facing a magnificent view of distant hills dropping down into the Rift Valley. It's a long building, two rooms deep, but we're only occupying half of it. The other, larger half, is empty, save for one room with a pile of broken, dirty furniture in the corner, and Flora's bedroom. Out by the kitchen the door opens onto a vegetable patch, filled entirely with passion fruit plants.

The day we moved in we were met by our landlady, Mrs Keegan, the wife of a local politician, with big handshakes for Adharanand and I and hugs for the children. The house had the air of a building site, with the smell of paint overwhelming the rooms, the furniture and floors covered in dust, the newly laid lino curling at the corners, and rubble on the floor in the shower and loo. Out in the garden, Zachariah, Mrs Keegan's handyman, was still laying paving stones in front of the sitting room door. The goats and wild dog, that had been tethered to posts the day we looked round, had gone.

Mrs Keegan helped to make the beds and sweep the floor while we unloaded the car went to buy food and kitchen utensils in Eldoret. We kitted ourselves out with tin plates, bowls and mugs, a large tin basin to wash Ossian in and a bright yellow storm lantern in case of power cuts. The biggest excitement for Lila and Uma was a bunk bed of their own, and they diplomatically decided to take it in turns to sleep on the top bunk, one week each, change over day on Saturdays.

Naiberi River Overland Campsite and Resort

We've been here since Monday, a mini holiday while we wait for our house to be ready, and have fallen into a very comfortable routine.

Ossian wakes us all early with his singing and calling out our names. We have breakfast bought to us by the friendly staff in their green uniforms: fruit, cereals, pancakes, toast, and hot chocolate. We eat it out on the veranda on the sofa and armchairs, while Ossian eats his at his little travel highchair borrowed from Lali. Then Uma sets up shop on the steps of the veranda, and Ossian and I go shopping for dolls and coloured pencils.

We gather our kit for a day at the pool, and head off down the pathways under the palm and banana trees to the large turquoise pool. The sun loungers are all empty, with a couple of staff sweeping the leaves from the poolside using a bundles of branches taped together. We spread out our towels and unpack the bags, laying out sketch books, pencils, crayons and Lila's Peter and Jane books.

As the sun swings up into the sky the loungers heat up, until they are too hot to touch. Ossian falls asleep curled up under a kikoy, lulled asleep by the sound of the waterfall, and we order lunch from the bar staff. We dip our toes into the cold water of the pool. Slowly we move further into the pool, shivering with delight and cold at the water. I swim a few lengths while Uma floats about in her armbands, and Lila hops up and down on tip toes.

Ossian wakes just as lunch arrives, and we sit at a table by the pool, drying off as we eat. Ossian wanders off to the bar and starts to dance to the music, casting coy glances at the two men sitting in there. He hears the geese coming down the path and runs off to chase them. Lila and Uma set up doctors' surgeries on the sun loungers, calling in their patients one at a time to be cleaned with wet wipes and cured with sun cream, before being bandaged up in a sarong.

At four we put on our clothes and pack our bags and walk up the winding pathway to the swingseat overlooking the pool. Uma calls out for passengers on her fairground ride, and Ossian, Lila and I climb on board and lift our feet up off the ground. She starts to swing us, singing to us as we ride through the air, Ossian laughing and holding my hand.

It's time to go back to our room, shower off and change into something warm for the evening. Adharanand gets back from visiting training camps, and we walk over to the restaurant, Uma carrying Ossian's high chair seat, and Ossian carrying the tray. All the women who work here try to pick him up and cuddle him, which makes him very cross. Some of them have children of their own, but they all live at the camp, only seeing their families once a week, if that.

We order our supper and Uma and Lila head over to the pool table to watch the players. Sometimes they have a go, but the table is too big and the cue's are too long, and they get frustrated, and I end up playing Adharanand. Eventually our food comes, and we sit at the same table every evening and eat a feast of Indian food, spaghetti, avocado and toast, with Mango for pudding.

Sometimes we sit round the enormous fireplace, with it's huge chimney rising straight up through the roof, talking to the Overlanders who are passing through. Or we go back to the room, the children quickly falling asleep, and we sit out on the veranda with a fire lit, and drink wine with the couple in the next door room. It has been fun here, but it's time to go. Tomorrow we move into our own home in Iten.