Leilan Overland Campsite

This is our third night here, it's very basic, the kind of place I would have stayed in backpacking on my gap year, but it's quiet - we have the place to ourselves. The owner's two young sons were here when we arrived, and Lila and Uma were soon running around with them, collecting the bottle tops that are scattered all over the ground, sorting them into colours and arranging them into patterns.

We drove to Eldoret today, passing shacks made of corrugated metal sheets and old bits of wood, dogs lying on piles of muddy rubbish, donkeys hitched up to roughly made wooden carts, and barefoot children in torn clothes staring from the doorways. Pretty much everywhere we go people stare, calling out "mzungu" (white person).

The children are unsettled. Lila and Uma have been fighting and fighting, every time they are together it ends up in a fight. I spent a huge part of the day trying to get them to be kind to each other, but Lila does not want to have anything to do with Uma at the moment, and Uma tries to wind Lila up at every opportunity. Uma has also regressed, demanding to sit on my lap and pretending to breastfeed, making Ossian scream with jealousy. Ossian is breastfeeding a lot, mainly I think for reassurance.

When we got back tonight we were all covered in dust from the road, the children's clothes and hands, faces and feet were so dirty with food and mud that I had to scrub them all from head to toe in a bucket of warm water to get them clean. It felt intense today, being here, with our children, with no home of our own, and I'm sure that's why they are all behaving like they are. We began to question whether we had done the right thing, bringing everyone out here.

We've decided to take a house in Iten that belongs to a local politician, which is supposed to be in a safe part of town, although it all looks the same to me. It's either that or live in Eldoret in a secure development, but we want to be in Iten, so we're going to give it a go there first. I'm sure that once we're in our own home, and the children have settled into some kind of routine, we'll all start feeling much happier about being here.