Tim is back in the UK for a few days so its my turn to be home alone with the kids. And we decided that Sunday was the day we would finally get round to adopting an elephant (as you do when living only a few miles from a world renowned Elephant orphanage). So we set off to watch feeding time and choose our Ellie. The kids had some Christmas money explicitly for this and also to fund some sort of support for human orphans/ street kids. They haven't yet quite decided how best to do this latter giving in a way that properly involves them but at the moment their thinking centres on providing football gear to slumdwellers fc - the kids team from the slum that backs onto their school, which recently thrashed the U13 school team 7-0. My suggestion that these children might have more need of school books wasn't helpful.
Anyway, back to the elephants, where we managed to sponsor both a mischievous rhino and a year old elephant called Barsalinga who was born just after we arrived in Kenya and was found next to his dying mother, who had been shot by poachers, when just a couple of weeks old.
The boys have been absorbing his bio data and learning lots of facts about ivory recoveries and poaching incidents last year. Katie says she would have preferred a girl. As we were leaving she announced that she could not believe we forgot the elephant - I had visions of putting it in the back of our land cruiser and bringing it home to trample down the maize and asked her if she really thought this would be wise. Turns out she had said adopted not forgot. Phew - don't think I could have coped with her determined efforts to take our new foster infant home!
Then off to lunch and as we got there, the kids wondered why Nairobi was suddenly feeling busy again. Partly that the election result was finally announced this weekend, 5 days after voting closed, so people are getting back to work and on with their lives again. Partly too that it was Mothering Sunday so people were going out to lunch together. Oooops. A delayed half term which meant school weren't filling art classes with Mother's Day cards last week and an absent dad meant the children weren't prepared for this revelation. Fantastic behaviour ensued over lunch followed by a suggestion we pop to the green grocer for a few things and by the way could they have a little money.......
Whilst I topped up on fruit and freshly squeezed juice they consulted "secretly", negotiated and then presented me with my lovely bunch of flowers.
Sometimes its good to be reminded that they love you really, particularly after a relatively housebound half term!
Anne
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