December is hereee! That means a Christmassy atmosphere everywhere, a lot of action at Wale and a lot of good and relaxing times ahead. Last Saturday’s dance performance was cancelled unfortunately, so I have no pictures to share from there. So, it was just a normal Saturday with art classes, movie, football and dancing.
This week a former volunteer at Wale Wale Kenya, Kalle, came to Nairobi to help with the football camp next week. Emil will also fly down here next week. They are a part of the team in Sweden, which is working with the Wale Wale Football Academy. This autumn they designed a new logo and ran a campaign to collect donors and get exposure for the academy. Now they will be here to see how everything is going and to get to know the coaches and talk with them. This Tuesday me and Julius interviewed Kalle about his volunteer work in Sweden with Wale Wale and also about the reasons for his visit here. Julius will be helping me with some of the social media posts from now on. You can read the post at the Wale Slum Soka Academy’s blog 😉 Next week will be busy because of the football camp taking place from the 12th to 15th. I will also be there with my camera and my phone, documenting everything on Instagram and taking photos.
We have a lot of these kind of sports camps for kids in the Nordic countries and Kalle told me, they were inspired by their own youth in Sweden, spending weekends at sports camps during the summers. This is really a great opportunity for the kids to get to dedicate a whole three days for football and also get to know other kids from other teams. I’ve done some camps during my childhood too and it was always the best time of the summer.
Last week I bought more pencils, erasers and markers and I am hoping we will finish the sketch books tomorrow. We are only missing a few pictures and then we just need to decorate the covers and they are ready to be sold! We have seven books full of interesting pictures of different African tribes and some fictional characters too. I must say, I have learned a whole lot about Kenyan and some other African tribes during this project, spending a lot of time researching and finding interesting pictures to draw. I hope that seeing these pictures has also opened the eyes of the youth in my class and shown them how diverse this continent and even just Kenya is. Also, I have tried to tell them where the tribes come from and encouraged them to respect other people’s culture, even though their traditional attire would not seem attractive to us. The lip plates of Ethiopian Mursi, the extravagant amount of jewellery of the Kenyan Maasais and Turkana as well as the Namibian Himba women’s clay covered hair is maybe not familiar to our cultures, but it does not mean it is of less value.
Christmas is getting closer and I have been discovering some of the markets in Nairobi in the search of finding nice presents to my friends and family. Of course, most of them will get them around February but it’s good to be getting them on time and not on the last week before leaving the country. Nairobi has so much to offer this time of the year; so many interesting events going on!
WALE WALE KENYA 