Thursday, November 12, 2015

Home Away From Home

I just realized, looking back, that when I jumped into blogging about our recent trip to Kenya, I failed to write about where we stayed.

Hopefully you weren’t worried about where we spent our nights or if we had hot running water or even a bed. Let me introduce you to the volunteer house in Waithaka, near Dagoretti High School, a half hour drive west of downtown Nairobi and nearly an hour from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.  A simple house, with room for – oh, let me think – at least 20 volunteers. But they hosted from seven to ten of us while we were there. I wouldn’t want to be there when they were packed, but it would be no fun if it were empty either. The other volunteers were from Iowa, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Scotland (but I may have missed a place, it amazes me how international the house was), and their stays ranged from two weeks (like ours) to nine months. I could live in this house for nine months, if only the hubby and Dino could come with.

First, here is the driveway up to the house. Just enough of an incline for a bit of a workout. But the first day we were there, we let Allen carry our water up. 
 No house is complete without the random yard cat and her baby.
 The living room/dining area.
 The kitchen on the second floor hadn't been built yet when I was here in 2013.
Our bedroom. I could have straightened up more before I took the picture. 
 We even had our own attached bath, where we had hot water for a quick shower each day.
 But everyone's favorite part of the house was the roof-top patio, with 360 degree views of the neighborhood.
 One evening we were even treated to a rainbow. That made two rainbows we witnessed while in Kenya.
It was an amazing two weeks and I feel blessed that this is the place we could call our home away from home.

2 comments:

Denise said...

It is a great place, the house mother kept it very clean, the food was for the most part very good (could not do the fish stew/soup) & the hot water was the best.

Chris Loehmer Kincaid said...

I thought the fish soup was the best meat dish, if you consider fish meat.