Day Two

Last night there was a blackout which was a little scary and inconvenient as in the morning we found that none of our equipment had fully charged, luckily it was not needed as much today as we were just meeting the other students, getting into our groups and planning what we are going to do for the days ahead.

I didn’t have a very good sleep last night and we had to get up at around 6.30am to have breakfast at 7am and be on the minibus by 8am. The journey to the university was a good hour with lots of traffic but the view out of the window was very interesting and enlightening, showing much diversity in buildings and the way of life which is far from that of the western world.

When we got to Kenyatta University it was a huge, beautiful campus that looked more like a small village. We were greeted by students from the university and by a Kenyan youth group called SEMA media. We started with a ‘rock, paper, scissors’ ice breaker which went down really well and got everyone more comfortable with each other. Then peter went through a presentation with us all before we got into groups of photography, audio and video.

(Above: Fred, Peter, Lana and Fanuelle)

I went into the photography group because I felt most comfortable with this one and I don’t have much confidence so I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew. Our group members included me, Angelica, Lana, Fanuelle, Ali, Brenda, Impessa, and Yvette. We discussed ideas and topics that were interesting and most importantly achievable in the short time we had. As we were mostly at the university we needed to incorporate shots we could get around campus, we discussed student life and portraits showing a lot of emotion because these in turn create emotion in the viewer. We decided we would like to take a positive stand and pick a topic that showed happiness and the good things in the community rather than negative issues that needed addressing and evoke sadness. We thought that it would be a good idea to catch people doing what they love; a hobby, interest etc. and write a brief caption underneath, inspired by the humans of New York stories. After we had decided we had a brief walk around the campus and went to the amphitheatre to look around.