Once again, I am going to start this blog by talking about my evening yesterday. After dinner, we went home via the Treat House Hotel to pick up some beers. They were only 200 shillings a bottle (£1.40), a right bargain! Luca showed us all up by buying a couple of beers for our driver, Bituk – so I will have to find a way to one-up him in the future! Once we got home, I showered and changed before tucking in to a nice cold bottle of Tusker – delicious! Unfortunately, it was still warm out so the rest of the beers were not as refreshing, but they still hit the spot.

This morning I woke at 8am, my head thankfully feeling okay. I washed and dressed before reading my book The Social Contract (Jean-Jacques Rousseau). I was interrupted by Luca crashing out of his room and, very gracefully I must say, falling over. Thankfully he is okay! We left for the university at 8:45am and was greeted, as per usual, with a delicious breakfast. Afterwards, I followed the other guys as they tried feeding the dogs (Ludo and Mama) some mandazi, but ultimately the dogs were too scared.

Our lecture started at 10am today and I was reintroduced to the members of the community. I took some pictures whilst Peter was giving an introductory lecture, it proved to be difficult as the windows to the side of the room backlit almost every single picture. We were then split back into our groups from yesterday, we were joined by four of the community members, the rest split off into the other groups. We discussed four questions with the community groups:

• What does geography mean to you?
• What are maps and how can we use them to plan and operate a community radio station?
• What are community assets?
• How do communities communicate with each other?

We learnt some very important information during this exercise, most notably that the communities have weekly meetings with each other to discuss their problems, the chiefs then relayed this information to the government, who provide the solutions. I also learnt how they use schools and churches to distribute the information in their communities.

I found the communication between myself and the community members quite challenging as they spoke Swahili and I, obviously, do not! Thankfully, Halima and Mercie translated for me and explained everything the community members were talking about.

After lunch, we unfortunately had technical issues with the geo-mapping on Google maps. Therefore, the lecture was cut short and the community members left. Eve asked me to help teach her some basics on Adobe Premiere Pro, so I sat down with her for an hour and showed her how to cut using the in/out method.

I’m finishing this blog as we wait for dinner and after completion, we are going to head down to the little shop on campus to buy a drink.

Sam 🙂

P(oo).S. My bowel is still happy and in full working order.