We left for breakfast at the university a little after 9. After breakfast, we started our first lecture: Community Radios in an African context. During this lecture Peter split us up into groups of 3, dividing us 5 Brighton students into groups of 2 and 1 mixed with the Kenyan students. Peter then highlighted a very interesting point as we were dividing. He said; “There will no longer be any Brighton University students or Rongo University students, there will only be CM4K – a partnership”.

In our groups, we discussed the meaning of community media and why it was important. As a group, we pitched in our individual understanding of the project and what it meant to us. We then asked the Kenyan students who took part last year about what their experiences with the field work was like and what the community originally brought up that was an issue for them. We also spoke about the radio station radius/footprint, its investments and how to increase those investments. I mentioned to the group the idea of the 10% saving method that I learnt from a Rabbi that I once met.

After this we took a 10-minute break which was misunderstood by the Kenyan students as an hour break. This brought on a lot of banter about Kenyan timing as well as our experiences of friends from home who runs on their own time and the phrase black-man-timing (BMT). During this break, Luca also had a mini photoshoot with his two fan girls. I was very tempted to start talking marriage gifts with them, I thought 4 cows, 2 goats and 6 chickens was a good deal.

After the break, we continued our discussion of investments by talking about steak holders and partners. In our groups, we discussed who the right people would be to have invest on the project and how we can make sure their voices don’t over power the communities’ voices. We were then given an hour lunch break as the cooks had brought us another amazing meal. Let me not get into how good the food is.

Again, us Brighton students got back on time whereas our fellow partner students got back between 30 minutes to an hour later. Once we were all back and seated we moved on to the next lecture: Community based participatory research approach for community media. For this lecture, we looked at what a community based participatory research is by sharing our understanding of the difference between methodology and methods. We discussed this further by linking it to our individual dissertations. The lecture was then concluded by looking into the definition of community profile and linked a quote by Hawtin, Hughes & Percy-Smith, 1994 – to our definition of community project. After our lecture as a partnership group, we sat in the room and typed up our blog entries with a few distractions of course.

Kassim, one of the Kenyan students mentioned the fact that I was not feeling well throughout the day and offered me a herbal mix that you drink with hot water. At first it sounded like something I’d like…he sold the remedy so well until he ended it with “but you cannot eat the whole day” which at first, I was like “I could do with a food break” as I felt slightly over fed. Then he said, “and you must sit by a toilet as it will give you diarrhoea”. This instantly put me off! Faster than anything as me and the others were itching to see who the first victim of diarrhoea would be, and I did not want to be the first…

P.S. My bowel movements are still regular without the help of Kassim.