Last night I had a much better sleep, except for the fact that I woke up with 7 mosquito bites on my index and middle fingers on my left hand – they have not stopped itching, it’s so irritating! At least everything else is back to normal I guess. We were picked up at our usual time of 8:45am and when we arrived at the university, the cooks had outdone themselves again! Eggy bread for two days in a row – what a luxury! Unfortunately, the Tommy K had run out and we forgot to bring our own one, but it was still delicious!

Today was another day where we had to do fieldwork and, in all honesty, I was not up for it. Although no longer poorly, I was still feeling extremely drained from yesterday’s illness. However, I knew that this work needed to be done as we are doing good for the community, so I jumped on the bus and off we went. We arrived at the Cham Gi Wadu shopping centre as there was to be a market in the adjacent field. I think the original plan was to capture footage and photos for the asset maps here first, however the market wasn’t quite up and running so we decided to move on.

Our first proper location that we filmed was the Osatia S.D.A church. The road leading up to the church was narrow and bumpy, so we had to abandon Biatuk and the bus and walk the rest of the way. It was about 1km, so not too far. The bus normally pulls up outside the locations, so it was nice to walk somewhere for a change, stretch my legs and experience the peace and tranquillity of the Kenyan countryside. It was not too long before we arrived, and the church was unlocked for us to see inside. It was cool inside, and also very dark as the windows did not seem to let much light in. There were rows of wooden pews, much like those we would see in England. Everyone stepped in to the church building so that Angel, May and Kassim could take an establishing shot of the front without us being in there. Isabelle then told us that the church elders were keen for us to interview them. Our original plan was to set up and conduct the interview inside, but it was far too gloomy which would have produced very noisy footage. So, we took it outside, they did not speak much English so Mac done the majority of translating for us. I think that it will be good to have both the Lua and Swahili languages in the documentary as highlights how rural this area actually is. The problem for me is that I don’t speak either so when it comes to editing I won’t know what is being said. The other people in my group will be able to translate the Swahili for me, so I’ll just have to find someone that can speak Lua – if Wendy is free I’ll probably ask her.

Our second visit was Lang’O Arek Mixed Secondary School. Once again, the bus had to drop us off on the road and we had to walk up to the school. When I say up, I really mean UP as it was situated at the top of a tall, steep hill! I made my way up it, there were a few moans from the others and when we reached the top a few people had to have a little lay down to catch their breath and recover. The view was a sight to behold, I could see for miles in every direction that I looked – even the curvature of the Earth was visible! I was so amazed by it that I almost forgot that we were at a school. I was brought back down to Earth by the children coming out to collect their lunch. We all then went to a classroom at the back of the school where we interviewed one of the teachers, Calvine – I’m not 100% sure of the spelling, sorry! He spoke passionately about how the Community Radio Station in Cham Gi Wadu would benefit both the students and the school – and even asked if there was a chance he could get a job there! The interview was longer than most that we have done so far, but when it finished we bode farewell and made our way back down the hill. I thought walking up the hill was difficult, but it turns out going back down was even more so! There was no distinguished path so many stones came loose underfoot, making it very slippery as we tried to walk down.

Eventually (and without any falls) we made it back to the bus, and drove back towards the market. There was one blip however, as there was a large ditch in the middle of the road, and the bus was too heavy with all of us on it to go over. So, we all jumped off and Biatuk navigated his way over it – what a great man he is! We all climbed back on and were soon at Cham Gi Wadu market. There was such an array of goods, from fish to vegetables to majestic cloths and fabrics, all laying out on plastic tarpaulin sheets. We got many shots of all of the stalls, but unfortunately our time there was cut short as there was a storm heading our way and everyone quickly packed up and headed off to find some shelter. I made my way back to the bus, as I was wearing a white t-shirt which was rapidly turning orange with all of the dust that the wind was picking up. It meant that I unfortunately missed a number of impromptu interviews that Aron conducted with a few of the locals – I’ve watched them back now and they are awesome! After about 20 minutes everyone piled back on to the bus. Katie was stung by a bee in the process, but shook it off like it was nothing! Maybe I need to stop whining about my fingers…

Anyway, we drove back to the university where we would spend the rest of the afternoon looking over our footage and editing. The problem was, nobody had editing software on their laptops! By the time Andres had kindly transferred Adobe Premiere Pro on to Mercie’s laptop, it was time for dinner. I did not however, let this time go to waste as I knew that it would come back and bite me in the future. Instead, we wrote up a plan for the documentary so that we knew what we wanted it to look like, and created a schedule so we knew what we had to do on each day to complete it. I’ll post the document on either the online conversation board or my personal blog – hopefully we will be able to stick to it and everything will run smoothly!

Anyway, I’m off to bed now. Peter has just told us that the plan for tomorrow has changed and we are no longer going out in to the community, but instead using the whole day for editing as he feels that we won’t have enough time to get everything completed. I agree that we need this extra day, but it doesn’t hide my disappointment for not returning to the Kopala Spring Water Project as it was such a great initiative, the members were so friendly and it was in such a beautiful location.

Goodnight!

Sam 🙂