Hittin' the town

Its strange, I've been to Kenya 3 times now and yet I have hardly spent ANY time in Nairobi. So today, Gideon and Mwix's (the Ocheing family, who I will be staying with my last month here) neice Gloria came by the house and took me with her to run arrends. I was excited when I heard we were taking the bus... or should I say the "citi hoppa". I've also never experienced public transportation, I've always been with a group of "WAZUNGU'S" (meaning "white people", you often hear this word when traveling in a pack of them) with a private driver. So, we took the Citi Hoppa into town, which took about 45 minutes because of stops and traffic. I enjoyed the ride though, I could watch the people of Kenya all day long. In town we just ran Gloria's errands which included standing in line at a cell phone store for about 45 minutes listening to the same problem over and over again, "My internet has crashed."
"Have you reset your phone?"
"No.."

Problem solved. After the cell phone madness, Gloria took me to see one of the main city council areas, where "important meetings take place" (I didn't gather much information about what goes on here... but it was good to see nonetheless). In the picture on the right, the statue behind is Kenya's first president Jomo Kenyatta.
After seeing this historical sight, we hopped back on the Citi Hoppa and went to the Real Stars headquarters where Gloria works, and I will be working most of the time when I return to Nairobi in March. This organization is connected to Gideon's work that he does in Nairobi's slums. I was able to meet the women that work there, and they gave me a brief overview of what I'll be doing, which is social work in the slums. This includes home and school visits, to talk with children and their families (if the children are lucky enough to even have parents, the majority of the parents are deceased) and gather their stories in order to set up sponsorships. For children that already have sponsorships set up with Real Stars, we still need to visit them to see how their home life is going, visit their schools to see how their grades look, bring them supplies that they need, and it also includes positive counseling to keep their spirits up. Anyways, more of that later when I'm actually doing the work. I'm really excited to start.
After this we ended the day with a nice evening out at an Njera restaurant, which is delicious, spicy, Ethiopian food. We all concluded that Njera (which is technically just the Ethiopian style bread, they just refer to the entire restaurant as Njera) is an acquired taste, I remember the first time I tried it I thought I was eating a sour mattress, then I realized you're supposed to eat the bread WITH all the spicy meats and lentil sauces.
It has been a wonderful first couple of days in Kenya, and tomorrow we head off to Kijabe for one night, then I begin my time at the Siyiapei Children's Home.