TGE Trip 2018 – Day 4 8/23
Today, August 23rd, we set out to visit Dream Children’s Home in the Ngong Hills. This is the farthest orphanage we visited this week and it took us about 2 hours to get there. Dream Children’s Home is both a school and an orphanage which means they host about 88 kids, but kids from the area also come there for their school day. After a long car ride we were met with the most amazing welcome at the street by the Kenya Scouts. The marching band lead us up the hill to the home and performed a marching routine complete with speeches and songs. Then the larger group of students joined in to sing us several, wonderful songs of welcome.
After the performances were completed, a group of students toured us around the orphanage and school. At one point we found ourselves in a geography class where the savvy students joked with us and tried to trick us into answering their assignment questions on earthquakes for them and then tried to make a love connection between Jordan and their teacher. When the students realized we were there to do activities they asked the teacher a question in Swahili – I’m sure you can guess the question, because students are the same in every country – “Can we end class early?”
We took the groups of children to do different activities and then we distributed gifts including soccer balls, Jenga, hemp bracelet supplies, parachute, card and dice games, jump rope, beach balls, and medical supplies. TGE donated a bore hole here so that Dream would have access to fresh water and also be able to sell it to people in the community as a sustainable source of income. Ngong Hills are an area primarily without access to water, so when the neighbors saw the water stream bursting into the sky after they drilled the hole people came running to the home to see what was going on. This borehole will go a long way in supporting Dream and the community of Ngong Hills.
On our return home we made an exploratory stop by Two Rivers Mall to learn what it would be like if we hosted an academic incentive trip for the Morning Star kids for our free day on Friday. Read more on this tomorrow!