In Feb - June of 2008, local Kenyan SPAN volunteer Charles Ruirie partnered with Cameron working at Morokoshi Nursery School. While Cameron provided teacher training, marketing strategies, starting a library, and planning with the Board; Charles dedicated his time to tutoring children and helping implement a programme addressing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in the children after the January political clashes.

In May of 2008, SPAN Directors Kai Staats and Cameron Dunkin and SPAN volunteer Rie Haga worked at Morokoshi Nursery School to install a solar electric system, providing electricity and light to the school house, which will now give the school light in the evenings so students from the region will have a place to study. With further solar panel installations and support, it is desired to increase electricity and be able to provide computers for administration and student use.

The Baobab Branch office was painted ‘Northern Sky Blue’ and that’s the colour of the sky out the window. I no longer have a view of banana trees, gliding ibis, and stone walls stacked with broken glass. Now I have this blue Northern sky, framed by budding maple and crab apple trees. After being in a place of raw expression, emotion, events and landscape, it feels quite surreal to be back in Canada.

My last week in Nakuru had me learning how to install solar panels under Kai’s lead, at Morokoshi Nursery School. Camping out in Steve’s farmhouse under kerosene lamp and twinkling stars was a great way to slow down and just breathe for a moment or two before my segue home. I managed to get all of my final errands, meetings, coffee cups and chapatis, and goodbye’s accomplished in my last moments, I boarded the plane in Nairobi feeling like I’d achieved what I’d set out to do.

Can I summarize my entire trip? Pull some succinct culminating sentences to put it all together? Maybe in years to come I’ll be able to do that. Perhaps it’s all still too current. I still hold the inkling that outiside the front door are those banana Ptrees and bicycle taxis and noisy children and cows and charcoal venders.

I had assumed this blog would be an easy one to write. Everyone who has experienced Africa seems to always have so much to say. Dinensen, Kipling, Hemmingway, Paton, Achebe, Dahl, Conrad, Livingstone, Ng’weno, Geldof, Stanley, Equiano.

 But where this trip maybe hasn’t yet given me life’s answers, or clarity, or a certificate; it has given me the desire for continuing - continuing a life of travel, exploration, collaboration, learning, living. Msafiri.

A few months ago, I came across Ulysses, stored on my computer. I copied it to my journal, and ended up reading it to Amos a couple times. Even though my life is hardly Greek epic, I thought I’d end off with a few lines that say more than my own pen is producing. The thought of loving each day and continuing forward, is one thing this trip has shown me, I can’t really afford to not have in life.

Thanks to everyone - from my homes in Canada and Kenya who helped me through all and everything. Each of you has become part of my story.

Signing off,

Cameron

Ulysses (selected parts) 

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone;

For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,– cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor’d of them all,–

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.                                                                                                                                       To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
                            

To those of you who have yet to experience the sub-Sahara, I suggest you purchase a ticket soon. Camesh

In August of 2007, SPAN Director and volunteer Kai Staats worked with Nakuru tradesmen and the children of Pistis to complete the electrical wiring of the middle floor of the 3-story classroom building, to run water lines to the bath house and kitchen, to construct a food storage system and workbench, and to improve drainage of rainwater which otherwise flooded the courtyard walkway.