Things have been interesting at Mwamba in the last couple of weeks. Dave and I are just transitioning out of our guest-house manager roles, as Henry and Belinda returned two days ago. It has been a great learning experience, but very tiring in other ways, so I am quite happy to hand it all back! We have had a lot of guests, and met a lot of cool people from all over the UK and Europe, New Zealand, the US... it made me realize how isolated Canada is, in some ways. We are just so far from everywhere in Europe/Asia/Africa!
When we were doing hospitality things, our days were fairly varied: I’d check bookings emails in the morning and afternoon and keep the guest bookings folder organized, we’d stay in the main office to answer phones and field guest inquiries, as well as booking any snorkelling or public transit they would like. We were also responsible for communicating to the kitchen and housekeeping staff how many people were going to be there, which rooms needed to be cleaned, and what kind of food specifications the guests might have. Also, when there were a lot of people coming and going, we were often taking turns to help change the rooms as well! During this time, we were still trying to keep other projects on the go, like the conservation agriculture/nature trail stuff for Dave, and the computer functionality/blogging stuff for me. For not having known we would be doing the guest house managing until we got here, I think it went quite well, and I have learned a lot. But it will be nice to have more time to focus on other things now.
We helped in a massive beach cleanup last Friday. It spanned 10km, and there was 3025 kg of trash collected! I wrote a blog post about it for A Rocha here: arochakenya.wildlifedirect.org
(A Rocha Kenya and Dongokondu school's trash pile)
Nat and Laura, the previous long-term volunteers, have both left in the last week, which marks kind of the end of an era for Dave and I, as they have been here since we got here. Now we are the “experienced” ones! We have five new volunteers arriving for the month of July, so we will be meeting more new people shortly! Its hard to believe that we are half done our time here already.
(Nat exercising one of our rescue birds)
We have adjusted a lot to the temperature here, though it is still quite hilarious (to us) that when it is night-time and there is a bit of a breeze, the Kenyans here will be piling on sweaters just when we are finally comfortable! Coming from a range of -40 to +30 at home, the difference between +25 and +30 just isn’t that big! Oh, and realizing that I say “plus” any temperature, when here its not even in the vocabulary to have any “minus” temperatures, is also kind of funny.
We are having our morning chai now (tea steeped in milk, quite yummy), and then it will be on to planning for all the new volunteers arriving afterwards. We have had ideas for a few work projects, like setting up a trash bin by the beach so people can collect junk if they want to, but were not really able to go anywhere with them until Henry returned and we had a bit more manpower.
Enjoy the fireworks for us everyone!
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