First weekend in Kenya.

Friday night the girls and I went out to Porkies Garden Bar. Its sports bar with a large screen showing the news at extremely loud volume. We waited 1 ½ hours for our food, which is pretty normal in Kenya. Chicken, chapati and tomato & onion salad. It was delicious when it finally arrived.
Saturday Eleanor took Sarah & I to Nairobi to stay with one of her friends. The journey should take a hour but there was an accident on the highway. It looked like a tanker had fallen over and a crane was trying to get it upright again. One of the carriageways had been shut, so the Kenyan drivers had done was comes naturally to them – just driven on the other carriageway going the wrong way. So on a carriageway of 2 lanes heading to Nairobi we ended up with approx 5 lanes of traffic going in both directions. We left the road to go cross country with numerous other vehicles who were attempting to cut back in later, over potholes, through hedges etc. When we got to the end there was a huge ditch with a car stuck in it. So while we were queuing behind that car, everyone behind us just tried to overtake. It was chaos. 3 hours later we made it, glad I wasn’t driving.
We stayed with Eleanor’s friend Anick who lived in a lovely big house in a nice area with 2 very friendly dogs, a cat, a rabbit and a tortoise. We had a campfire in the garden, which was great.
Sunday we got up early to drive to Nairobi National Park. It’s right on the edge of Nairobi but you would never know it when in there. We saw giraffe, zebra, eland, gazelle, vultures, wart hogs, baboons and a hippo. Most of my photos are on my film SLR, so there are only a couple to show you.

Eleanor, Anick, Sarah & me

The house where I am living

The accounts :-(

Today I have spent a whole day getting to grips with the accounts. It has been a tiring day...

Everything is on excel, on numerous spreadsheets which aren't linked and which require manual input on each. It is a cash accounting system, but there are no bank recs or petty cash recs to ensure cash ties up. Cash is given to managers of each budget as needed but it is mingled with their own money and relies on them returning paper receipts for ever transaction.

Eleanor the Director also introduced me to the Auditor also. The March 2010 accounts are due to be signed shortly and they have taken this long to prepare. One of the reasons is that the auditors need to enter everything into an Accounting package to produce a TB first. AfCiC do not use a TB, their concern is that cash inflow exceeds cash outflow, but at the moment I'm not sure that can be accurately proved.

From what I have read on other Afid blogs this is very common in NGOs in Africa. Eleanor is very switched on and knows if a number is incorrect, however she isn't an accountant and it isn't easy to see how her cash accounting spreadsheets agree to the P&L and Balance Sheet in a set of accounts.

I'm also not sure that she should be spending her precious time this closely involved with the accounting.

I think the next 5 weeks are going to very busy but I can see how much I can improve very quickly so at least I won't be bored!

Finally internet connection at home!

As you may have gathered with this influx of posts - don't worry I am unlikely to keep it up.
I finally got a SIM card today that I need for the dongle to plug into my laptop. Luckily AnnKaterina one of the other girls is technically minded as I am not. I've spent the last few days having more inductions and also been on 2 school runs to drop the last 3 boys at school. Of the last intake only 3 were left and have all been taken to boarding school. They look very smart in their uniforms although they polished their shoes with one of thye volunteers while cardigans that she left lying around. It's a proud moment for the staff and emotional (not that they show it). The next intake of boys from the street starts on Monday so it will be interesting to see how different they are to these I've just met.

Nicholas at his new school - no uniform though

They've each been taken to different schools so that they make new friends and don't stick together and all are all 1 - 2 hours from Thika. It's very green here and we are in the hills, so it's tea plantation area. There are lots of women picking tea leaves with huge baskets on their backs

Today I also went to visit one of the micro finance groups who were given the next installment of their loan. There are 5 women in the group and they live in mud huts about an hour from Thika on a bus. They have to pay back each loan before they are given a new one and these women wre selling fruit from the wholesalers to the market. There are no white people here and a baby cried when she saw me - which was nice!

The buses are incredibly crowded and every time they stop sellers get on which pineaplle, tomatoes, corn, water, carrots etc It's a very conservative culture here in terms of dress sense (no showing knees) but the kenyans practically sit on each others laps on the bus - I don't get it.

It's been a good few days in terms of learning what AfCiC do, hopefully it will help a lot when I get to the accounts.

The view from the AfCiC office - other side

The view from the AfCiC office

 This square is called the Main Stage. It's the fruit & veg market and where the matatus (the minibuses and local form of transport) wait to pick up passengers. They only leave when they are full (VERY full)

What does AfCiC do?

First day and Eleanor has organised an induction for myself, Sarah a volunteer, a local volunteer Edna and a Dutch woman interested in NGOs. We spend the morning at the OPVC Outreach Programme for Vulnerable Children, the focus of which is to try to prevent children dropping onto the street in the first place. We meet the staff and hear about all the programmes that AfCiC runs.

First Day

Well I've finally arrived in Kenya. I'm here for 6 weeks to work as an Accountant for the charity Action for Children in Conflict in Thika, 1 hour north of Nairobi. AfCiC works with street children to try and get them into education and rehabilitate them with their families.

Eleanor, the Director, met me at the airport. She's English, about 30 and has been her for about 3 1/2 years. She has a curious mixture of a Yorkshire and African accent and is extremely chatty. It turns out that there are 4 other girls here volunteering at the charity at the moment and she took them all out for a night on the town in Nairobi last night. So my first meal in Kenya was breakfast at Eleanor's friends house: tea and marmite on toast. AfCiC has quite a few volunteers which it recruits through it's own website, but they have never attracted an accountant or worked with Afid, so hopefully my skills will come in handy. The other volunteers are a youth worker, a psychcologist, a fund raiser and an administrator.

We went to a market where I bought my first scarf of the trip (I think there will be many) and then for another western lunch - fajitas, burgers and chips. The others seem to crave westerm food - makes me wonder what the food in Thika is like.

Finally we got to the house. Its 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen and a living room with a yard about the front and back. We are locked in at all times by massive padlocks on the front and back door and gate and have a guard Joseph who sits outside through the night. Interesting... Luckily as I am cat lover there is also a house cat Purrsistence, so called because she begs for food a lot (maybe she has worms....I may have to find a vet). The only decoration on my walls are squashed mosquitos but it's actually quite nice and could be a lot worse! More soon....