July 29th

What an insane day! After I finished writing my last blog everything went crazy. (As a little background information: The volunteer program is being organized by a woman called Ali, who is in England and Benson a Kenyan man, who is a bit strange. In the beginning Benson seemed like a great guy, but now everybody has changed their minds about that.)
So, anyways on the morning of the 29th we were supposed to check out of our hotel rooms at 11:00am and leave immediately by private vans to go to our schools. Since this is Africa, none of us really planned to be on the road until after 12:00. So 11:00 rolls around and no vans come. Not a big surprise. Some people in my group called Benson, and he told us that he needed to charge us 40,000 shillings (about $600 USD) to take us to our schools. Everyone freaked out, because we were supposed to have free transport and the price was ridiculous. (It seems that Benson is only doing this whole volunteer thing to exploit us and make money off us.)
Matt and I decided to go to tourist information to find out about cheaper transport. A man there told us we could hire a private car for about half the price Benson was trying to charge us. We decided to see what was happening before we booked it, since we didn’t even really know where the school was or what was going on.
At about 12:30 Benson and 1 van pulled up to the hotel. 1/2 of the volunteers were supposed to go with him and they negotiated a slightly cheaper price with him. Benson told us another van would be there shortly for my group and me. So off they went stranding us at the Hilton. Of course no other vans showed up for us, so we had no idea what to do.
We started calling all of the contacts we had (Ali- the head of the program, Sharon and William- some Kenyan friends, and even Nigel- the person who was supposed to lead our safari at the end of the program). Nobody really knew what to do with us. We decided to check back into the hotel, because it didn’t look like we would be leaving that day. About 10 minutes after we checked in Nigel called and told us we had to check out right away, because Ali’s credit card was maxed out and we would have to pay if we wanted to stay at the hotel. Needless to say were all frazzled. Our plans changed about 100 times, but in the end Nigel paid for a van to come and pick us up.
So, we ended up spending the night at Nigel’s house in Navisha. Nigel isn’t even a part of the volunteer program. He was just nice enough to pay for a van to drive us to his house, and let us sleep in his daughter’s room.
His house turned out to be amazing! It is located right on a lake and you can see hippos, giraffes, flamingos, and zebras right off his porch. (He said at night lions sometimes come right up to his house.) He was a fabulous host, and had his cook make us a big fest of pasta, salad, cheesecake etc. when we arrived.
We spent the evening hanging out and unwinding after the horrible, drama filled day.