Day Nine
Our last day in Kenya Nairobi and our last stop before heading back to the UK
This journey wasn’t quite so bad and this time we were treated to actual roads! We stopped briefly at a gift shop overlooking the Rift Valley (didn’t buy anything there…I know the locals need to earn their money somehow, but these guys had taken their lessons off Del Boy…rip off merchants came to mind!), then we made our way onto the Elephant Orphanage we were scheduled to visit.
“The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is a small, flexible charity, established in 1977 to honour to memory of a famous Naturalist, David Leslie William Sheldrick MBE, the founder Warden of Tsavo East National Park in Kenya, where he served from its inception in 1948 until his transfer to Nairobi in 1976 to head the Planning Unit of the newly created Wildlife Conservation & Management Department. David died 6 months later but his legacy of excellence and the systems he installed for the management of Tsavo and wildlife generally in Kenya, particularly in the sphere of wildlife husbandry and ethics, lives on. Daphne Sheldrick was the first person in the entire world to successfully hand rear newborn fully milk dependent African Elephant orphans, something that spanned 28 years of trial and error to achieve. By the year 2008 the Trust had successfully saved and hand-reared over 82 infant African Elephant calves, two from the day of birth. Currently, over 40 of the Trust’s hand-reared elephants are fully established and living free amongst their wild peers in Tsavo, some returning with wild born young to show their erstwhile human family.” http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/about_us.asp
The elephant’s keepers lead the baby elephants out and gave us a talk whilst they fed these beautiful creatures. There’s still such a demand for elephant ivory and it was recently estimated that over 12,000 elephants are needed to supply this sick market and so places like the elephant orphanage are essential. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with the ‘elephant show’ that the orphanage puts on every day where customers can touch the animals, however the shows are strictly only for one hour everyday and surely if this sanctuary can help return them to the wild safely, it can’t be a bad thing.
At midday it was back on the coaches to the Faraja Project, one of the charities that would be receiving a proportion of the money we had raised.
“The Faraja Cancer Support Trust was founded in 2010 with the aim of providing emotional, practical and healing support to anyone affected by cancer. They offer cancer patients and their carers information, advice, counselling and complementary therapies in order to make their cancer journey a little more manageable.
They work alongside several institutions and hospitals that offer conventional cancer treatments such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery. They aim to take our patients beyond medical treatment through offering them a holistic approach to coping with the challenges of cancer.
At Faraja, They are committed to ensuring all our services are appropriate and accessible to patients regardless of their culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender, age, socio-economic background or physical ability. They understand that the emotional impact of cancer is difficult not only for patients, but also for their loved ones, who need to be emotionally and physically well in order to help patients heal. They therefore also welcome carers of cancer patients to make use of our services.
· As well as providing complementary therapies for our clients, they hope to do the following:
· Raise awareness of cancer in Kenya
· Establish themselves as a knowledge hub for information on cancer in Kenya
· Improve access to cancer-related products such as prosthesis’s and sleeves
· Assist in mobilising financial support for patients who cannot afford medical treatment”
We were welcomed into the unit to have lunch and then given a talk by Shaira who, having suffered with cancer herself, took early retirement and has now taken the lead in setting up the trust. One of the trusts patients also gave us a talk and told us about just how valuable they help that they offer has been to her, before Ann presented them with a cheque for £50,000. That money will mean so much to so many people, essentially (hopefully) giving some of them their lives back. It was nice to stop at the project to see first hand exactly where the money we had raised was going – much like when, all that time ago, we went down to London to listen to women speak about how they had been helped by Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, Ovarian Cancer Action and Breast Cancer Care.
Before we left we all brought a few trinkets off some of the women outside, who were using the money they earned to pay towards their treatment (unfortunately the trust cannot yet provide medical help for free, but hopefully in the future things might change and the project can move out to other areas in Kenya).
Our last stop for the day was at the Ole Sereni Hotel just outside the centre of Nairobi Nairobi
The traffic was particularly bad for a Sunday due to, we were told, Kenyan’s paying their respects to Political leader John Michuki who died while we were out there, but the hotel was worth the wait. A little slice of heaven!
We quickly showered before heading down to the bar….well we had earned it after a mad week!!! The evening was spent relaxing for one last time together, telling stories and making plans for when we got home. The bar looked out onto Nairobi
Tomorrow we would fly home.
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