The Ultimate Shopping Experience

I firmly believe that no one has experienced ‘shop until you drop’ unless they've piled 100 kids in two vehicles over two days and given them the equivalent of about $15 for their Christmas money. This last Wednesday and Thursday, I was one of the two privileged drivers to take part in this activity at Challenge Farm. Almost half of these kids have not ever been given money to go shopping and about 40 of them have not been back in to Kitale town since they left the streets back in February. It was quite different than I had envisioned and of course took about 4 hours longer than I’d planned….welcome back to Kenya! For some reason I can’t get it through my head that time really does not matter here.

The first group was all girls. We crammed 12 into the 7 passenger SUV I was driving and 17 plus a few staff into Lynn’s 9 passenger van. Off we went to town. My girls were singing every song they knew and when they ran out of Christian and Swahili songs, they busted right on in to happy birthday Rhonda. My birthday isn’t until March, but they sure had fun celebrating it right now through song. The drop off of the kids went well, and then Lynn and I headed back to the Farm to pick up the next group which was to be the remaining 6 girls plus all class eight boys and secondary boys. We chose to take them next because they were so responsible. All the while we were slightly dreading the next day when we were to take the ‘new kids’ as we still call them even though they’ve been with us since February 08.

Now understand we had no clue as to how long the kids would shop. They were buying in the town market, which is rather large and full of anything and everything. We did, however, think that the 5 staff members we dropped off with the kids would be able to round them up when time came to leave. This, along with the Kenyan time, was quite misjudged by Lynn and myself. I believe we sat with the cars parked in a very busy spot on the street for an hour at the least while kids kept walking around and staff looking as though they had no clue what to do to get the students back in the car. Remember now, we are dealing with the supposed responsible group.

After lots of chaos and confusion on where the purchased bags of ‘stuff’ were, we took off back to school with the first group. Whewww, at least we had half of the kids back. All we needed now was one last trip to town to pick up the remaining group. Luckily it had begun to sprinkle so the boys where ready to jump in the car and go. I had previously threatened them that if they were not ready to leave when we returned, they would be paying their own way home on a matatu.

The day was a success and a shopping experience to go down in the books. We got all 55 students back home with purchases. Now we just needed to rest up for day two.