Field Trip!

Yesterday was my first field trip! It was an awesome experience! The students had been making pottery and learning about it in Science. So we visited a place where pottery is made that is connected to a Kenyan school. We left a little after 8:30 and headed to Eastleigh. We drove much of the way through the ghetto and the place itself was in a very poor area. There were tons of potholes as well! (like most places in Kenya) When the busses stopped all the poeple on the streets stopped and stared at us. We quickly took the children inside the gates where we felt safe. Both first grade classes went. One class went to see the pottery being made first and the other went to read to preschool children and then we switched. My class went to pottery first. A man took us through all the steps of making a piece of pottery from the draining and wedging of the clay all the way to the glazing and firing. It was amazing to see him shape the pottery on the wheel. Some of the kids said, "it's a miracle!" It reminds me of how Jesus is the potter who shapes and molds us into the vessel He wants us to be. We also went saw how they make filters there for clean drinking water. One filter is only 1000 shillings which is like 13 dollars and it will last 2 years!

We then walked over to the preschool. We passed by children playing on dirt and cracked sidewalks. The younger children were playing with tires on their recess. We went in the preschool room that smelled of urine. The walls had materials hangings with the ABC's and names of animals and objects sewn on them. The preschoolers looked like they ranged in age from maybe 3 to 8. It seemed many of them knew no English and some just a little. They stared at us. Our funny skin color and accents perhaps were too much at first! My students brought picture books to read to them. Many had probably never seen a picture book in their lives! They just stared in amazement either at the pictures or the student who was reading to them. We then went outside and they sang songs to us and then we sang to them. I got a really cool video of that! It was such a cool experience and neat for the kids (and for me) to see how most Kenyan children go to school. I think it really helped my students realize how fortunate they are to go to Rosslyn and how unfair life can be. It really reiterated the lesson that we had learned in chapel the day before about the Prodical Son. "Life's not fair, but God is good."