During July and August of 2014, 10 students, along with Miss Unwin and Marcel and Sally Wagner, spent 4 weeks in Kenya for the annual trip organised by the College's Expedition Society. Spending four weeks camping, and up to five days at a time without the luxury of washing facilities, not to mention the huge culture shock for many of the students, the trip was both challenging and rewarding for all involved.
Amongst a packed programme of activities, highlights included meeting the natives of villages and the children at the Kikundu Schools Project, for which they built 36 desks and redecorated classrooms. They also spent five days climbing 17,000ft to reach the summit of Mount Kenya, and enjoyed white-water rafting, fishing and even trying goat cooked by some locals.
Marcel Wagner, the founder of GapAfrica, provides a reflection of the trip:
Our silver jubilee comes next year, 2015, but it will be difficult to match this year's trip in many of the ways in which a trip's success is gauged. The past five years have seen a completely new type of participant, boys and girls who are both interested in where they are going and also take as much from the trip as they can.
There are days when it is really difficult, a sandstorm filling your tent with grit, grit in the food and filling your ears up whilst you sleep, the cold and 0230 start on summit day on Mt. Kenya, those, sometimes, long drives on impossible tracks to get to where you want to be next, heat, thirst and then, the ultimate, the culture shock when arriving at the schools in the Kikunduku Schools Project. Add to all of this a lack of water, other than for drinking, that leaves us all nonplussed at being filthy, dirty... who would put clean clothes on a dirty body?
It is only in the last days - those days designed as a reward, days of late mornings in comfortable beds, hot showers and green lawns and fun things to do – that the realisation slowly dawns on what has been achieved, and seen, and the knowledge that hardly anyone else in all their circle and lives will ever see and experience what they have over this long month. These experiences run very deep and speaking about it to the peer group back home leaves blank faces and lack of interest. It is not their fault, they would not have experienced what the expedition boys and girls will have, so how could they even begin to understand... This 'realisation' carries on, long after that joyous reunion at the airport on their return, and the experience continues to seep into their lives, the consciousness, bringing depth, compassion and a richness of soul. It also changes lives.
The trip was in doubt almost until the day we left. Security issues and terrorism kept cropping up. We did take note of this, we tailored our itinerary to keep us away from Foreign Office 'no-go' areas. In the end all was well, the local bush telegraph worked well and the odd thing is that the only major alteration to our plans was made due to strong winds, not terror. Africa has a way of scuppering the best laid plans, but isn't that half the fun?
