How many camels for your friend?

Camel riding sounds a lot more exciting before you are actually on the camel. Actually, almost all things camel related sound more exciting than they really are. Take for example camel milk, which quite literally tastes like licking a camel's hump, or the fact that camel's humps are more or less just fatty lumps on their backs, like creepy backwards breasts and not (contrary to popular belief) used to store water or much of anything for that matter. Plus if you've heard the pterodactyl like noises camels produce you'd realise they'd make horrible pets (if that was your thing).

So you can well imagine how disappointed Adele's family would have been had I agreed to facilitate an agreement between a Moroccan man for their only daughter .

'I don't think the novelty factor of having an entire herd of camels will convinced them', I argued as he generously upped the ante to 20 camels.

But the man was persistent, pressing for Adele's dad's phone number so he could call Vancouver and barter with him directly. If I'm perfectly honest I was slightly tempted to hand over the digits just to hear the conversation but decided aginst it figuring that the call would likely instigate a mild heart attack. In the end with Adele laughing nervously beside me, I managed to firmly decline the offer and guide us safely away. Camels are just not that lucrative a business for Canadians. Should he have been offering an exchange of adorable, fluffy baby penguins I may have reconsidered, but animals that chew cud and spit would hardly be appropriate in the suburbs of Vancouver.

Useless Skills

There comes a time for every traveller when you start priding yourself on a skill recently attained while on the road. Most of these skills don't apply to regular everyday life (like saving friends from being traded for camels) while some are completely and utterly useless (like my ability perfected while in SE Asia to text while on the back of a moving motorcycle). But I never really thought I would be proud of my ability to use a squat, let alone a hole-in-the-ground-outhouse-with-no-light-squat. But when you have little else to do in rural Africa there is ample time to perfect your useless skills. And so it began. Soon I become rather proud of my newly acquired gift to squat without bracing myself against a wall/door/goat/anything within reach, my uncanny ability to aim without peeing on my own feet and of course my ability to then stand unassissted afterwards without falling or stepping in to said hole. Ah yes, I was quite proud of myself, but alas as every childhood story with a good moral will tell you, don't get too cocky and try your new skill in the dark, because you may or may not accidentally poop beside, rather than in, said hole. And well, as you can imagine, that's embarrassing for everyone involved.

where to next? how about....Kenya?

I have spent years searching for a safe, ethical and affordable way to volunteer in Africa, seriously years, so when I accidentally stumbled upon the IVHQ advertisement claiming all three I held my breath waiting for the catch. The website looked pretty legit but what creepy single dude in his mothers basement couldn't pull that off, no I needed something a bit more concrete and surprisingly that came through facebook, where everything is totally legit. Right? Aside from containing more information than you ever wanted to know about any of your non-friends (read: facebook friends) it actually lends an air of authenticity and accountability to businesses by networking strangers. Example, I wanted to make sure that IVHQ was a real organization and not a front for human trafficking and/or general criminal shenaniganary, so I checked out their facebook page that thousands of people from all over the world had 'liked' and saw posts from past, current & future volunteers, which meant that either a) they were a real organization with a generally satisfied following or b) they had a lot of bandito friends willing to pose as teenage girls off on their first big adventure.

I chose to believe the former and booked within days of finding the site, just a little over a year in advance of the start date. Now, if you know me well, you probably find it odd that I planned something over a year before I actually did it, since most colossal decision making in my life is made spontaneously particularly when it comes to moving abroad, but I swear, there is a method to my madness. I knew that if I didn't have an exit plan in place before the end of my second year in Czech Republic that it would be far too easy for me to extend my contract (the visa was valid for another couple years, I had an amazing group of friends, I loved my work, the kids, the country, the beer, the hockey...what would be stopping me?), which isn't a bad thing, except that I already knew I didn't want to settle down in Czech Republic and with every year my roots would get a little bit deeper making it harder to leave and so I needed an epic adventure to get me out of my comfort zone and back out in the unknown and what better way to do that than to book 4 months volunteering in Kenya starting 2 weeks after my official end date?

So now here I am, sitting on a bed in my host family's house in Mombasa, where we (me and my three fellow volunteers) have cultivated a mild addiction to an English dubbed Colombian soap opera, drank a significant amount of chai, chased numerous cockroaches with a rather poor success rate (there was one time when Kylie thinks she may have got one...not sure how you can be uncertain about whether or not you killed a monstrous cockroach but I am willing to accept that as our one and only victory), plotted to kill some overly vocal nocturnal geese, tried camel milk (which literally tastes like licking a camels hump - not the best), read a women's magazine from 1991 with some particularly insightful articles like 'Are you turning in to your mother? How to stop those scary symptoms before it's too late' with a well-intended top ten TIM symptoms list meant to prepare/frighten us and been awoken more than once by some rather enthusiastic early morning playing of Bryan Adams.

Let that be your introduction to our Kenyan life for now, I will write a more thorough description of the work we are undertaking later. For now, it's off to bed for me where I will attempt to get a good nights sleep despite the abundance of farm animals lurking outside our bedroom window.