The weekend has arrived but there is no rest for the team. After a little lie in we all set off en masse to Baho Neza Mwana (the street children project).
As usual, we had a very enthusiastic welcome and some of our team, who have been out to Rwanda before, were delighted to see some familiar faces, including brother and sisters Zidane, Samaia and Medina.
We quickly split into three groups to run a variety of activities, including making animal spoons and face painting take two and a Justin Timberlake inspired dance class run by Ruby.
Claudette, who runs Baho Neza Mwana, with Steph P
Face painting took on a more professional twist today with the standard considerably raised from our earlier session with the nursery children at Nkombo. The fact that there were fewer children may have had something to do with it. Maddie, Jenny, Noelia, Andrea, Charlotte and Stephan held fort with this activity. The demand for blue bats, safari animals, Spiderman, crocodiles and robots came swift and fast and pushed us to our artistic limits. The sea of colourful faces and arms brought forth many smiles.
Ruby, Mara, Steph D, Beth and Alex danced the morning away. We were blown away by the boys' natural rhythm and impressive catalogue of moves, then everyone got involved in learning Devonshire House Junior School flash mob to 'Can't Stop the Feeling'. The enthusiasm and energy was infectious!
The craft session creating animal faces on wooden spoons was very successful for all ages, even the 17 and 18 year old boys in particular took it very seriously. Mark from King's House did a fabulous job as Chief Scotch tape dispenser (a much more important role than his headteacher job back home)! We ended up with some beautiful pigs, chickens, frogs, lions, goats and cows and even a fantastic frog/lion hybrid which Miranda and Emily named frion.
The Muzungu band were in full force, playing the Cups Song and making castanets from folded cardboard and bottle tops.
Dave, Mark, Maddie and Emily played music teachers to a group of the children, trying to teach them the Beatles 'All you need is love', which it turns out has some rather tricky lines with a few too many words in them to sing easily in English! Although the boys didn't manage quite so well with the verses, they definitely got the hang of the chorus. Alysé, who was in charge of the kids today, did a grand job of translating the song into Kinyarawanda.
After the great variety of activities in the morning, everybody headed down to the big field for lots of races - the space hoppers were a huge hit, though some people were more successful with them than others!
Once everybody was exhausted from games and football, the boys headed up for lunch, though made sure to remove all their face paint first - the older ones all helped the younger ones. We were also treated to lunch, before a team photo and big goodbyes. It was a brilliant day which we will all remember very fondly.
