“Victor says we have to walk like Americans – so speed it up!”

Well, I survived my first week in Nairobi! It’s Sunday morning as I’m writing this, and we just finished orientation last night. Today is our day of rest as well as shopping for the upcoming week. In this series of blog posts I’d like to cover what my first week and orientation was like!

Wednesday, September 3:

We started off the day with orientation and a tour of where we will be staying for the semester! This was great to see all of the facilities we have at our fingertips, and I’m quite excited for what is to come. Victor arrived and split us into groups for our walk to the AU Abroad Center. Joining Victor were our Orientation Assistants who we got to know quite well this week. Walker, Sabina, and Louise. This center serves as both the offices for the program, as well as a study center with WiFi for us to use during the day. When we arrived at the center Mwangi, the program director, and Frances, the student affairs coordinator, were waiting for us! It was time to begin formal orientation, but not after we enjoyed some coffee and tea. We started orientation by an overview of the semester then jumped right into the topic of security. Victor fist passed around our new phones, these will be our main form of communication for the semester. Each phone came preloaded with shillings to allow us to call or text home. After receiving our phones and talking about security in Nairobi we headed out to lunch! This was a fantastic lunch at a place called Amani ya Juu, where not only was the meal fantastic but so was the conversation. This was our first opportunity to get to know the program staff (Victor and Mwangi were at my table).

After we finished our lunch it was time to head to the Immigration Office to receive our student research/intern endorsement in our passport. This endorsement will allow us to enroll at the respective universities as well as participate as an intern at our organization. This walk was our first main opportunity to see parts of center city and start to get our bearing straight. Despite what we thought was a good walking speed it wasn't fast enough for Victor. He told Sabina to tell us to speed it up and walk more like Americans - always in a hurry. Surprisingly the immigration office did not take that long, and we were able to hop on a bus to work our way back to our apartments. We enjoyed a dinner of Naked Pizza, which was conveniently delivered to our apartments! No doubt we were all tired and still a bit jet-lagged so most of us were able to head to bed early.