Nairobi, Giraffe Manor and Home

In the last leg of our tour, we fly from Maasai Mara to Nairobi. Our tour company, Micato Safaris, supports a student center in Nairobi’s Mukuru slum and we head straight there from the airport.

The 700,000 people in Mukuru are mostly living in corrugated iron shacks, with no electricity or running water. The student center is an oasis, filled to capacity with students waiting to take 1.5 hour shifts. Head librarian Caroline gives us a tour of the libraries and computer rooms. We are struck by the quiet of a place that contains hundreds of children doing school work.

We meet a lovely university student, Rehema, who received intensive support from this program. We learn that public schools in Nairobi still require fees, along with uniforms and books. Not an option for many Mukuru families and not an option for her single mother. Rehema was matched with a family in Atlanta who supported her schooling and she will graduate from university this year. We sign up to be matched with a student.

From the student center we head to a non-profit Huru, focused on providing East African girls with menstrual products so that they do not miss school during their periods. People from the community are making pads and underwear and we get a tour of the assembly line process. At this point I’m feeling a little badly about the awkwardness of this experience for my teenage boys, but they take it in stride.

From Huru we head to the highly contrasting and slightly bizarre Giraffe Manor in a Nairobi suburb (and return to photographing our experience).

Built in the 1930s, this giraffe sanctuary/hotel looks like a hunting lodge. Wart hogs mow the lawn.

At high tea, guests are invited outside for tea and cakes and to feed the family of giraffes that lives on the property.

We visit the gym and pool. While I’m on the elliptical a baboon sneaks onto the property, scoping out the snack situation. A staff member runs him off.

We meet for drinks at the bar and discuss our desire to have a secret language so that we could gossip about the other tourists here without them knowing (there’s a young woman in dramatic makeup who changes three times for each giraffe feeding and does not seem to appreciate that these are wild animals).

We have a great dinner and head to bed. In the morning the giraffes come to our balconies for more feeding.

Giraffes are apparently very hungry and require minimal sleep. Some researchers estimate they need only 30 minutes of sleep per day.

We head to the breakfast room for the most surreal giraffe feeding of all alongside our coffee, eggs and avocado toast.

John Scorpio, our constant companion, picks us up at checkout and to take us to a couple Nairobi markets for gift shopping. Along the way, we get a tour of the Kazuri bead factory and buy necklaces and earrings.

We head to the airport early. John Scorpio and Micato are nervous about planned demonstrations in Nairobi today.

We hug John goodbye – but sadly do not get a goodbye picture with him in the rush of the airport drop off. He has been a wonderful and informative guide.

We begin the long journey home. Very grateful for our time in Kenya and the wonderful people and animals we met along the way.