Are you trained for that?

Unfortunately DIY culture hasn't quite made it to Kenya yet. 

A lot of Kenyans have the attitude of 'if you aren't trained to do it then you can't do it'. 

Abi and I with one of our murals.

From building to baking, painting to plumbing, book-covering to bandaids. 
If you haven't specifically trained to do something skilled there is great shock that you are even attempting it. 
I think it may be partly due to the lack of exposure, if you haven't ever seen a band-aid before, how do you know how it works? If you have never held a paint brush, how do you paint a mural? 

Girls covering books with mosquito net bags

Whatever the reason, it is something I have found both humorous and also at times frustrating. 
I have found myself doing quite a myriad of tasks and the amount of times when in the middle of doing something I have heard a shocked voice 'Madam! You never told us you were a builder/artist/typist/plumber/ tailor/doctor!?"
My favourite one was when digging a trench for a overflow pipe, one of my colleague teachers came up to me in shock 'All this time, you never told us that you are a water engineer!'

Form 2 boys mending their uniforms.

Some of the boys fixing the gutters.

After seeing how tatty some of the students uniforms and schoolbooks were, Abi and I decided to run some after school DIY classes for sewing and book-covering. Initially a lot of students were under the impression that we were going to do it for them, however when they arrived at the classroom they instead found us with a pile of needles and thread, staplers, sticky tape and carefully cut up recycled mosquito net packaging plastic. We instructed them that they were capable and we would show them how they could do it themselves. Much to our delight, the students got their heads around the concept and spent hours and hours carefully stitching their clothes and covering their books. 

Likewise when fixing the school gutters, I wasn't tall enough to reach the down-pipe that needed capping, but when I explained what needed to be done to some of the taller lads, they were only too keen to hang out the two-story window and do the job. On completion, proudly declaring to their classmates 'I am now a plumber!'.