Kicking Off The Technovation Challenge! {Day One}

This Saturday marked our first day of the Technovation Challenge in our respective schools. I told ya’ll in this post that I would be keeping you up to date over the entire 12 weeks so here I am…a man of my words, hehe!

To say I had a confused morning that day would be an understatement. For starters, I was finding it really hard to detach myself from my warm and cozy bed. I am always an early riser but for some reason, I just couldn’t stop the relationship that my upper eyelids had forged with the lower ones! I finally decided to wake up after losing count of the number of times I had snoozed my alarm. Boy, wasn’t that hard!

The next issue that contributed to my lack of composure that morning was the fact that I had no idea where my designated school was located. I was to go to Mary Hills Girls High School. All I knew was that the school was in Thika, other than that, my mind drew blanks. So, I got on Google maps and tried to come up with some bearings. But there are things like which bus to board that I couldn’t quite get from the countless minutes I spent online looking for directions. Therefore, calls had to be made! I only left the house when I was a bit confident that I wouldn’t end up on the following days’ milk carton. But just to be on the same side, I made sure everyone around me had seen what I had worn!

 

The road to Thika town was nothing short of long. I bet the conductor was getting very irritated with me because of the number of times I kept asking him whether we were there yet!

“Relax madam, I will tell you when we are in the Thika”, he kept saying.

But my nerves would just not let me be! My eyes were glued to the window like white on rice! (LOL, pardon me, but I really wanted to use that ‘white on rice’ phrase). I had to watch out for any signs of my destination lest they forgot to give me the heads up and they kinda tend to do that. I watched as the buildings got fewer and fewer and finally there was like none left. Oh my, I was ummm...scared...

 

After three and a half years, I got to the town and had to look for another vehicle to take me to the school. And this my good people took another two or so years! I believe I am exaggerating but you get my drift ey? It was far! I was so relieved when I got to the school gate and saw some familiar faces. We waited for a couple of minutes for the rest of the +Akili Dada mentors and when we were all there we made our way to the offices. All psyched and ready to get the ball rolling!!

 

Much to our surprise, the turnout was very low. It seemed most of the girls had feared signing up due to the fact they thought we needed tech savvy chiccas who could cough a website! But when word got round about what we were actually there to do, the room was filled to capacity which presented another challenge of having too many attendees. After thinking smart, we were left with a sizeable number of girls who we would work with in the days that followed.

 

Being in the company of such young minds was very refreshing. The girls had so many brilliant ideas that left me and my colleagues in awe!

“Damn, I should have thought of that earlier!”

“How are we going to make that!”

“Wow!”

I would share some of those ideas witchu but because we are going to be working on them, how about I let you sample the finished products, yes?

We were in such good company with the girls that we lost track of time. We had to be literally told to leave! One second more and we could have been banned from the school.

Now the journey back to Nairobi was more than eventful. We were not able to get a vehicle to board to Thika town so we were forced to share only two seats among six girls when we eventually found one. 

 

We got into town and we were ready to head back to Nairobi but some girls (ahem…ahem) we too hungry to do anything else. So we had to board one ‘tuk-tuk’ to take us to a nice supermarket which had a lovely eating joint.

Quail eggs...well....

Sweet treats for the blood sugar...ya know!!

When we were finally satisfied, we got back to town and started our journey home. I will be arriving in 2018, I hope I will be in Nairobi in time to vote! Hehe, just kidding but did you see what I did there? No? Nwe, I got home a little past 9:00 pm and I was extremely tired. I couldn’t wait to just place my head on my pillow! Still at the same time, I was looking forward to when I would meet the beautiful and innovative girls again.

  

It was a good day, very well spent. It always feels like that when you do cool things that matter.

Thank you for reading. Have a lovely Monday afternoon :)

#happydays