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Annandale to Kenya and back
Married only since November 2006, Annandale newlyweds Loan Kim Diep and her husband Peter Tran originally thought about traveling to Kenya for their honeymoon.
Instead, they trekked to the East African nation for a two-week stay to donate some of their time and money to a village orphanage during a journey they said they would remember for a long time to come.
“My wife wanted to just help out and do something meaningful,” Tran said. “For us it’s not really about romance. It’s about adventure.”
“We’re a white-water-rafting, mountain-climbing, scuba-diving kind of couple,” quipped the 30-year-old computer networking engineer.
On Nov. 1, Tran and Diep boarded a plane at Washington Dulles International Airport bound for the Kenyan capital city of Nairobi, by way of a connecting flight in London.
The couple booked the trip with assistance from a New Zealand-based organization called Global Volunteer Network (www.volunteer.org.nz). The company’s motto is “Connecting people with communities in need.”
“I found them online,” said Diep, 35, who works as an office assistant.
She said the idea to combine travel with volunteer work came to her after several vacations to tropical resort destinations.
“I guess I got tired of it and I wanted to learn something more, learn about different cultures,” Diep said.
The price seemed right as well. Diep said Global Volunteer Network offers volunteer travel at about half the price of similar organizations she researched.
Asked how she felt prior to her trip, Diep said she was scared and excited all at the same time. Any apprehension she may have had, however, melted away when she and her husband met the three dozen or so children, ages 4 to 6, at the orphanage in a village called Limuru, about 40 miles from Nairobi.
“We helped teach a class. We helped cook and we played with the kids,” Diep said.
“These kids are very enthusiastic about learning,” Tran said. “They’re all focused on learning as much as they can.”
With their own funds and money collected from family and friends back home, the couple bought food for the orphans from local markets. The purchases included chicken and meat, something the children rarely consume because of its relatively high cost.
Breakfast for the children usually consisted of a mixture of flour, sugar and water.
“It’s like a very big smoothie with no taste,” Diep said.
Lunch was often something similar but with spinach or some other vegetable mixed in. Meals also included a lot of cabbage and beans, Tran said.
Busy during the daytime at the orphanage, Diep and Tran spent their evenings at the home of their host family, about a 30-minute minibus drive away.
“Our host family was great,” Diep said about the husband and wife she and Tran stayed with named John and Mother Mary. “We had a lot of long nights full of conversation about the culture.”
Asked what the experience in Africa had taught him, Tran said, “The most important thing that we learned is that we should appreciate what we have here.”
“I admit that we’re spoiled here,” he said.
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