Written by Canadian SportWORKS Officer, Martin Villafuerte
Martin’s international experiential learning experience is funded by the Queen Elizabeth Scholars (QES) Program. This collaborative initiative is made possible through the leadership of the Rideau Hall Foundation, in collaboration with Community Foundations of Canada, Universities Canada, and Canadian universities. Through its promotion of international student exchange and civic engagement, the QES program is helping to grow young Canadians into global citizens while promoting Canada as a destination for the world’s top talent and attracting top talent and international research leaders to Canada.
Niaje! What’s up, everyone? My name is Martin Villafuerte, and I am one of two Canadian SportWORKS Officers currently serving in Nairobi, Kenya with the National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK). I am a student at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta and I am here completing my practicum for the fall semester. I have this opportunity because of Commonwealth Sport Canada and the Queen Elizabeth Scholars Program, this would not have been possible without the program and the contributors of the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship. It’s been a blessing to be here for about a month now and I have so much to share with you all about what we have done so far and what is to come!
I have been sent here to support the Cheza Healthy program, which was founded in NOCK. Its main purpose is to encourage youth in primary and secondary schools to become more physically active in an enjoyable and long-lasting way. We believe we can achieve this through “cheza,” which means “play” in Swahili. This aligns with what I have learned so far in Physical Literacy, as my program aims to get people active, with the motivation being that people enjoy what they are doing while being physically active. This internal motivation helps individuals stay active for life, which is also the goal for Cheza Healthy. In the events we plan for Cheza Healthy, we keep in mind that most of the events should be designated for actual activity, not just sports, but any game that people can participate in with friends or colleagues, so they can have fun and get their bodies moving. Before and after the central physical activity part of the event, we, as the Cheza Healthy team, discuss how physical activity can prevent non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers, which are a growing concern in Kenya. With this in mind, the team and I started brainstorming what we can do for our community (I say our community because Kenya feels like home to me already).
The first obstacle we faced as a team was that during September, October, November, and December, primary and secondary schools have exams, and the school board limits the number of extracurricular activities. This slowed us down from creating events for that population, but Tony, my supervisor here in Kenya, gave us creative freedom to determine which populations we could reach out to and create events for. Our first week was spent brainstorming about who and where we can reach. Here is a small list of the populations we have contacted and plan to work with.
- Oasis 4 Orphans in Naivasha
- KCA University with the Leadershift International Club
- ViBE (Vision Beyond Eyes) is an organization that works with teen mothers
- The McMillan Memorial Library community with Book Bunk
- Staff at NOCK for an internal Cheza Healthy event
- Children’s Home in Donholm, Nairobi
- Canada-Mathare Trust
- Amara Senior Living
- Tennis 10s – Bumblebee Tennis Federation and Omanyala Foundation
There are more ideas in mind that we want to bring to reality; however, I will keep those to myself for now, in case we are unable to make them happen.
As of October 3, 2025, we have done three events for Cheza Healthy (ViBE for teen moms, Internal Cheza Healthy event, and Tennis 10’s) and on top of this, Steph (my co-SportWORKS Officer) has been invited to events hosted by NOCK to meet the presidents and secretary generals of sports federations. There’s plenty for us to look forward to, and I am grateful for all the upcoming events and the opportunity to give myself to Kenya. It has been a wonderful experience so far, meeting the team at the office, making friends with coworkers, and participating in events outside of my practicum, such as the World Cleanup Day on September 20.
Steph and I met the manager of ViBE on this day, and it is also how I got in touch with student leaders from KCA University. It is safe to say that the heart of Cheza Healthy is pumping, and I am grateful that I can contribute by talking to people I meet and sharing the idea of Cheza Healthy. When I went to see a basketball game, I met Jeremiah and told him about Cheza Healthy. He put me in contact with his dad, who works at a children’s home in Naivasha. I’m in the process of planning an event with them for November. In another similar instance, I was talking to a rugby player who was attending the Rugby Legends Cup about my idea of visiting an orphanage and inviting him to speak and play with the kids. He said he would love to. After a couple of days, he contacted me, saying that he knows of another children’s home that he would like us to do an event for as well. Now, we get to do an event with them, too!
I’m so glad I have been getting along great with the Kenyan people here. My coworkers, the security guards, fellow sports game viewers, and so on. I have also been learning Swahili and keep a list of words I know. When I practice them with others, it usually surprises them and brings a smile to their faces. I’m going to leave here able to speak a sentence in Swahili and respond in simple phrases. So far, my favourite words are ‘niaje’ (what’s up), ‘sawa’ (okay), and ‘Asanti Sana’ (thank you so much).
What I have learned about myself in this first month is that I genuinely have a golden retriever-like energy. Always open to talking to anyone, seeing the world positively, and wanting to explore everything. In the first week, I was bored with recovering from jet lag, so I decided to go for a walk around my Airbnb. My Airbnb host had attached a PDF of a list of things to do around the area, and I was interested in finding some of the places he mentioned, such as a really affordable BBQ spot where I could get a full meal for $4. I explored and had a fun time, but being new to the place, I got a little nervous and headed home after 15 minutes of walking around. This happened a couple of times, but now I am confident enough to try different routes to walk to work, and the walk is about 25 minutes long. Another place my Airbnb host mentioned is Toi Market, a market known for its clothing. However, when I mentioned to my coworkers that I wanted to go there, they warned me, saying I would get overcharged or get lost if I went alone. I may be too bold for my own wellbeing. Or even wanting to visit the children’s home in Naivasha, it’s a 2-hour drive away from Nairobi, where the office is located. My coworkers say it’s a whole expedition to get there, and I could also be overcharged, but I still want to go and am planning how to do so safely and without being scammed.
Steph and I have been wanting to hang out with our coworkers, so we say yes when we’re invited out, and through that, we have been to the rugby game I mentioned earlier. And after that rugby game, a concert was taking place in the same venue, featuring a local artist named Nyashinski, whose concert was terrific. I have some of his songs on my Spotify playlists now.
And then another coworker invited us to go to his concert! I was surprised to find an artist in the office. Shout out to Jairus Mola and his new album, Molarity. I’m excited for his upcoming concert. Jairus also showed me and Steph his favourite fish spot, and wow, it was delicious. I will add a picture of what our meal looked like. The dish is called Ugali with fish.
We got to pick which fish we wanted to eat, and we were starving, so we ordered two. It’s a dish where we eat with our hands, so our server came to our table with a jug of water and soap, allowing us to wash our hands. To eat this dish, we took some Ugali (top left of the picture) and scooped up some fish with it, along with some kale (top right), and chowed down. It was so tasty, and it was definitely not the last time I had this.
Speaking about tasty food, A Monkey thought our trash had delicious food and has visited us three times! The first time was because we left the windows open, and it came in and ate Steph’s fruit. I was the first person to see the mess it made, and I thought to myself, “Man, Steph eats fruit weird, but whatever.” Steph sees the fruit and is shocked, and then we look out the door and see our trash bin has been ravaged. With the deduction skills of Sherlock Holmes, we figured it was a monkey, but we have not seen it yet. We saw the very next morning.
Update: the monkey has a whole family that is almost as big as mine back in Canada. Here is a video I took of them:
I was pretty hyped to see them right outside of my bedroom, and when I sent it to my girlfriend Sophie, she was pretty hyped too. She was like “BABY MONKEYS🥹🥹.”
So, something tragic happened to me, but I found it hilarious. I considered not sharing it, but I decided to share it anyway to show my genuine self and my day-to-day experience here in Kenya, outside of working for NOCK. So on Friday, October 3, it started heavily raining in the evening. I was at the gym when it started raining. Feeling bold, I decided to walk home because I didn’t mind getting my shoes soaked. And oh boy, little did I know of what was gonna happen… Here are some photos I found of the city that day:
So I started my walk not knowing it was this bad in my area of the city. In some parts, the water was a little past my ankles while I walked on the sidewalk. Some parts of the town got flooded, with water flowing like a river up to two feet deep. As I reached the halfway point of my walk, I got to the main highway, which I had to cross. Luckily, no cars were driving at that moment. The unlucky part was that the road was also flooded, and the water ran past faster than on the other streets. I found myself smiling and laughing more and more because I did not expect it to be this bad, and I was already soaked on the outside, so whatever. I see this guy trying to cross the street too, so I approach him and suggest we cross together, and we start finding a place to cross. He was hesitant to cross, and I thought it was because he did not want to get his foot wet. Assuming this, I told him, “Over there seems like a good spot to cross, the water is barely moving!” We walked over there, and as I was taking the first step, my new friend said, “No, don’t.”
I fell into a water drainage well. It reached my belly button, and I was shocked. I did not see that at all, and I forgot there were drainage systems in the city. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t fallen into one sooner, but thank God that when I did, someone was there to help me up. So, now thoroughly soaked, my white shirt no longer white, and humbled after being so bold, I start following my rescuer as he finds a way to cross the street. Up the street, there was a car that tipped into a drainage well, and I could really relate to it. We finally crossed the street, I said my goodbyes, and I started walking home, praying that I wouldn’t fall into another well. As I made my way back to the apartment, a lady saw me and was bamboozled by the way I was trotting. I said to her “Mambo!” which means “Hi! How are ya?” She did not reply. When I got to the apartment, I had to ask Steph to grab some towels and open the door for me because I didn’t want the apartment to get covered in healthy water. Here is a photo of what I looked like right outside the apartment:
It felt a lot wetter than it looked, and it took me 5 days to get everything washed from that day. My laptop and phone were damp, but by putting them in a bag of rice for a couple of hours, the rice soaked up all the water, and my things functioned like they did before. Phew! Here’s a video of where I fell in. You can’t really see how deep it was, but during the storm, I couldn’t see the ground at all.
Anyway, I want to wrap it up here so you don’t have to read so much and can look forward to the next blog. I will try to get another posted by the end of October 🙂 I hope you all had a good day (or have a good day, since Nairobi is 9 hours ahead of Calgary), and I hope you come back around! Here are some miscellaneous photos that I want to share as well.
Thank you so much for reading. Warm Regards,
Canadian SportWORKS Officer assisting the National Olympic Committee of Kenya