Charo, 32 years old - Shimoni, Kenya

In January 2015 I took a boat trip with a friend to Wasini island.

We packed a rock-sack with some fresh clothes, a bottle of water, digital camera, sun-screen, a few dollars, and we started our journey in a bus towards the port of Shimoni, about an hour away from Diani Beach.

By the time we arrived to the pier, the bus had picked up along the way a German couple on holiday break and a Japanese family residing in Nairobi.

At the pier, we all boarded a Dhow boat, where more travellers were waiting for us on the benches: two girls and a boy from Canada, a Scottish-Aussie couple with their daughter, an Indian family of five persons. I’ve counted the number of people on the boat: we were nineteen people and four staff members.

We left the port to a tranquil sea, enjoying some beverages, fruits and Kenyan doughnuts that were nicely arranged in colorful plastic baskets on the deck by the crew.

Half an hour of navigation and we were in the open Ocean, eyeing the sea turtles and dolphins that were peeping up from under the waves, snapping photographs and chatting away among us.

One of the sailors approached me to find out whether I was married and how many cows my boyfriend had to pay off to my father for his blessings. His name was Charo.

We discussed for a while about the terms and condition of marriages in our Countries and he explained to me that his plan was to find a permanent job back in his home-town, Malindi, so that he could afford to buy two cows and find a girl to make a family with.

“You speak Italian very well” I said to him.

“A friend of mine teaches me. He goes to Italian classes, come back home and repeats to me what he has learned. I need to find the money to go to the Italian course myself, so that I can get a certificate and find a job in a big hotel in Malindi”

“How much does the Italian course cost?”

“Twenty euros per month. It lasts one year. But then there is another fifty euros to pay for the final test and the certificate”.