Home safe and sound

Beyond the restaurant window last night there were no soldiers marching the streets and nobody running for their lives.
Masterton aid volunteer Sarah Ryan was finally home from Kenya.
Sarah, 20, flew into Palmerston North and the waiting arms of her mother Carrie Ryan late yesterday after a journey home from Nairobi that took 35 hours to complete.
She arrived "dirty from three days of Kenyan dust" and was tired, hungry and broke.
Sarah had been in Kenya as an aid volunteer with the relief agency Mama na Dada since early December and was to have travelled home in February from her first trip abroad.
But the December 27 election of Mwai Kibaki as president sparked riots and killings and widespread lawlessness across Kenya that has so far left at least 600 people dead and the country teetering on anarchy, and Sarah was trapped.
Family friends had been texting and calling Mrs Ryan all day, she said, eager for news of her youngest daughter's safe escape after weeks stranded in the eastern African nation.
Sarah was just as eager to visit friend and former Solway College classmate Jean Glover, now living near Palmerston North airport, to tell her she had at last made it safely home.
Their reunion quickly turned into a meal in the city centre before Sarah took the final leg of her journey back to Masterton where she could bathe without fetching a bucket of water and sleep unafraid.
Talk at the table naturally centred on Sarah and her experiences in the western Kenyan village of Kunya on the shores of Lake Victoria, working with women and children and orphans and being adored simply because of the colour of her skin.
She recalled how her skin colour post-election became a target for assault not adoration when she was bruised and cut after 200 rioters at a burning roadblock attacked the van in which she was travelling partly because she was seen as "white and therefore wealthy".
She spoke about armed police guarding the Mama na Dada compound and her week-long diet of silver beet and rice as food supplies ran out; of teargas victims and stonings and beatings and shootings; of safe haven bought in the capital during her final days before she fled a nation tearing itself apart.
"In my mind I'm still half expecting to see soldiers march past outside the window bang, bang, bang and terrified people running and coughing and rubbing their eyes.
"It's been such a big deal just to go outside and I just realised it's safe to do that now, without an escort, without worrying about what might happen next," she said.
"One of the worst times I remember was the day we were attacked at the road block. I really feared for my life. We went to go into the city and were told to turn back around because people were being stoned.
"I don't have bad feelings about it though. I'm home now and it was all a really good learning experience.
"Even the stuff that didn't turn out like it should have."
Sarah is already planning her return overseas that will come after a trip to Sydney in July to meet friends attending World Youth Day 08.