Only one member of Kenya's first-ever team of snow sculptors has ever seen snow, and even he isn't quite sure how one goes about carving it.

They have chisels, mallets and a saw; they are packing gloves and extra sweaters. But the Kenyan team entered in the international competition at the carnival in Quebec City next week -- the Olympics of snow-sculpting -- faces a particular disadvantage.

Michael Kaloki first saw snow sculptures when he was a journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto and travelled with fellow students to visit the famed Quebec Carnival in 2000.

"I walked up this hill near the Plains of Abraham," he recalled, his voice softened with the lilt of a Kenyan accent. "And all of a sudden I see people sculpting ice, and it just hit me -- you can actually -- Wow! Making use of ice."

Mr. Kaloki, 28, returned home to Nairobi and began work as a freelance television producer, but he held on to the idea of one day competing in Quebec. He found other young Kenyans interested in the idea: Peter Walala, 25, a sculptor, who leads the team; a physiotherapy student and beauty queen, Winnie Omwakwe, 21; and a fellow television producer, Robert Bresson, 30.

Although they've been practising in Kenya, their first attempt to sculpt snow will be in Quebec. They've had to make do with ice, also a challenging find in an area where people wear T-shirts in January. They approached the Stanley Hotel -- a storied Nairobi landmark where Ernest Hemingway used to quaff beer after the hunt -- and asked whether they could borrow some big blocks of ice.

Executive chef Mark Chira found the idea intriguing and offered the team his cold room. He filled the kitchen's largest stock pots with water and froze them to produce blocks of practice ice.

Mr. Chira said he keeps the cold room at -18, which was a shock to the novice sculptors. "They don't even want to spend a minute there because it's damn cold," he said, adding that he worries about how they will do in the -30 temperatures he's heard sometimes grip Quebec City.

The first practice sessions, in December, were not auspicious. "We started carving the ice and there were small bits shaved off. Winnie asked, 'Is this like snow?' I said yes, and she said, 'Okay!' " Mr. Kaloki recalled.

Ms. Omwakwe gamely tried to form the ice chips into a small sculpture, but they wouldn't meld. "She looked up and said, 'But it doesn't stick!' And I said, 'When you see snow, it will stick.' "

Their contest sculpture is a close-to-life-size rhino entitled Kikiri, the Kiswahili word for "struggling."

Mr. Kaloki explained the theme. "It represents the struggle of the rhino, which is almost extinct in Kenya, and also the struggle is for the ice. The glacial deposits on Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya have gone down significantly -- we're trying to say that in the near future there may not be any animals to sculpt about and there may not be any ice to sculpt with. We have to conserve our animals, and we want to [communicate] that we're being affected by global warming even in Africa."

The team has practised producing a hippo, a crocodile and the rhino. Mr. Chira displayed the sculptures at the hotel breakfast buffet, which drew a crowd, and some local reporters.

The Kenyan team will join the other competitors on the field on Tuesday, Feb. 4, and have the week to work on their block of snow, which measures 5.4 metres long, three metres high and 3.6 metres deep, scooped from the Plains of Abraham.

"Sunday at 9 a.m. they have to drop their tools," said Catherine Constantin, director of international recruitment for the contest.

Mr. Kaloki and his team are not the first Africans to compete at the carnival; a team from Burkina Faso came a decade ago. And this year they are not the only team from a snowless nation, either: Singapore is also sending a crew. Other entrants include teams from Argentina, Peru, Chile, Norway and Belgium; the Belgians are the ones to beat, Ms. Constantin said.

Mr. Kaloki is confident about their rhino. "We're actually going to give people a run for their money," he said. "We're going for the first prize."

But there are a few hurdles. For one thing, they don't have the money for plane tickets yet. The team has been trying to arrange sponsors in Nairobi, he said, but the words "snow sculpting" leave people bewildered.

There's also nowhere in Nairobi to buy cold-weather wear. Mr. Kaloki said Mr. Walala was thinking they would just wear a couple of sweaters, and he had to explain that this really wasn't going to be enough.

Fortunately, the contest organizers anticipated this problem and have gear to lend them, Ms. Constantin said.