On safari

I did the proper tourist thing this weekend with some of the other volunteers and spent a night in Chobe National Park in Botswana - just a river crossing from Zambia. We were driven round by a guide in an open sided safari truck and saw as many animals as you could possibly wish for. There were some really magical moments - a herd of zebras glimpsed through the trees, switching their tails from side to side - families of giraffes bending their necks gracefully to eat or seemingly doing the splits to eat something off the ground - baboons shaking fruit down from a tree to eat - a line of elephants strung out along the horizon like in a child's picture book - a fish eagle perched on a branch devouring its catch......and many more. But some of it also left me feeling uncomfortable - partly because being driven around for hours on end by a local guide made it seem an unequal, almost colonial kind of transaction, and also because there is something hollow about watching a lion padding along a track with six vehicles full of passengers beside him, all  leaning out and flashing their cameras! I loved the birds best of all. There are so many of them and so many different kinds, often exotically coloured - and the guide seemed to know the names of all of them. The picture is especially for my colleagues - it is the lilac breasted roller (if you look closely) which features heavily in one of the English intermediate 2 past close reading papers! I also quite enjoyed the bush camping which reminded me of my days of Girl Guide camp - complete with tripods holding canvas buckets to wash in, camp fire and loo tent.

School today and yesterday has been very intense, but rewarding too. Today I had three groups of all boys at a school out in the bush where the children are particularly responsive and friendly. A group of 12 -15  year olds spent about 20 minutes in complete silence absorbed in drawing and colouring in pictures of animals they were copying from the book we had read. It was a lovely moment.