Birds, pizza, and a loss

We now appear to be entering kind of a 3 month quiet spell, from what we can tell. The students are taking exams this past week and our classes were canceled (but not before we'd prepared a lesson plan on “self-esteem” and showed up ready to teach it), school ends in 3 weeks and the students and teachers all go home. Our 3 month lockdown “Integration Period” ends Thanksgiving Day, which we'll celebrate with Thanksgiving dinner at the home of the PC Country Director, with Embassy staff. The following week we have a 3 day training with our Swazi counterparts on “Project Design and Management.” Although it sounds hideously bureaucratic, which the PC easily slips into sometimes, we hear it's one of the better training sessions. I'm bringing a bright young English teacher/librarian from the local High School – part of the goal is to get us working well with our local Swazi counterparts, so they take ownership, do a lot of the work, and so that our projects here are sustainable once we leave in 2015. Once school ends in the first week of December we understand the country more or less shuts down for the Christmas break, until school resumes January 21. KUF is having more trouble landing a good counterpart because her first and second choices were too busy with the last week of school

It's now boiling hot, and in our metal-roofed hut the temperature is in the high 90s or worse by 11 a.m., and doesn't cool down til 8 PM or so. All of which is preface to say that Thursday morning, after a visit to one of the primary schools where we've been working to try to line up a counterpart for Katherine for the December training, we took the bus 45 miles further east and north to Hlane Royal National Park, a game preserve where the Kings used to kill lions, but now it is well-preserved, has giraffe, elephants and hippos, plus fine birds. Here we are, having got off the bus and walked 100 yards to the gate. Once we got there we were accompanied by an armed guard until we got inside the electric fence protecting the reception area, but curiously lions were viewed as uninterested in passengers disembarking from the bus outside the gate; anyway, we survived.

We saw a total of 7 new birds. Here we are at lunch, where we saw 2 new birds, I think. This looks out 150 yards to the hippo pool.

Practically the first bird we saw, nesting in a low-hanging bough just 15 feet away, was an African Paradise Flycatcher, a 3” bird with a dark blue head, bright blue eye-ring, reddish-brown back, and then an improbable reddish-brown tail 20” long!

We suffered a setback on our return; when we arrived home we could not find the pocket-sized book of Birds of Southern Africa. Maybe left in the restroom – we were tired and hot, or maybe it fell out in the cab of the truck in which we hitched a ride home. (We get rides very quickly, and feel quite safe; South Africa would be a different story, we are told.) We are asking our daughter, who found this for us originally, to try to get us another.

The 7^th grade has now taken their high-intensity national exams and finished primary school (those who passed), so a farewell pizza party was held 25 miles away, at a chain restaurant in one of the nicer shopping centers in the country. We all piled into public transport, and arrived at about 9:30, and then sat and all 80 students (the 6^th grade came, as well) waited patiently for the pizza and plates of sausage and wraps to be served, around noon. All remarkably well-behaved. That broke down a little as they served the dessert, thick chocolate cake with ice cream, and the sugar high set in. I failed to get a picture of the little boy in a shiny black 3 piece suit, or the girls in their cocktail dresses – aged 13 and 14, mostly. Here they are waiting to be served, 7^th grade at the table, 6^th in 2 very crowded rows in back. The 2 mugging are 2 of the brighter 6th grade girls, whom I like a lot, although they can be mischievous.  I had sat next to the one on the right in pink and started reading to her from a Disney book about Princess Jasmine, and then she took over and read it to me.  I need to get her more books.  The school library received 1,000 new books in March through the previous PCVs, but they have not been "registered" (listed, I guess), so the students aren't allowed to touch them.  Makes me crazy.  We're going to get past that.