Final visits

                We've made some last-time visits to some of our favorite places here in the past 2 weeks, because classes have ended and the students are taking end-of-term tests.  All the classrooms are in use for testing, so we can't even get in to teach them when they are not taking tests.

                So this week we spent 2 days and a night at Mabuda Farm, the beautiful B&B on an estate 20 miles (and worlds away) from our site.

                We saw 4 new birds (in order of importance): pink-throat twinspot (so unusual here it is not even in Katherine's excellent Pocket Guide showing 440 Birds of southern Africa); forest weaver; grey-headed bush-shrike; and grey sunbird. Katherine said she could leave southern Africa after finally seeing the pink-throated Twinspot!  This brings her southern Africa bird list to #257!!

                In addition, we saw some old favorites: eastern black-headed oriole; black-headed heron; 4 different sunbirds; green-backed heron; crowned hormbill; hammerkop (pictured below):

and the fabulous trumpeter hornbill.

The proprietor of the Farm, Jono Pons, took us for an early-morning bird walk with the young man he is training as a birding guide for tourists.

Thursday the High School English Department took us out to a delicious braii (grilling) restuarant, where they brought in picnic baskets all the fixings other than the meat, which was grilled at the braii stand.  The woman standing on the left was our once-a-week siSwati tutor and she was the one who helped us set up a tutoring program with most of the High School students from the Refugee Camp.

       African children are ingenious in creating entertainment out of minimal supplies: games with some string or plastic bags taped and tied into a ball.  Here children from neighboring homesteads show off the cars they have created from wire and boxes.

PIC

And we caught our last Friday afternoon church practice at the Camp:

We really love these kids.