Monday morning saw the arrival of a coach load of young schoolchildren and their teachers who were here for a conservation education day. After I’d taken loads of gorgeous photos of the children, I learned that due to the child protection policy I’m not allowed to put anything on social media that easily identifies the child so I’ve had to be very careful with my selection and editing here.
Upon arrival they had a drink and an apple. It’s an important part of schooling in Africa that children have a good meal and healthy snacks. Sometimes their school lunch is the only meal that they have in a day:(
We are not on a game reserve so there are no predators, although we do occasionally have a leopard wander in and out, and there is also a lone Impala who somehow got here and has been named Gordon!) It’s therefore safe to walk around, so we took the children on a bush walk around the lodge, which has extensive grounds. We had them looking for animal tracks and learning the names of trees by looking and touching the bark. The children soon got used to the volunteers, and they do like to hold hands. Quite often a volunteer had four kids attached to them!
The walk was followed by a games, a worksheet, lunch, and a splash in the swimming pool. They were all quite happy to get into a cold pool, yet before that, all of them wore jumpers, some of them wore coats and some of the girls had thick black tights with long socks over them!
I was amazed at the hair styles too – these must take literally hours to do – It’s hard enough to get our girls of that age to sit still long enough to have their hair plaited!
Finally, before they left, a group photograph was needed, and that task fell to me. It actually wasn’t too hard to get everyone into place – they were more cooperative that a lot of wedding guests I’ve had to round up!