Great news, good news, and a little bad news

Well, this past week has been quite eventful. I have some great news to tell you, some good news and a little bit of bad news.
Since everyone always wants to hear the bad news first I’ll start with that. One bit of bad news came to me on Thursday. I had the class to myself while David was in Arusha and so life was a little crazy as it was…then I went into the staff room and Nicholas asked me if I’d talked to Mhula. Well it just so happened I was at Rosi’s house the night before for supper and stayed really late so I never got home to talk to the boys. Nicolas proceeded to tell me that Mhula would be moving out this weekend. I was sooooo bummed. The rest of the day was a little harder to get through after that news. So I went home later and Mhula gave me the info as to why he was leaving. Mhula was asked to be a boarding parent at one of our houses on campus. Our school has grown a lot in the past year, but our staff has not. Some issues with this have come up so to improve, they’re hiring more boarding parents…Mhula being one of them. I don’t blame the guy for doing it. He gets free food now and a little extra cash, but I know that the house will be lonely without him, plus I lose my cooking partner. He promised he’d come visit often though so that will be good.
Ok, last bit of bad news….I got really sick in Kenay this weekend, but good news, it was only for a short time. I woke up in the middle of the night on Saturday and proceeded to “toss my cookies” as you might say. It was no fun but I think it was let on by a combination of possibly eating something bad, and also over eating times a million! The food there was great and I definitely ate a lot of it. Could have been part of my problem... :S
Ok now on to the good stuff….my great news is that I was in Kenya this weekend and besides the being sick part it was FANTASTIC!! The night we arrived there was a huge herd of buffalo that had come to the watering hole near the lodge and so I was able to watch them as they got a good drink. Then as we sat down for supper a huge herd of elephants came in and drank too. We were so close to the elephants it was unreal! Basically this lodge is set up so that you can see these animals in the wild, but they can get pretty close to you without it being a danger. Our rooms were up on pillars and then there are decks all around the buildings. There are two large watering holes that the animals come to and one of them is very close to a deck. From there you can watch them drink, spray themselves to cool off etc. The first night I was there before I went to bed I decided to take a look out my window and just a few minutes later a huge elephant walked right under my window and below my room. It was crazy!!!! We also went out on a lot of game drives while we were there. David and Narelle have a pop up roof for Safaris so we got out searching for animals a lot during our stay. I saw TONS of animals! I got to see giraffe, zebra, elephant, buffalo, civets, impala, water buck, lots of different African birds, and best of all….we spotted a cheetah!! As we were driving we saw something in the distance, got out our binoculars and saw it was a big cheetah. We think she may have been pregnant because she was so fat! She got a little closer so we stayed to watch her for awhile. It was great! It was also really fun on the drives to get so close to the elephants out there on the paths. One time we had an elephant walk right behind our vehicle. I was pretty freaked out, but I’m here to tell about it so that’s good :)The only disappointing thing was that we weren’t able to find any lions. We went out early on Saturday morning and went on a night Safari with some guides but no such luck. We were able to see a lot of animals though…so I guess I’ll just have to save seeing the lions for another time. I’m trying to plan another safari during a long weekend we have in March.
The good news is that we also got to and back from Kenya with only a little bit of trouble. The way to Kenya was pretty easy. Just a few signed papers, a little money and get the car through…done. Then the extremely bumpy roads from Kenya to the lodge and we were there. The way back was a bit more difficult because they were being picky about some of our paperwork with the car and asked us to pay them for “overtime” so our driver wasn’t exactly happy about that…but eventually we got through.
Other good news…teaching is still going well. I had a pretty good two days when I was on my own and David was away. Thursday was rough at times because the kids weren’t as good of listeners as I had hoped they would be, but that afternoon we had a talk about our day and Friday seemed to be better. On Friday I did a really fun art lesson with the kids and they seemed to love it. It really tied into our unit well too so I liked it for that reason :) As for teaching today…it was hard to get back at it after being so relaxed all weekend, but we managed. I did some multiplication stuff with my small group in the morning and we are doing some guided reading, spelling stuff and a little grammar. I have some of the more struggling readers so we’re doing a lot of the basics and then going from there. I hope they’re learning because sometimes I feel like I’m not doing everything as well as I could, but I’m trying to learn from my mistakes and do better each day.
I better get going soon because I REALLY need a shower and I’m going to Rosi’s house later for supper and a chat with her. She’s a great talker and a good person to hang out with. I’ve started running and training for the Kili marathon that happens in March. I won’t actually be doing the marathon because I’m definitely not in that good of shape, but they have a 5K on the same day so I’m running with some kids and other teachers on Mondays to train for that and I’ve been doing a bit on my own as well. So, I’m off now to get a few things done. I hope everyone had a great and relaxing weekend. I hear its warming up a little so I’m sure that’s nice! I also know that my little nephew had a good 1st b-day party from the pictures that were sent to me. Let me know all the other news from back home. I like to stay in the loop :)
Love you,
Alissa