Ehland visit

We were visited by a herd of eland overnight. I heard a bunch of hooves stomping around my hut and I woke up to find tracks right outside my door and all over and around the sheds, campground, and right up to the door of the main house. They sure had left their share of eland poo on the lawn next to the pool.

We also have a new dinner guest. A baby python has taken up residence about 10 feet from the dinner table in the lapa. It’s so cute and small at the moment that the guests find it very amusing and take lots of photos. No-

one has yet freaked out. The owner says that in his 50 years in Namibia he has only come across 2 pythons, so it is a pretty strange sight in these parts. The local staff want to kill it or at least capture it and move it away from the house. At the moment it’s only about a meter long, isn’t poisonous and probably doesn’t have the strength to strangle your ankle (let alone do a person any permanent harm). However, they do grow up to 5 meters long, so maybe it makes good sense to move it while it is young. I took a quick powerwalk along the 3km mountain hike after breakfast this morning. The trail goes up and over the Khomas mountains that I see from my bathroom window. I didn’t see any animals (except a wild horse), but I did walk past the three-legged cheetah enclosure. The cheetah was rescued a year ago and then broke its leg while playing with a toy. They amputated the leg, so now it can’t be let back into the wild. It is completely tame and the tourists can take the three-legged cheetah for a walk. I really must do that one morning. The big question is – how fast can a three-legged cheetah run? Faster than a two-legged man? I wonder if someone will eventually find out the hard way. I started teaching at the kindergarten today. I only have 4 students and one toddler who come in to wreak havoc and break things, but doesn’t actually belong in the class. The kids are Patrick, Patricia, Vivian and Denzel. I wonder if he is named after Denzel Washington, or whether Denzel Washington has an old African name. I’ll have to find out. The kids turned up with their stubborn hats on. The first day is all about finding people’s abilities and limits. I tried to find out their abilities. They tried to find out my limits. Besides coloring, I don’t think they have held pencils before. The abcs are totally mysteries to them. I guess that makes it easier. Now I just have to teach them to write one new letter a day for 6 weeks. After a futile hour of trying to get them to copy the letter “a” over and over again, it was finally game time. For the first hour they had pretended they didn’t understand me at all and spoke zero English. Strangely at game time, when they wanted to be understood, they were speaking lots of English words and accurately following instructions in English. They finally settled down over coloring at the end of the day and were having a nice little chat amongst themselves. The local language (which is a derivate of San which is the oldest language in the world) includes several clicking and kissing sounds. It really was a joy to hear them chatting and clicking away around the coloring-in table.