Wednesday 9/22 Photographs

At Tarangire National park we went to a travel lodge that tourists can stay at. We were able to order beer and food (I had another cheeseburger) and if you were willing to pay 5,000 shillings you could swim as well. This is the view from the table we were all sitting at. It's not the best quality, but you can see some elephants near the right middle. You can also see the Tarangire River, this river never dries up so during the dry season there are a butt load of animals in this park.

So there was this herd of about 100 zebra right around the road we were driving on... I got some good pictures because they were so close. This safari was more of a class than the last one, we were practicing a counting method and had to stop each time we saw a mammal larger than a DikDik and record GPS coordinates, distance from our vehicle, how many, and of course what species for 3 hours from 9:00-12:00. Though we had to do work this time, this was still better than any class I've taken back in Vermont!

More zebra...

We saw some cheetahs! Isn't amazing how well they blended in? This is pretty zoomed in on my camera, they were about 50 meters (yes, I'm a part of the normal world and use the metric system now...) This was after 12:00 so we didn't have to record them for our class, but it was awesome to finally see a large predator. About 10 minutes after this we saw a single lioness, she was far away and behind some rocks so the pictures I got aren't worth posting... Hopefully next park we go to I'll get some good lion ones!

Sometime last week, maybe Friday (I can't remember the days run together here...) we went to a local orphanage called Watoto Care (Children Care). It was for community service but honestly it was such a great feeling to be helping these kids it didn't feel like work at all. As soon as we got there one of the little girls climbed into my arms and I spent the rest of the time there making faces and counting to ten in Swahili (because that's about all I can do, haha!). They were all fascinated with our sunglasses and would put them on. They also loved taking pictures with our cameras, so excuse any of the smudge marks on the following photos!

For the actual community service part we built them a clubhouse (as you can see) and a see-saw. One of the SFS groups before us had made them a swing so we wanted to make them a bigger playground. We also helped some of the mwalimu (teachers) mix and pour cement into one of the rooms. After we were done helping and building we continued to be personal jungle gyms for the kids and played some futbol!

We brought sodas with us to give them towards the end of our stay. They got so excited! It was truly heartwarming when they wanted to share with us too; such a great lesson in generosity and sharing.

Here's one of the older boys on the see-saw we built. (Notice the black paint... I DID THAT!) It was great, two days after we visited the orphanage we drove by again and there were like 8 kids on the see-saw... SO CUTE! Such a great experience, I think we all want to go back again before we leave Tanzania.