Wow wee another week gone. Mon to Fri was very busy. I hardly went to any lessons this week as we had a lot of prep to do for the ISSSA Athletics tournament which was held at the University of Botswana's athletics stadium on Friday and Saturday. ISSSA stands for Independent Secondary Schools Association and organises a lot of tournaments such as swimming and athletics and MaP is one of the schools that takes part. Bruce is part of the organising committee so i was helping him with admin school jobs and ISSSA prep. For the latter it consisted of going through all the schools final team list to check they had the right ages in certain age catergories and that they were not cheating by having someone too old, i checked by cross referencing with the whole schools list which had the date of birth on. A long task but i did find a few schools which were guilty of it (i guess this shows just how badly people want to win this tournament-it is a big thing here!) I also had to help get the athletics kits ready for the MaP students. They also all got a small sports bag which has the MaP logo on it with a water, energy drink, banana and energy sweets. There are 60 people in the athletics team so that meant there were 60 bags i had to fill but as most of you know i like organising stuff so i actually found it quite an enjoyable task (better than photocopying!)
Friday was the day of the first athletics and so Shambs and Bruce had to go with the team so i stayed behind and ran the PE lessons with the cover teachers. I was with the girls and we did football which consisted of a lot of screaming with a few girls actually kicking the ball rather than running away from it! After my lessons Bruce had arranged for the school transport to come pick me up at 12 and take me to the athletics so i could help out there but as you can guess this was 12 African time so it turned out to be more like 1!! It never fails to amaze me how relaxed everyone is here! I arrived just in time to see the best event-the relays.Now the student dont just cheer a bit every now and then like in England - here it is full on screaming, chanting, singing shouting, stamping. So much better than in the UK! There were 12 schools competing so the relays were done on time not position (as there were two heats for each age category). I can proudly say MaP won half of the relays and the ones they didnt win we came second or third! Now i dont know how we did overall in the tournament as it occured on Saturday but i was away (i will come onto that) fingers crossed we won!
The Weekend:
This weekend i went to Botsalano Game Reserve with Virginia, Clara (her daughter), Sally (a teacher and friend of Virginia, Denise (another teacher and friend of Virginia), Safiya (Denise's daughter) and Samantha (Safiya's friend) . So a girls weekend! Botsalano is a reserve just over the SA border and is not that well known as they purposely do not publicise it much to try and reduce poachers as there is a high numbers of rhino. So you just turn up, get a campsite to yourself (its that empty) and then drive round the park in your own cars (although you do need 4x4!) Just driving to our campsite we saw a lot of wildlife. The first time it was further away but we had another drive that early evening and then one the next morning and in total we saw, (are you ready?), wilderbeast, warthog, impala (which we saw pronking, when they jump vertically in the air), springbock, waterbuck, kudu, RHINO!! (these were very close to the car-between 10-20meters) and about a pack-10-15 (thats probably not the correct terminology) of giraffes which were always chilling about 2 minutes drive from our camp and we got as close as 10 meters to some of them! We could hear a lot of jackal at night and you could hear the giraffes at night as well walking around.
It was a really fun, chilled weekend and i am really grateful to Virginia for organising it as otherwise i wouldnt have been able to go visit it! Right i will upload the wildlife pictures now-there is a problem with wifi so pictures of the camp may be up early this week (we managed to persuade Dean to let us take one of the school cameras with the long lenses!)
hope you all have a good week!
J xx
No comments:
Post a Comment