Eggs in your french fries???

Since coming out to the bush, Chris and I have been talking a lot about how we have been able to normalize a lot of things that were at first quite frightening/shocking to us. For example, everyone here fries eggs into their french fries— weird at first, but now we love it; when in a car, if you come to a river, you drive through it, rather than over it on a bridge, and the person driving is often drinking a beer; when bathing, you look out on the river and see hippos and elephants doing the same; and when you sleep at night, you hear growling and howling right outside of the canvas walls.

While all of these things seem quite normal to us now, some things which are quite normal still shock me. For example, this happened:

A couple of days ago Chris and I received an invitation to go to “World Environment Day” at a primary school in one of the (somewhat) nearby villages. We rolled out of bed a little past six and hobbled over to the truck and hopped into the back. About an hour later, we rolled into a small village. The village looked like not more than a couple hundred people lived there, small homes made out of mud and grass, one small store, a mosque and a church, and lots of whildren running around. We drove through the village, out a ways to the school. When we arrived we started talking to one of the teachers... we asked him how many teachers there were- he said 6, which I thought was a good number for the size of the village. When I said that, he looked at me and told me that there were 592 students at this primary school. I couldn’t believe it..

The actualy festivities didn’t start for about 2 hours , and in the meantime the children amused themselves by surrounding us, staring, and inching closer and closer. If we said or did anything, someone would repeat it and the whole group would stir a little bit. If we were still, they were still. If we smiled, they smiled. It was a really strange experience, and with several hundred children literally two feet away from you, it’s really easy to go a little nutty. After a very long time of the staring activity, the teachers began the event. Groups of students from four or five nearby schools sang and danced songs they had written about the environment in absolutely beatiful four part harmonies. There was a short interlude, where a man in a lion costume and a man in a ninja costume pretended to beat each other up and do a little gymnastics routine. Afterwards, each musical group came back and performed the same songs they had sang earlier. To conclude, representatives from a bunch of nearby organizations (including the Wildlife Conservation Society) gave speeches about the importance of protecting the environment.

After the ceremony ended, they took us inside one of the school buildings to feed us a delicious lunch, along with all of the other special guests. You could still hear children laughing, playing and singing outside, and their celebration continued until we left about an hour later.

On our drive home, we stopped in another village to pick up some of our friends who were doing interviews on elephant conflict. After thinking that World Environment Day was kind of strange, this seemed absolutely unbelievable. The entire village (not that many people) was out in the center of town drinking Pombe (home-brewed maize beer) and they were incredibly drunk... all of the elderly women were smashed and the old men were sloshed. Everyone wanted to talk to us ut we couldn’t make any sense of what they were saying... and it was only about 4 PM. We collected our friends, hopped back in the truck, and made our way home. We saw 6 or 7 groups of giraffes, tons of impalas, and two kudu, after seeing zebras and elephants and all sorts of game animals just that morning.

We are working hard on the Wildlife Conservation Society- Ruaha Landscape website. As soon as we’re finished I’ll post the link on here if anyone’s interested in seeing where we live... and more pictures are on their way. They won’t upload here but I’m determined. 6 more weeks until America!!