White Sands

All the kids collected outside the classroom before the end of first break, every single one of them was there and lined up. Ok, lined up is a generous way of putting it. But they were there! Quite amazing, just shows you how excited they were about the excursion, because every other day they’re late back to the room. In typical African fashion, the busdriver was nowhere to be seen. Turned out he’d gone to sleep in the shade. Once this small detail was remedied we all squished on board and were off to White Sands beach. The non private section. Anya and Jahn had kindly allowed us the use of their house as a starting point, and were an enormous help throughout the whole excursion.

I will tell you more about it, but I think photos are the more pressing demand at the moment...

Ah ha! Finally got them to work. I am good. So, this first one is a view of the shore from out on the reef. It was low tide obviously, and we were exploring all the rocks and coral and seaweed and shallow pools.

Here we have a lionfish. How cool is it! That was the best photo I could get sorry, for a start I was trying to keep six or so kids from catching it in their nets (you do not want to pick up a lionfish) and then I had to deal with the reflection on the water and yeah. Seriously though, coolest fish ever. Not sure what kind of crab the second one is, but I will look it up for you sometime. It looks small in the photo, didn't give you anything to match it to scale, but it's about as big as my hand. Also very cool. Although not quite as cool as the lionfish. Doesn't have the 'danger' factor you see.

This last photo (only included so that people don't bite off my head) is of Jordan and myself. Jordan is one of the kids I spend a lot of time working with individually, as he is somewhat hyperactive and can become high maintainence for Zoe when she's trying to look after an entire class. I get on really well with him, he's a great kid but has attention issues. Still, I discovered early on that the one way to get and keep his focus is to talk to him about animals, of any kind or size. Perfect. I can do that all day. So he has enough respect for me now that he does occasionally listen when I need him to behave, and we end up having some really good times together. For example, while on the beach I stuck with Jordan most of the time, and he was constantly asking me what something was (sadly my knowledge of East African sea life isn't as thorough as it should be) or grabbing my hand to pull me over to look at something. He was completely in his element.