animal park!

Hello people!
I will start off this post talking about yesterday. It was a fun week, but I have so much to say about yesterday that I have to get that out first!
Yesterday, the staff had planned a fieldtrip - some kind of fun mystery trip. They have been planning this for a while, and it was fun to try and guess what it was. On the way, I started getting really excited and hitting the seat in the matatu and my friends were cracking up at me, but I didn't care because I couldn't wait!! haha. Anyway, we got there and it was an animal park!

I wished that I had talked to my fourth graders after going there, but if you are a fourth grader reading this, I am still I got to talk to you on Monday! That was definitely a highlight of my week!! :) I miss you guys!

Anyway, many of Kenya's wildlife is on natural preserves, and some are in parks like the one we went to. The animals are cared for there, and are not as wild as on the preserves. They are fed some, and the park also tries to give them as natural as an environment as possible. With that said, it is similar to a zoo at home because the animals are fed and SOME of the animals are fenced in, but different because the animals all interact with each other and some are free to roam about the park wherever they want.
For example, we were walking along and then these monkeys noticed that we had a bag of bananas, and so they all started coming and following us! There must have been about 20 following us, and who knows how many more were watching. ha. Anyway, so we walked into this field and were trying to decide where to sit, when out of nowhere, this family of giraffes walks by!! It was incredible!! They were so close! It reminded me of that scene in Jurassic Park when the people are first in the park and the brachiosaurus walks by and they are blown away. I felt like that girl because I was so awestruck that these beautiful giraffes got so close to us. Even thinking about it right now feels so surreal, but I took some pictures. They are so beautiful and I love their long eyelashes and huge eyes. I love that the pattern of their skin is unique and such a gift from God. It was really exciting, to say the least. :) Later on in the day, we also got to feed them, which was a lot of fun too. :)
Anyway, we also saw crocodiles (they have 30 in the park, and they are all in this swamp area. They are fenced off, of course, because they are considered the most dangerous in Africa, but we were still pretty close.. good pictures. :) ) , buffalo, impala, and antelope. Like I said before, we also were close to the monkeys, and they also dug through the garbage can when we were finished with lunch, to eat our banana and mango skins. :) We also got to touch and take pictures with a 128 year old tortoise that was bigger than me when I crouched down. And finally, we also got to get close to some hippoes, but they were on the other side of a brick wall because they are pretty dangerous to humans. The guide told us that the hippoes are so heavy and strong that they could easily break the wall if they wanted to (they can't jump over it even though it was only up to my waist or lower), but they could break it, so the park also has a trench before the wall. hah. Anyway, it was interesting to see them all together. The monkeys and some birds came along to feed alongside the hippoes, and the buffalo were not too far away - not even in a different fenced off area. It was good to see such community! Finally, we also saw a bunch of birds, snakes, fish, and beautiful trees. I kept thinking of our life science unit at school over and over. Whew! More to add on to the lessons for next year! :)
Anyway, it was a good time together with our team. Some of the Kenyans had not even seen some of those animals so close, so it was fun to see them excited as well. :) Fun times of laughter.

The rest of the week was good - lots of preparation for the outreaches that we will be doing in the next three months. I can't believe it - we only have two more weeks of lecture and then we go! So we have been learning and praying a lot about what we will be doing, and learning a lot about the people we will be with. This week's lectures were also really important for beyond DTS, dealing with how to take care of what we have been entrusted with in life. It was really good.

Hope you are well!