All creatures great and small…

You have heard about our close encounters with snakes and not so close (!) encounters with hippos in our last newsletter but sometimes it is the smaller creatures that grab our attention. Lately there seems to have been an influx of these types of encounters and sometimes in the strangest places. Today we experienced frogs falling from the sky (well kind of!) and could almost sympathise with those Egyptians during their plagues. Matt opened the bathroom door in our banda and had to dodge a falling frog! A few hours later possibly the same frog was making an effort to climb the door again. Some people (?) never learn! A little while ago housemate Rachel discovered a frog in her trainer when trying to put it on-she almost squashed it thinking it was the tongue of her trainer folded up (yuk!). It managed to hop away unharmed though thankfully. Needless to say we have learnt to shake out our shoes in case it might be something less friendly next time! Also recently, there seems to be an abundance of furry caterpillars that get everywhere-we have decided (on little info) they are harmless however. For those that have asked about the bird life here we don’t have a lot to tell you, unfortunately. We often hear birds in the bushes that have the strangest calls like stones hitting each other or someone shouting but we rarely see them. They must be shy despite their noise! Our resident bird expert (a PhD student researching here at the moment) has however confirmed that there are a variety of migratory birds from the UK that take residency here at some point in the year! For those of you who know about these kind of things he listed the following species (or part of): black caps, warblers (willow), swallows, buzzards & hawks. Is that exciting?!

Well, we haven’t just been focusing on the animal world. Last night we had a ‘Cultural Evening’. Matt was MC (master of ceremonies) and a choir from the nearby village came to sing. The singing and dancing was amazing, especially when African women are able to do it all with a ‘sleeping’ baby tied on their backs! We reciprocated with a few songs we had prepared. It’s very interesting how the performances differed so much – we sang in English, they sang in Swahili; they danced, we (just about!) managed to sway and clap in time; they were accompanied by a drum, us by a guitar; they had a soloist who repeated phrases, we harmonised in parts. It’s easy to think that Africans somehow have music and rhythm in their blood – it all looks very effortless! We finished off with line dancing to some Canadian country music. I wonder what they thought about that!

Yesterday we waved goodbye to our friend, Bernadette, from Austria. She has been training with us since October, through training in the UK, Orientation here and Language School. She heads off to start her job in Dar Es Salaam and this has made us start to think about when all our Swahili buddies leave in 2 weeks time… :-(. We had her ‘graduation’ on Thursday and Matt, Olly and I performed a skit in Swahili… it went down well with many laughs! That’s one thing we are still very thankful to be able to do a lot of at the mo…