Keep on Smiling

This week's post and photo come courtesy of Brother Tony. He sends a monthly email newsletter that gives updates on his travels, projects and what's been happening at the school over the previous month.

Big news this month! He and his team have been working for the past several years toward transitioning the school to a solely secondary educational institution and they continue to make great strides toward this goal. They have begun the placement of the younger students in other local primary schools in order to provide a secondary school that will have the ability to educate all of the secondary students in the area. 

St. Francis Secondary School will soon reach this goal, with incoming classes of students grades 8 to 12 beginning in January 2011. Congrats Brother Tony!

This month's letter ended with the following P.S.

"When in the States I shopped around for a dust-mop (not found in Zambia) and came with this Walmart yellow mop in my case. When Grade 8 Susan came to my room to return borrowed books, I put the mop on her head. She looked so well I asked her if I could take the photo and send it out on the email. I hesitate now to use the mop on the floor. The girls love to model it."

Modeling photo #2

Eunice

Snapshots

These are just a few of the many photos I took of random details from our trip.

The Zambia sky is radiant and expansive. I can still see it in my mind's eye. We traveled across many miles of flat land and in most places you could actually see to a horizon line--no skyscrapers, no jets, none of the usual distractions. And no smog to dull the colors of crisp ivory clouds painted on a vibrant indigo sky.  

These pigs live at the Franciscan mission where Bro Tony lives and I visited them every day while we stayed there. They were an entertaining bunch for sure. They would noisily greet me as I walked up, putting their snouts in the air and tripping over each other to get to the gate. They quickly lost interest in me, however, when they realized I wasn't there to feed them. So cute.

I was intrigued by the variety and colors and textures of the vegetation in Zambia. This is actually a banana plant, which I had never seen before. They are gorgeous.

Pure Magic

It's nearly impossible to describe the experience of being on safari. All of your senses are engaged and heightened, because you are seeing so many amazing and unusual animals in their natural surroundings; feeling the cool stillness of the air at dawn; hearing all of the sounds of the outdoors: insects, exotic birds and countless animals I couldn't possibly name; and seeing up-close the fine details of the trees, vegetation, water, flowers of such a vast and unique landscape.


We would be driving along and suddenly someone would point and say "Look! Over there!" The truck would stop and a hush would fall over the group. And in pure silence, we would sit in awe of whatever majestic creature we were fortunate enough to have cross our path. 







Sometimes the animals would acknowledge us and sometimes they wouldn't, but they rarely approached or ran away.

Every part of being on safari was so full of anticipation and possibility. That has to be one of my favorite parts of that experience. The way it made us all little kids again - reveling in the pure magic and wonder of it all.