Education Day!

Today was the celebration of "Education Day" - an initiative by UNICEF with the motto, "Let all children go to school!"  This is obviously a noble cause, and since I haven't shown my face at the Ministry of Education yet, and since Lynne, who's visiting with us and helping out with some education work wanted to go... I went along to the celebration today.  The celebration was being held at the Cultural Centre, which is only a couple of "blocks" from our compound.  It was meant to start at 8:50am.  Lynne, who's never been to these sorts of things before, didn't want to be late.  Um, right.  Late.  I managed to convince her that we didn't have to leave our house before 9am. 

So around 9am, we were munching on some breakfast... and we heard a bit of a scruffle in the bottom kitchen cupboard.  We both turned around just in time to see Zane, the mighty hunter, emerge from the cupboard with a tiny rodent in his mouth!  I tried to chase him out of the house with his prize, but he was adamant about taking it under my bed... I didn't bother chasing him because that would just make it all worse :(  But just a few minutes later, Zane emerged from my room and went straight back into the cupboard... where we heard some more commotion.  And he emerged triumphantly once again with a rather large rodent in his mouth... and promptly went straight under my bed.

Here's a photo of the mighty hunter after consuming his feast. I  couldn't get him to show you his mighty fangs, but at least he's sticking his tongue out!

And just because he's so cute, here's another whilest sleeping off his feast.

At the same time all of this was going on, I noticed yet another wild-life related cool thing in our house:

This guy is about 3 - 4 inches across and has been hanging out on our screened in verandah all day!  He's a moth, but looks exactly like the leaves that he happens to be perched nearby.  I've never seen anything like this before, ever.  Cool, eh?

Right, so once all that fun was finished, it was around 9:30, so we headed over to the cultural centre to see if anything was going on yet.

Nope.  Not yet.  But we got to sit down and wait.  And I did my PR and greeted several people that I know from the Ministry.  And then we waited.  And waited.  And guess what we did then?  We waited some more.

Eventually, things got under way with some songs and a few poem recitations from some of the school children.

And lots and lots of speeches by various officials.

We had super good seats - second row!  So I couldn't sneak out early :(  But at least we were seated pretty much directly under a big ceiling fan, which helped keep us a bit cooler for the next 4 hours that we were planted there.  The Minister made a nice speech about the value of mother tongue education and how we need to work hard to implement the language policy.  I heartily agree with him on that point, of course!  I wish I could have written his speech, though.  Maybe I should travel around the world and market myself as a speech-writer to government officials who are advocating for mother tongue based bilingual education :) 

Anyway, the Education Day celebrations ended peacefully and on a high note with a little brass band from the police service, who weren't going to let us go away without hearing from them!

On the way back to the compound, we took a detour through a market which has sprung up in the open field behind where the old market used to be, a few years ago.  I was amazed to see how much of a market had sprung up!  You can buy most basic things there - onions, tomatoes, greens, garlic, lentils, and we even went far enough along to find a few pineapples and some bananas.  So I'm quite happy that these things are available within walking distance once again, instead of having to get in the car and drive to a market!

By the time we got back to the compound, I was pretty sweaty, hot and hungry!  A quick slather of margarine and garlic on some bread in the oven, plus some tomato and cucumber salad, and I was good to go back to work... once the generator was switched on, that is, since the electricity left us for several hours today, too!