Awards, Chiefs, Crocs

In the past few weeks I have gotten to go out of Daktari on some interesting small trips. One of course was the ChildLine presentation that I wrote about in my last post. Then this previous Friday we went to the town of Polokwane, about a three hour drive away, to attend an Early Childhood Development Awards ceremony presented by the SA government and funded by Absa bank (one of the biggest banks in SA). We have applied for a grant from Absa ourselves, and were invited by the woman who runs their Corporate Social Investment to attend this ceremony to see some of the other work they do and to meet other people working with children in the area. I was allowed to come along mostly because of my connection to ECD, and it was a really interesting ceremony. It was a very glamorous affair with nice tablecloths and a full lunch, etc. What's really weird about things in this country is that punctuality is just not expected. We were, of course, on time around 10am for an event which was supposed to run from 10am to noon. We sat at our table and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually, around an hour and a half later, they got started. With no apologies, and not even a reference to how late they were. It is kind of unreal in a cultural awareness type of way. The rest of the ceremony varied between interesting and boring, but what was cool is that it is a ceremony to award the best creches and practitioners in Limpopo, so it was actually oddly related to the work I was doing in Bloem!

Then this morning I got to go into The Oaks village and meet the Chief! Didn't know I would ever be appealing to the chief of an African village, but that's what we did today. Risette and Thabo and I left around 7:15am and drove to the village for an 8am visit with the Chief. We were visiting to ask him if he would support Daktari and especially our Outreach Program. He was an older man, around 70, surrounded by about 10 men and two women who made up his committee. Thabo translated for us into Sepedi as we described what we do here and asked for his support. Ideally we would love if he would attend any ceremonies we do in his village or at the high school, and if he would sign a letter of support that we can add to our letters of support from the municipality in our proposal for sponsors. It was a short meeting (with surprisingly no waiting!) and he agreed to support us, which was great.

Today, while the kids were at Makalali, I got to help feed our two new baby crocodiles. They don't usually eat when it's cold because they're cold-blooded and don't have enough energy to digest when it's cold outside. If they eat when it's cold for too long they can even get sick as the undigested food rots in their stomach. Gross, huh? Anyway we have a volunteer here now who is really good with reptiles, and she helped show us how we can help them eat. We basically rubbed small dead mice all over their faces until they ate. All in a day's work!

I'm looking forward to a big driving trip down to St. Lucia and Durban with one of my fellow volunteers next week, my first real traveling since I've been here! I will take loads of pictures!