Chipangali/The Great Zimbabwe/Dewure

     Saturday morning my alarm clock woke me up 5.10 am. It’s time to go to Chipangali. It took 5 hours to go to Chipangali by car and Seppo drove and Yvonne, Talent and I mostly slept the whole time. Heh! In Zimbabwe police writes a lot of tickets and some even say they have a certain target of how much money they have to get per day. We run to one police that fined us $10 for driving too fast. We were in a hurry so Seppo said -can we go without the receipt- and the police said -yes, but then you have to pay me $50- so we waited for him to write the receipt obviously. Seppo likes classical music and I like it as well so we listened to Beethoven, Mozart, Sibelius and Webber. The reason we left so early was that Seppo had to be on time for Viv’s funeral (he is the founder of Chipangali). When we got there we all went to the funeral because we were instructed by the staff and we didn’t want to talk against because the service had already started. So funeral service for two hours, lucky us. It was touching and the stories that told about Viv were funny. In the end they played a song that Viv liked and said to the crowd to have fun, and I did, because the song was “In the jungle a lion sleeps tonight”. It left the funeral on a happy note which was the idea.

                Animals at Chipangali are rescued one way or another and if possible they are returned to the nature when they are ready. Coolest animals were of course the lions and leopards but also Jackie the jackal was cute because it could be petted by visitors. I also got to pet a wildcat named Prince, who unfortunately liked me so much that it marked me his own THREE TIMES, if you don’t know what I mean by marking, then too bad. After that I went to shower and then we ate with the family who runs Chipangali. I didn’t have time to pet lions because of the shortage in time but when we go back in three weeks they said I could pet lions then and maybe one of the leopards as well. I can’t wait!

                Sunday morning we left 7.30 am to visit the Great Zimbabwe which includes ruins and a museum. The ruins are up high and Seppo lead us with the pace of an army commander and at least I felt exhausted. When finally up we took some photos and Seppo told us about the place. When down we went to see the museum which had explained the time of the ruins and how it was made. There was also a vault which contained, I think, 9 statues of a bird (kalasääski) and one of them is portrayed in the Zimbabwe’s flag. Seppo told that some Zimbabweans consider that place as the most sacred place in Zim. One of the statues is still in Cape Town, but they are trying to get it at Great Zimbabwe as well as the others.

                After that we went to visit Dewure which is a boarding school that we have 33 students in. Talent and Yvonne might go there next year so that’s why they were with us. While Seppo had one on one conversations with the kids, I played with others. They were so nice and it’s sad that I won’t see them more than maybe once after this because they don’t have holidays until the 7^th of December. I think they liked games I knew, and I think I learned new games from them.  

I do not like computers because I find more and more problems of trying to start teaching ABC English & Me program. And I should be ready tomorrow, whhhaa, I am not ready, I don’t even have a puppet (which I am btw gonna call Maria)

 

Laura