Goodbyes and hellos

It's been a funny week. Very busy again with lots of different projects to manage. Very quiet around site now the kids have gone back to school.

On Monday night a small group of us headed out for a final meal with Josh (pictured on the right of Matthias) before he headed back to the UK on Wed. There's an Italian restaurant chain called 'Primi Khaya' which he loved and so we went there.

In a mere 6 weeks, Josh managed to fire a passion for rugby into the boys at GGA, he brought kit and enthusiasm from Warwick School. He also levelled a whole area of land and created a tennis court, basketball, netball and volleyball courts and also got official rugby posts and soccer nets. In addition to that he designed and arranged for special posts to be built to be multi-functional for basketball, netball, tennis and volleyball nets. They are quite amazing and maybe will be the next big thing in sport! In his spare time he managed to jump off Oribi Gorge with a bungee and out of a plane to skydive over Durban, catch a zebra being eaten by 12 lions on camera and create the perfect pizza combo at Primi Khaya.

All in all, a successful time. He will be missed. He'll be back.

But a new arrival has taken up my evenings now in the form of Thembalina, a mixed race kitten (tabby and ginger). Three kittens were dumped on the wire fence outside preschool this morning and were rescued by the teachers. We managed to give one away to a parent whose own cat had recently died. One of our teachers took one and that left little Thembalina who makes up for the fact that Tubbles was merely with tapeworm rather than with child.

My original plan with the original (yet non-existent) kittens was to introduce the children at GGA to them so that they learn about how cats grow and behave and learn to respect them. Plus the kitten will grow to love children if exposed to them enough, in a safe way where they are not terrified. So Thembalina will fill this role nicely.

She's about 4 weeks old, so too young to go outside. I'm keeping her in until I can get her to a vet for a checkup. Then when she's big enough we'll venture to the playground and find those eager boys who want to look after her. Kittens are supposed to sleep 16 hours a day, I hope she doesn't decide to play in the middle of the night, she's already scratched me stupid... Hmm, some training will be required... After 2 hours of manic racing round, she's currently asleep on my lap. As she's about the length of my hand, she looks teeny next to the mighty and rotund Tubbles, who wasn't too impressed about this little upstart moving in on her territory. A lot of hissing and arching of backs has given way to a bit of growling. Give them a few days, they'll be fine. I hope. Thembalina is a mixed-race name for a mixed-race cat... Themba means 'hope' in Zulu and '-lina' is Italian for 'little'. But it also sounds a lot like Thumbelina, who was tiny too.

It's my weekend off tomorrow and I'm going to take a short break this time to somewhere nearby. That way I can make it to church on Sunday. Going to stay in a guesthouse that looks like it's been taken straight out of Stratford and placed in the Midlands Meander village of Hilton. Mock Tudor, est.1938 (authentic Tudor then?!?!) . The thing about working for nearly 2 weeks without a break is that by this point I am nearly always verging on totally exhausted and it takes me the whole weekend to recover and relax! These past 2 weeks have been long and particularly stressful, although I can't really pinpoint exactly why... I'll be writing my next newsletter this weekend too, so look out for that next week.