A visit from the family

Ahhh,

I'm writing this feeling blue because my parents and brother just left after ten wonderful days (my sister and uncle left last Wednesday, but it is all sinking in now) . I had forgotten how nice it is to spend time with my family and now its another 7 months until I see them again. But that is the nature of this year.

We started our time together in Etosha, where we saw many more animals, including mating lions, a family of rhinos, a leopard and an elephant (my family saw 22 elephants on the last day, but Sinead and I left early to go shopping- doh). We also spent some good time looking at the stars, since my Dad had brought me a southern hemisphere star book and was really excited about using his new binoculars to find nebulas and look at Jupiter.

From Etosha we headed back to Outapi, and I got to stay in the luxury Outapi Town Lodge instead of my humble abode. It was really nice to have a toilet and a hot shower every morning. Everyone took turns coming and talking to my classes, which was a huge hit. One class was really upset because they never got a good chance to talk to my family. I had some of my classes prepare questions for them, and although I'm not sure how much the kids learned from it, I think everyone had fun and at the end of most of the classes we took turns singing.

At the end of the week we headed off to the Kunene River Lodge, which is very close to us, but the road is very rough so it took quite a while to get there. The lodge is an idyllic spot, stuck among huge trees on the banks of a pretty big river by Namibian standards. On Saturday we went rafting down the biggest rapids I've ever done- my Dad and I were the only ones without a guide, and we did pretty well despite not really knowing what we were doing. Then today we had to say goodbye and its off to another week of teaching. It will be really good to see them again in December