Week 48, and it's going faster with every week! In precisely 1 month (and 5 hours!) I'll be landing back at Heathrow airport after a full 24 hours of travelling and then it's just the long drive home. This has been a very enjoyable week, and we've got a lot done, but I'm afraid to say that when typing it up it sounds very unproductive and quite tedious! We just didn't see much! Also sorry for the lack of pictures again, I'm really struggling with getting photos off my camera!

My week started with Bird Survey on Zambezi Drive and Minefields Drive. We got some pretty cool species including kingfishers, doves, francolins, babblers, tchagras, swallows, buntings, bee-eaters, hornbills, vultures, storks and lapwings. We counted a total of 29 species in our session, then went off looking for giraffes and elephants but we didn't find any. That fairly well sums up our attempts at finding elephants this week!All 3 of our elephant and giraffe sessions only produced a couple of giraffes and no eles. Afternoon Game Count was fun but it was pretty much entirely warthogs and impala. Never mind - I may complain about them now, but not much longer that I'll have them everywhere! That happened with both of our game counts, seeing only a couple of giraffes and kudu during each.

Thursday morning we went out for a Snare Sweep at the golf course at Elephant Hills hotel. The hotel puts out salt licks and obviously the grass and vegetation is constantly watered so it's very attractive to animals. This makes it a lovely course, but unfortunately also very attractive to poachers too. Having said that, we found no snares! Had a nice walk though!

Did more community work than normal this week, going to Monde School to teach volleyball as well as doing seedling project and litter pick. When we arrived at the school there were about 200 children waiting for us and getting very excited as we climbed out of the car! Trying to organise them was something of a nightmare, particularly since there was a whole lot of shouting and they were all trying to ambush those of us carrying equipment so they could go off and play. We eventually managed to divide into football, rugby, volleyball and then the small ones just playing simpler games and running around. I took the grade 4 and 5 girls for volleyball, and we quickly got the net set up and split the group into 4 teams, 2 with me and 2 with another volunteer. Since we only had one net, we swapped which groups were using it about halfway through. Only being there for 2 hours meant we had to jump through skills pretty quickly, but I got them to do catch-push volleys decently, some not bad digging, and then passing to each other with 3 touches on either side of the net. Unfortunately they couldn't seem to understand that the ball didn't have to go in the same order every time, or that they were playing against each other! It was more of a nice game of catch between 6 of them while the others stood back and watched. When I tried to get them to mix it up, the other 6 passed it very nicely 1-2-3-over between them and the first 6 stood back and watched! Trying to teach children who don't speak great English and aren't confident enough to say when they don't understand, is not the easiest thing I've had to do here! They were starting to get bored (unsurprising when there was no apparent element of competition to their throw and catch game!) so I decided to give them a go at hitting, first just at the ground, then over the net. This actually went quite well, particularly aided by 2 teachers who seemed to know what they were doing and spoke Ndebele, and we did quite well until we tried to bring in blocking and even the teachers couldn't explain that they had to stand at the net and try to stop the ball coming over by jumping with their hands in the air! We then swapped off the net and spent the rest of the time either practicing volleying and digging more, having some fun serving against a wall, and generally playing a game of How Long Can We Keep The Ball Off The Floor. They seemed to really enjoy it, and found it hilarious that I decided (considering the sand was sodden it was effectively beach volleyball) to join them playing bare foot! They sang us songs before we left, then it was home for an afternoon of elephant IDs.