Tigers in Africa?

For the past couple of days I have spent the majority of my time working with Pete, a geography teacher from England, on putting the windows in on our brick classroom. Yesterday I woke up at 7 to go on a nice jog, because I knew it was going to be a hot day. I got back close to 8, showered up and had some breakfast, then went off to the building site until noon. I grabbed a quick bite to eat, and then went off to the 6th grade class to do a few exercises with them on their conservation class. Last week we just watched the movie “White Lion”, and talked about it briefly afterwards, but this week we had them first draw out a scene from the movie that they remembered, which was interesting because some drew a lion, porcupine, or elephant, while a couple drew a picture of a rifle. After that we had them do a word-search on some of the key terms that were mentioned in the movie. Some kids whizzed through it, while others couldn’t finish it with out peaking off the person next to them. Finally we had them work in groups of six to put together a puzzle of six different animals we cut up into pieces. We put all the different animal pieces together, mixed them around, so they would have to work together to arrange them in their proper position. We made both the word-search and then puzzle a competition, and the winners would receive more candy then the other kids. All the kids enjoyed themselves, as did I. Kate drove me back to the “hole,” which is where we eat our meals, and hang out together, so that I could board the bus to go on our excursion to Tiger Valley. At first I was very skeptical on going to see tigers in Africa, but once I was there, and John Vardy explained his reasoning for having these tigers on his property, the whole aspect began to really make sense. In short, he explained how the tiger population in Asia is diminishing every year, and while the populations in India and China continue to grow, there won’t be enough room for the tigers to survive. His future plan is to continue to expand his property to 100,000 hectors, and introduce the lion, leopard, cheetah, and hyena into his tiger populated land, because evidently these creatures once lived together in parts of Asia. There is already a lioness on his property that gets along with the other tigers, because John introduced the baby lion when one of the tigresses gave birth to a small litter. At first the mother tiger didn’t accept the baby lion, but soon after it became part of the family. I saw footage of this lion and tiger hunting together, which was spectacular to see. There were also two white tigers on the property, which was awesome to see, because there are not any other wild white tigers in the world. It was a fascinating place to see… Today I built all day with Pete, and we’re almost above the window line. Tomorrow I’ll continue working on the wall. The group before us only completed 4 rows of bricks, and I think we’ve completed about 16-20 rows… we’re cruisin’.