Doing good things

Thursday at work was rather interesting. After cataloging another small collection akin to the WWF manuals (these ones were the Redbooks - lists of endangered species), Sunel said she had a project for me. We are a very small library, and as such, have a very small budget. Therefore, any money that we do spend, has to be justified that it meets the needs of facilitating education and training. This means that we don't really have a budget for entertainment, which is unfortunate for the staff and students who live here and don't have transportation to go out after work/class or on the weekends. So, it was put to me to develop a collection of fiction books for the library so that staff and students have leisure reading during their time off, which they had been requesting for some time, but alas, no budget. And there's no ILL or anything like that here, either. If we don't have it in-house, we don't have it, and you're not getting it. The key, though, is that I have to develop this collection with absolutely zero money. Good thing I'm resourceful, and know how to politely beg.

I spent the next two days (minus part of Friday which I spent putting some files into the archives) soliciting donations from local public libraries for discarded fiction books. Initially I was just going to ask for adult fiction books, but noting our involvement with the village schools near here, I wondered if I mightn't ask for some children's books too, because if we're poor, they're probably much more so. Sunel thought this was a great idea, so I had at it. I've actually had a bit of luck and some good responses so far. Next week, actually, Sunel is supposed to go out and collect a bunch of donations from one of the libraries that responded (being that I don't have a car and such), and I'm anticipating the arrival of these "new" books greatly. This is pretty much going to be my baby, my big project, of the semester, in addition to all the routine stuff, and I like the idea of that.

Both days after work I went on a sunset game drive. It was a little harder to capture the animals I saw on camera because of the fading light, but I did see a lot more of them, which I'm really happy about. Funny observation: the whole "deer in the headlights" phenomenon is worldwide. After it got dark, the impala would just stand right in front of the car, frozen in the headlights, just like North American deer, and we had to drive forward slowly with the lights off so that they would jump away from the vehicle moving toward them.

Most of my weekend I spent either cleaning house, catching up on sleep, or shooing critters out of my room. Seriously. A scorpion, a baboon spider, a baby squirrel, our resident frog, and a bat all made themselves part of my life this weekend, in addition to the normal bugs that abound. The elephants were really loud this weekend too. Gawie noted that it's probably the bull elephant we've been seeing trying to move in on some younger females, and either they don't want it and/or the older females are jealous. When elephants get mad, they don't just trumpet, they growl too, and they're incredibly loud. More than once I'd heard them and gone running to the fence to see what I could see, and they were nowhere, but I could still hear them so loudly as if they were right in front of me.

Next weekend, one of the administrators is taking a trip to town and has invited me to come along. It's nothing special, she says, but it'll get you out of the bush for a day. She wants to go get a facial and get her nails done among other girly pursuits, which seems kind of ridiculous for the part of Africa we're in and what we do here, but on some level I understand it. Sweating all the time, bugs, critters, dirt 24/7...I completely get the need to break away every once in a while and do something nice for yourself. I'd settle for a shower with more water pressure than a leaky faucet, but getting my hair done and going shopping will do just as well. I'm also hoping to go on a longer sunset game drive into the night, and farther into Kruger than I've been going, and maybe seeing a couple of big predators too.