School talk

One of the things we do with the project here are school talks at the local schools. On Wednesday we did one in Beethsa, a village about an hour's drive to east of our camp down a very bumpy dirt road. The idea is to introduce the project to the local children and give them information about elephants.
We'd visited the school the week before and had a slightly bizarre, very formal meeting with the deputy head, someone else important, another someone else important, and finally the teacher running the Environmental Club (who we wanted to do the talk to). I asked about the possibility of filming the talk, which they said would be fine as long as I wrote a formal letter in advance requesting for permission. I did, and we dropped it off at the school a few days before the talk, and I turned up on Wednesday with my camera gear. One minute before we started, they informed me that they couldn't grant the permission to film after all. I should've applied to a district head office or something - just because there's no telephone, electricity, or even a mobile phone signal in the area doesn't mean there's no strict bureaucracy in place. The teacher apologised for not getting the word to us sooner, but sending a donkey to deliver the message would've been the only option (true).

As the filming plan went out of the window I adopted a new role of taking on a group for the exercise part of the talk. I had four questions about elephants written on a piece of paper (with no answers), and I tried to quiz my group of seven terrified children who barely spoke English. Needless to say, it didn't go exactly well, and it didn't help matters when I started off by revealing that I'd never seen an elephant. The children looked at me like in disbelief, and as soon as I'd slipped that out I realised it didn't exactly add to my credibility as an elephant expert. Hmm. It turned out that only one of the forty children in the club hadn't seen an elephant, so I' made a mental note of keeping that information just to myself in the future.

While I'm in the subject matter, I just want to clarify that there are indeed thousands and thousands of elephant around here, but it's quite rare to see them as they only come near the villages and the roads at nighttime, and during the day they hide deep in the bush. So it could well be that I won't ever see an elephant, even though I hear them almost every night and see fresh footprints every morning.

Still. I've learnt a lot about elephants in the last two weeks, and by the time of the next school talk I should be fully up to scratch. And we are doing an elephant nightwatch soon, so I might even have seen my first elephant by then.