Elephant Orphanage

The elephant orphanage cares for babies who are motherless.  One of the  elephants was only 3 days old and was rescued  as it was being attacked by lions.  The mother had been shot for the ivory tusks.

Marje liked petting the elephants, who look up at you with their big eyes. 

Baby bottles all lined up for feeding time.  Visitors are only allowed in in one hour per day to view the feeding time. Elephants are very sensitive and can become very attached to caregivers.

The "babies" sleep in these stalls.  The bunk is for one of the caregivers to sleep with them.  The babies need to be feed every 3 hours.  They are kept here until 3 years old when they are ready to be reintroducted into the wild. The care givers rotate sleeping in the stalls with different animals, again to prevent them becoming too attached to just one caregiver. 

Look how well they line up!

Oh how I love reading the signs. 

One of the older babies, about 2 1/2 years, will make a good mother.  She takes  on a protective role with  new comers.

International School of Kenya

I spent several day at ISK at a teachers conference.  The campus as huge, the enrollement is almost double that of my school in Dakar.  Each grade is housed in these circular "pod", which contains 4 classrooms each.
The school had a nice outdoor pool, but my luggage never arrived, so alas, no swim suit.  The school is in the suburbs.  The weather when I was there was great.  Nairobi is much cleaner than Dakar.

Market place in Nairobi

The outdoor markets are always so colorful.  Everyone is trying to sell you something, will give me a good price, "you're my first customer of the day, so it will bring me good luck, so I give you very good price."

Normally I love the fabrics, but I think they are better in West Africa.  The woven bag that I got I thought was one of the best crafts that they had--and not available in West Africa. 

This chain of supermarkets always had this elephant at the entrance. 

Leaving the mall!

France summer 2011--Cite d'Aigues-Mortes

Visited the ancient city which was founded in 100 AD.  Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) rebuilt the port in the 13th century as France's only Mediterranean port at that time. It was the embarkation point of theSeventh Crusade (1248) and the Eighth Crusade (1270). (links to wikipedia)

City center, with statue of Saint Louis, king of France who launched  the 7th and 8th  crusades. 

The town isn't actually on the mediterranean, so canals were built for access to the sea. 

The 1,650 meters of city walls were built in two phases: the first during the reign of Philippe III the Bold and the second during the reign of Philippe IV the Fair, who had the enclosure completed between 1289 and 1300. The Constance Tower, completed in 1248, is all that remains of the castle built in Louis IX's reign. It was designed to be impregnable with six-meter-thick walls. A spiral staircase leads to the different levels of the tower.

From 1575 to 1622, Aigues-Mortes was one of the eight safe havens granted to the Protestants. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 caused severe repression of Protestantism, which was marked in Languedoc and the Cévennes in the early 18th century by the "Camisard War". Like other towers in the town, from 1686 onwards, the Constance Tower was used as a prison for the Huguenots who refused to convert to Roman Catholicism. In 1703, Abraham Mazel, leader of the Camisards, managed to escape with sixteen companions.

My protestant grandfather from Northern Ireland had French Huguenots roots.  The family name had been  "Roche" until his grandfather , who fought in the Napoleonic wars and was wounded at the battle of Waterloo, changed it to Rock.  The family history does not go back any further than this great, great, grandfather. I have no idea where the family was from in France, so it might have been here.