Preparation and Exploration

It is the night before the grand opening of our new Education Centre! Everyone is super excited, although all of us are also pretty exhausted from the last few days of preparation. McKay, Gina, and Grace have been busy taping out and spray-painting our Eli Africa logo across the wall, while the rest of us have been upheaving boulders from beneath our new garden, and I may have accidentally electrocuted myself a couple times while trying to remove a light from the wall. We want to make sure the centre makes children excited to learn but also challenges the traditional classroom setting. Classes will take place beneath our many banana trees, on mats in our main room, in cushy chairs of what we like to think of as our brainstorming room. Vedant is pumped about his project of a mini-ecosystem in a fish tank, and Gina is busy planning our new pond.
Besides being hard at work all throughout the day, we have had several extremely exciting evenings in the last week. McKay managed to get all of us invited to the huge Hindu wedding across the street, which lasts a total of five days! The festivities can be heard from our house, and consists of constant music and ritual, with many nights of ever-flowing drink and food. We all dressed up one night for the big dinner, and thanks to one of our generous volunteers, Sharuna, all of the girls wore gorgeous, traditional Indian wedding garb. The food was prepared in the traditional Mauritian style, served on a banana leaf, and was absolutely delicious. Everything is eaten with your hands, scooped up by hot naan. Hopefully we didn’t disgrace ourselves too much with our lack of appropriate manners. The beauty of the clothing was overwhelming, and the Indian music was lovely.
In addition, we had an eventful team-building camping trip on the shore of the lagoon last night. Vedant barbecued us some amazing chicken and lamb prepared in his own blend of spices, and we built a bonfire on the sand and bonded over one of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. We woke up to a picturesque view of a horse and rider galloping through the water across to one of the top ten resorts in the whole continent of Africa. We were quite proud of the fact that we shared the same view as tourists who pay thousands per night.
Hopefully posts will come more often when we finally get our wi-fi this week! But as for now, it is time for some final preparations for our opening lessons tomorrow, and some much needed rest.