Fw: Invitation to join the Homeschool Teen Community Service Group

Word!  We've been invited.  Their first project for the year is happening next Thursday.  We are meeting to make paper mache Tiger Toys.  What is a tiger toy?  Its a brown paper mache ball filled with meat.  The lions and tigers down at our local reserve get served their meals as such.  So they can "kill" them, ripping and shredding, before eating.  You can just feel how satisfying that might be for a big bored cat.

I asked our Africanner friend Elsje to explain to me how its okay, growing up in a land where lions and tigers live.  She was dismissive.  "Oh sure, you get used to it.  You learn to deal with them.  For one thing, you always hear the lion roar when he's moving into new territory.  And that sound travels for miles, so you know if you're near a lion.  Also you watch the springboks and other animals.  They'll let you know if predators are nearby."  Right, I was slightly unconvinced.  

So she went on to explain, "For instance, once our class (of middle schoolers) was taken on a fabulous camping trip.  Oh it was so fun!  We saw all kinds of cool things.  Then we set up tents, built a fire, and put meat on the barbie.  Then, uh-oh, we heard the lion roar.  So, all the bushmen hired to take care of us told us to 'hurry children, into you your tents AND DO NOT COME OUT'."   Here, I was very unconvinced.  I ask you, in your TENTS?   

"Sure," Elsje says, "And then here comes the lion and we are in our tents and the fire throws his shadow onto the walls of our tents as he walks by. Oh, it was SO COOL!  Then he took our meat and left and that was that.  They really are lazy old boogers, those lions."   Now I am dramatically unconvinced.  But pish posh to lions, Elsja basically says.  Then she adds thoughtfully, "but a pride of lionesses?  Now they scare me."  And that was the full story of growing up on the African plains in Namibia with big cats.  Are y'all as reassured as I?