The children slept in small tents dotted throughout the guest house garden .....
In the afternoons they had 'free time' & would play ball games and 'hide & seek' in the guest house garden We recently hosted one of the local schools out to our farm for a 2 night field trip. There were around 65 kids in total, plus around 10 teachers who accompanied them. The children were aged around 10 years, and came from schools in 2 different Tanzanian towns.
They all camped up at our farm guest house (you can read a post I wrote about our guest house, and see more photo's of it over here). The children slept in small 2-4 man tents in the garden - as did some of the teachers, and I think that a few of the teachers slept in the guest house (I don't blame them !)
The school came with their own kitchen tent which was pitched at the back of the guest house (which has it's own fenced garden) and a team of cooks - all 3 meals a day were prepared 'bush style' on open fires for the kids and served in a 'dining' tent. They even had special 'toilet' tents set up at the back of the garden ('long drop' style but not quite as primitive as the toilets I showed you over here last year !)
The kids had a great time on the farm, splitting in to smaller study groups and taking part in various activities/going on outings on both our farm and in the surrounding areas. Hubby got to take a small group around and discuss 'Commercial Farming' with them, followed by a picnic afterwards and our daughter got to join in on all of this (aswell as many of their 'free time' activites), which she of course loved !
This group of pupils, in a few years time when they are a little older, will eventually have a school field trip which involves climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and the teachers were telling me that small field trips like the one they held at our farm - which involve things like pitching their own tents, using bush kitchen and toilet facilities and sleeping out under the stars - are an introduction to what they will experience when they climb Kilimanjaro one day.
Interestingly, the youngest person to ever (illegally) summit Mt. Kilimanjaro was a boy aged 7. The minimum youngest age to (legally) climb the mountain is 10 (and this record is currently held by someone, too) and the oldest person to ever summit was a 79 year old man.
Crazy ! Crazy ! The whole lot of them.
And .... did you hear about the lady who holds the world record for gazing at Kilimanjaro from her back garden every day for the past 5 years and repeating to friends/family 'I will never climb that mountain, so don't even ask !' She has a blog and did have everyone - momentarily - fooled though, when she wrote this post last year.
