Bana Ba Metsi's 10 year anaversary (mike)

Bana BA Metsi 10th year anniversary
Our trip started at 6oclock on Friday morning as we sat at the side of the road waiting for a lift that we had arranged for night before with a woman that we did not know, she was going to take us all the way to Bana Ba Metsi, when she arrived her car was packed with food (mainly cabbages) for the ceremony the smell was strong to say the least, we settled in for the long journey, when we arrived at Shakaway (over ¾ of the way ) we stopped to pick up food for the weekend, as we came out of the shop a convoy of government cars drove passed it turned out it was the president who was also attending the ceremony, we clambered back into the car and headed for the ferry crossing which is the only way across the river, we were lucky that there was no queue the ferry as you can wait for up to 3 hours as the ferry can only take 3 cars across at a time, the ferry has two small motors attached to the back so it is not the fastest thing in the world but crossing is always nice the scenery is beautiful, on the other side it is a further 40ks of dirt road, only two weeks beforehand we had been up here in a two whiled drive car and spend about 20ks going sideward’s down the road, but because of the president coming they had tried to fix the unfixable road and it was better than I have ever seen it (still un-passable by British standards) we arrived at Bana Ba Metsi and found the other two boys ( Tom& Darren) we dumped our stuff in there house and I went to work with Darren we had to collect vast amounts of fire wood as the cooks had to start cooking at 5 in the morning (we had to get up at 4 to get them) all the way till the evening so a lot of wood was required, Darren, I and one of the groups of boys (the boys are split into work groups to get more work done) filled the buky up at least 4 times driving further into the bush each time to find dead/ fallen wood to load up, by the end of Friday we were all exhausted and crashed out by a small fire and chatted, Darren and I were up at 4 to go collect the woman that were cooking the food, when we got back we decided to get some sleep, as we went back to bed Tom and Gordon had to get up to go and mark out parking spots for the cars that would be turning up. No sooner than we had lay down to get some shut eye some of the boys came and said that we were needed to drive and collect some people so that they could look around the centre before the ceremony started, as we left I was dragged off to help Tom usher in cars full of government executives, we had cleared a path thought he bush the previous day leading to the football pitch were the president would be landing his helicopter, so as we were trying to park these cars there were BDF (Botswana deafens force) hurtling around the bush in there 4*4 with mounted machine guns on the back it was quit amusing as they had got bored waiting around and were racing each other on marked out courses. Eventually the president flew himself and his family in from the local BDF camp and was escorted thought the bush by several heavily armed cars, by the time we had finished all our jobs the ceremony was under way so we stood at the back and tried to watch, we kept getting pulled away to sort out any problems that occurred through the day which was alright to start with as we missed the speeches which I have always found boring but as the day got on and the heat picked up we were getting sick and tired of walking around dressed smartly doing dirty jobs, luckily we did not miss some of the traditional dancing and Darren playing his bag pipes for the president, there was a film grew there from the Botswana major news company and two days later Darren was on the local news with a video of him playing his pipes. After the president had left and we had dropped most of the gests (500) at the ferry we came back and decided to go swimming with the boys which is always fun as I have said before they just want to drown you, and after we got out we organised a staff vs students football match which was highly entertaining as we could cheat and they could not we won 5-4 but only because of a spectacular dive from Tom which conceded a penalty. That night we surprised the kids with fire works which they when mental over, when the kids went to bed the celebrations of a successful event and the stresses of the passed few weeks were relived started for the older generation, needless to say we were all feeling fragile in the morning, then it was time to head home.