Wet, Wet, Wet

Rhinoceros Hornbill taken by Patrick Wright

Apologies for being rather late this week. It has been a very damp weekend and is continuing to pour as I write. I believe from what I can gather from the satellite images that Sabah is on the edges of a cyclone going through the south of the Philippines. Borneo is known as the "Land Below the Wind" as it usually manages to avoid the worst of the typhoon and cyclones that the Philippines and Japan and Korea seem to get.... but not this time! I do feel so sorry for the tourists though who have only maybe a week to "do " Sabah and I met a lovely Catalonian couple who had spent 4 wet days at a beach resort and now will be spending 2 days in KK and then back to Spain without a glimpse of the sun!

Pygmy Elephant by Patrick

 It was of course the start of the very important Muslim festival on Sunday of Eid al-Adha which is to commemorate the prophet Abraham's (or Ibrahim) sacrifice of his son to God, which of course thankfully was avoided by a sheep being replaced. This is a festival when cows, sheep, goats are slaughtered for a huge feast which is always shared with  people who are in need such as the sick, old and poor. However because of the torrential rain I saw very little evidence of people in their gorgeous bright bajus and "pyjamas" as I suspect everyone was inside trying to keep dry.

Gibbon by Patrick

  Last week we had a visit from a consultant from the National Foundation of Education Research who is going to be the external monitor of our project and I was in charge of taking her to visit one of the project schools and then she ran a workshop on hierarchical card sorting which is a technique used in evaluating and monitoring projects such as ours, which I'd never heard of - another new thing to learn! Which brings me onto 2 courses that I'm doing online with Coursera, which I've only recently discovered, which don't cost anything unless you want a certificate, and I've embarked on Coaching Teachers and Supporting Children with difficulties in Reading and Writing. They both seem very good and I've mostly been watching short videos which isn't too difficult!

Marble cat (photo from internet)

  My last ramble of the week is that I had a wildlife moment on Saturday which is rare here as apart from an odd sighting of a snake or monitor lizard, it is not an everyday occurrence. I was driving down a road and two kittens tried to run across in front of me. One made it and thankfully wasn't touched by the car and the other turned back into the undergrowth. The difference between domestic and wild cats is obviously very slight but the markings on these kittens were amazing and I would like to hazard an amateur guess that they were marble cats, which I have seen in the dark before but that is the first time close up in daylight.... very exciting!

Oriental Hornbill by Patrick