Elephant Hunters

This past weekend was the most fun we’ve had since we’ve been in Burkina Faso. We went with Emily and Jesse to Nazinga Ranch to see lots of African animals! This game park doesn’t have many of the animals I grew up seeing in Southern Africa, like lions, zebras, and giraffes, but they do have elephants, so I was determined to see lots of them!

It took us about 3 ½ hours to drive to Nazinga in a truck we borrowed from the Baptist Mission. Here we are at the entrance to the park:

This is the hut we slept in on Friday night:

A painting of a crocodile decorated one wall!

Friday evening as we drove in we saw a few animals, and Saturday morning a guide showed us how to navigate the back roads of the park. Most of the time we stayed in the truck, but at one point we climbed to an observation point and looked out over the border with Ghana. We saw a long train of elephants walk past in the distance.

Here are some of the animals we saw:

Warthogs … aka African punk rockers (so dubbed because of the mohawks on their backs)

Antelope


Baboons (you have to look really hard to see it behind the trees -- the baboons were kind of camera shy!)

And lots and lots of elephants very up close and personal! Here we are in an observation hut close to a lake where the elephants come to take a daily swim. We saw about 20 elephants at once!

After their bath, the elephants actually walked up through camp and started eating leaves off the trees right next to people’s huts. Look how close we got to one of them!



If these pictures don’t make you want to come to Africa, I don’t know what will! Along with great wildlife, West Africa has lots of needs you can help fill. This year we need over 4,000 volunteer to participate in mission projects that last anywhere from a few days to a few months. You can visit
http://www.gowestafrica.org/gosend/go.htm to check out our Volunteer Requests. There’s more opportunities than we could possibly list here, and we guarantee you’ll read a request that will make you think, “I could do that.” We ask you to prayerfully consider how God might be calling you to join Him in His work in West Africa.