Paintball to welcome the newbies!

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Ahh today is another day of good-byes unfortunately and these people are going to be really hard to say good bye to since I've worked with them so closely for two weeks! I'll remember each and everyone of them forever. But first I have to take care of the lions this morning. Nothing interesting happened, they were all sleeping today, but I did get to feed Joshy his bottle. It was just a little hard because there were only 3 people in our group to do all the work, but we got it done of course!

After breakfast, I said goodbye to Alex because she was going down to the cabins early and I wouldn't be able to talk to her before I got back from meat prep. I tried to get someone else to go to meat prep for me because I always go, but she said no, she didn't want to miss saying good bye to one person, which I just think is stupid because I certainly didn't want to miss saying goodbye to all of my friends of two weeks when she's just known them for one. That is exactly what happened. Because we were teaching a new person how to do it, it took 2 hours and I didn't get back up to the restaurant until 1130 and everyone left at 11 to the airport. I was so upset, I should have made it back in time and I can't believe I didn't get to say goodbye to any of my friends so i went outside and cried for a little while. You just get so close to everyone because you work all day together and spend most of your nights together as well.

After lunch I went in with the lions once again, but a Hebrew handling came in and I needed to leave because there were too many people so I went up to the restaurant just in time to see a big group of 13 people come in to do a lion handling. You obviously can't have that many people in at once so we had to break it up into groups of 3 people and one group of 4. But the Israeli people had more handlings so I went with them instead to the tigers, who were well behaved, and then to the hyenas, who were not so well behaved. We had to stand outside the enclosure until we could get them to calm down so that the people could go in there. They calmed down a little but it was still a pretty short handling.

After that was done, I went back up to the restaurant because it was so cold and rainy and windy. I hate this kind of weather because the animals don't behave. After like 30 minutes of just chilling in the restaurant, the new people have arrived! The reason I know this is because there is a huge comotion outside. One of the volunteers is returning and so Ashley and Delano decided they were going to hit him with the paintball gun. I only caught the end of it but it was hilarious. Delano was the one to start it, but he was the only one who didn't get hit! Josh got hit in the leg, Tim (the volunteer) got hit in the crotch. Finally Ashley got hit in the shoulder and then in the last second, Time hit him in the ass. That was hilarious. If I was the new volunteers, I would probably be terrified, but that's exactly how the guys are, which makes volunteering so much more fun! We welcome them all and try to figure out their names but there were like 7 of them and I got too overwhelmed and only learned like 2 of them!

They were chillin in the restaurant, but we had to do meat prep, since I had done meat prep this morning, I was supposed to go get a leg, but I can't carry it all the way up, so I had Jake go get it for me 😊 The rest of meat prep went nice and smooth, we had great meat! I showed Meghan how to do the sanctuary and that was all we needed to do for the night.

Once we all got back to our cabins, we chilled in the communal for a while and all the new volunteers came in and we just watched a movie, the dictator. It was not very good and I actually fell asleep during the movie, only to wake up at the end to walk to my room and fall back asleep. Its just so exhausting here that its always an early night for me.

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