Me on Jacob's motorcycle

I heard Mom let me give you a ride on my motrorcycle "I laughed my a** off as I said I will only sit on it" I went home for a funeral and not my own!!!!

Surprise party

Surprise party for one of Rachell's friends we had almost 30 teenagers at the house. They all had a blast.

My female turtle she weighs about 10 kilos. And is quite large.

One of my turtles that I have she dug a hole and layed eggs (very rare to see) from what the internet said it takes from 69-241 days for the eggs to hatch depending on the temp outside......So if I dig them up and put them in the oven it should take 24 hours (kidding)...It was so cool to see this but every time I got near her she would hiss at me. They scare me.

Lemur Island

Beautiful animals

Lemur Island Madagascar

There were so many very friendly lemur's the rangers would give the kids fruit and the lemurs would climb all over the kids to get the fruit..

Pilanesberg Safari, Sun City, South Africa

Pilanesberg Game Reserve, mother hippo with baby.

Albino Lion at the Lion Park in Johannesburg, South Africa

South Africa Safari

Lepard in the Lion Park Reserve, didn't notice the fly infront of him until I was looking at the photo's at a later time.

Blast from the past

2006 Ghana Mole (Northern Region) We tried to get as close as we could to the elephents (the game park guard got so angry because I would tell the kids run up to the elephent and turn and smile so I can get a picture, and they were dumb enough to do it......Hey you have to do what you can to the shot..

Jeff and I at the Africa Unite Concert (Bob marley) concert.

Blast from the past ( ok 2006 )

OK you have to take my word on this one but this is the Africa Unite concert (Bob Marley) so in the back ground is Ziggy, Damon, and Stephen Marley. The Marley's moved to Ghana about 15 years ago and they do a concert once a year in a different country. We got to see this one in Ghana in 2006. It was UNBELIEVABLE

Sydney and friends

Miss Attitude

Since the photo was taken she has been locked up in the attic, we will let her out when she is 30.

Sydney

We did some photo's for her and her friends that were leaving for boarding school in London, they had fun putting together the scrap books for each other..

Yes.......they are still the practice models, the night before the graduation photo's for the international school.

I tried to use a stuffed animal to practice but the girls made fun of me, see how that turned out for them ;)

Rachell & Sydney

They hate when I need to practice for a photo shoot, can you tell by the nice smiles they have on their faces..At least I didn't make them get out of bed to do it this time.

The baby of the family

Miss Sydney

Looks can be deceiving, she isn't as innocent as she looks. Such a sweet teenager (when she is sleeping).......

Taken just before leaving South Africa Jan. 2009

Rachell and Nadia

Rachell and her friend Nadia a few days before Nadia left for collage.

Rachell

Messing around with a new camera and lens...

My friend's daughter "Rachell's best friend" Allie.

The wedding in the Mosque, I got to go in the prayer room at the end of the ceramony to shoot the prayer. It was unbelievable and so colorfull.

First ceremony 300+ women only.

one of the photos of the first ceremony 300+ women and a priestess that came to the house (the main Chandler is bigger then my living room and bedroom combined). It was amazing to see and watch I did learn very quickly who not to photograph (being in allot of Muslim countries its not hard to figure out). All wearing the Indian clothing and head dress.

I'm sorry it has been soooo long i've been working

Ok do most of you know of my wanting to get into photography (well i'm on my way) I hope. I finally got my personal container from South Africa with all my photography equipment, the next day the school called and wanted me to take the photos of the graduation class (thank god it was only 8 people) so with Rachell's help we got that done and It took me a few days to edit all 75 photos (yes that's right 75). But we got that done and before I had a chace to think straight I had a wedding to shoot for some kind of Indian royalty here in Madagascar. This wedding is over 1 month time 6 different celabrations at 6 different venues. The last at the local mosque here in town I got to go check it out for the lighting, WOW amazing I was blown away at the beauty of the place and of course I was told it was nothing like the mosque's in the middle east (which I've seen form a distance) in Dubai. It reminded me of the detail the LDS temple's have inside their buildings.

No evacuation, peacefull days but not nights...

No evacuation at least not for us, the U.S. ordered the evacuation of all non-emergency personal and their families last week, we had flights to get out on Friday but decided against it after alot of thought and talking. We were not in danger and if things got worse (which they didn't) we could always go. The school was on spring break last week so I guess it was a good time for a coup de' tat.
The ex-mayor (now president of madagascar) took power after the military took over, there are still rallies downtown but peaceful for now, and the riots have stopped leaving me with one store left to shop in. Thank goodness we just finished getting the house set up.

Things were back to normal so we thought, Saturday night around 1:30am we had 4 guys cut the bobwire fence in the back yard (only one guy got over the wall) thank god for a great security guard that heard something and ran back to see what the noise was all about to find a man coming over the wall and told the guard to go away so they could rob the house. Most security would have gotten scared and ran, but he ran around the house to hit the emergency button on the wall and the siren started, lights flashing and within 2 minutes we had 7 security guards here with full riot gear on running all over the yard.
It took us a few minutes to figure out what was going on before we realized how lucky we were...Jeff gave the security man a bounus of about one to two month pay for keeping us safe.

Needles to say we now have razor ribbon on all the walls, 2 extra panic buttons, security was doubled during the day and night with a dog to top it all off. We have installed lights on every wall outside the house and yes bars are going up on the windows.
But we have been very lucky for the last 9 years doing this work in these places and this is the only (hope last) time we have had problems...

This is when me and Rachell went to the grocery store and the millitary started to surround the store and the demonstraiters were trying to come in.

On to other fun things... We have chameleons all over our yard, they are wild here and we only dare to touch the small ones the big ones bite. All of our neighbors(kids) climb in the trees to find them for us and of course try to sell them to us, even though the chameleons were ours to begin with.

Madagascar on the verge of civil war, US ambassador warns.

Madagascar is on the verge of civil war, the US ambassador warned yesterday, after soldiers who support an opposition leader ousted the country's army chief.
The move came as opposition leader Andry Rajoelina, who has been locked in a three-month power struggle with President Marc Ravalomanana, said he would boycott peace talks due to start today.


We are not sure what this means for us just yet....The embassy non essential personal (wives & children) are evacuating now because they don't feel comfortable that the Madagascar government will resolve this soon (and they are a bunch of babies).
We will see if they shut the school down and if they do if we can home school, if things get worse we will be sent back to all of you until things calm down. But for now we are safe and don't feel like we are in danger this makes for interesting living, we have never been in this position before but most of our friends have been, and so far they aren't worried.

Malagasy Attitude...

Push carts are used to transport everything even people.

Over looking the rice fields in Antananarivo, Madagascar

Saturday is laundry day, everyone meets at the river (the red one in the first pictures) and scrubs all their dirty clothes and bedding..Don't know how they keep everything so white. But this is what you see all over the city.

This is the view from our living room.

The city with several small fires while the police and the local people have it out using tear gas and rubber bullets firing for several hours.

This is the city looking from our living room, the colors of the city are amazing.

We arrived at our pre-booked hotel of La Marina. The best part was the free wireless internet. We couldn't believe it when we found out.....it was actually free, Madagascar of all places. Needless to say we wasted no time in logging on and catching up with emails and stuff.
The hotel was very nice indeed. With an excellent restaurant and large sunny court yard garden where you could take your morning breakfast while surfing on the laptop!

The American International School of Antananarivo (can you say that fast 3 times) I can't, was just next door to the hotel. We had alot of visiters that came by the hotel the first 2 days to see if we had changed our minds about staying. After me asking where do we get 0ur furniture at so we can start the shoping process we were told everything had been burnt down a few days before our arrival. But there were some shops they were more expensive but atleast we had some options, but the only problem we wern't allowed to drive to them with all the road blocks the embassy had said better to stay at home until things calm down...

We had been ready to leave Johannesburg before getting the news that there was a cyclone hitting the island. But got a phone call from friends living in Madagascar informing us we might want to hold off flying in because of the Mayor trying to overthrow the government (he declared himself president) and the real president didn't want to share the position. The whole country was in the middle of a political war and burning down the stores....So we held off one more day, good thing we did the flight we were originally to be on was refused and had to turn around and fly back to Johannesburg.
We finally got to Madagascar, very excited to see the island from the plane (didn't realize how big it was) seeing all the rivers that were red flowing into the ocean.

Before leaving South Africa

We went Great White shark diving before leaving South Africa, this was one of the smaller sharks about 9 feet, the largest was 12 feet, amazing and awsome thing to do. Rachell and Sydney were having so much fun.