At precisely 11 a.m. on Tuesday and in a national park called Lake Mburo (pronounced M-bore-o), five animals met for tea.

Precisely, the park is in western Uganda, which is a country in Africa, which is one of seven continents in the world. Africa is across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States.

Precisely, the animals meeting are Rhino (rhinoceros), Leo (lion), Ellie (elephant), Lepo (leopard), and Z (zebra). On this day, they sit around a table as they had been doing for four years. The table was really a log. The chairs were tree stumps.

They meet secretly and away from their herds, which is the name that Rhino and other rhinoceroses and Ellie and other elephants call their families; from the pride that Leo calls his family of other lions; from the leap that Lepo and other leopards are referred to in a group; and from Z's family of zebras that are known as zeal.

On the table is tea, which there is plenty of in Uganda. It is not the kind of tea that is put with water and poured from a pitcher into cups that are difficult to hold without spilling. To be precise, this tea is pointed, leathery brown leaves stacked high and plentiful. Tea leaves are simply a reason for the weekly gatherings for talk about the family, the weather, and whatever else comes up.

"At last," Z said, chopping on a grouping of leaves, "we have enough rain to visit the watering hole. I was getting worried with all the dryness."

"I know," Rhino agreed. "The mud was so thick yesterday that our kids didn't want to stop rolling around in it. None of us actually wanted to come out of the mud.

Lepo nodded, "The bad part after a good rain is more two- leggeds. There are more of them."

"So true," Ellie said. "They come with more noises and smells from those machine things that carry them."

"Yeah," Leo added. "The machines have openings at the top and sides. The two-leggeds hang out and point fingers and cameras and phones at what they think is me. They are usually wrong. I make a game of them not finding me. If they do see me, I lay still and yawn at them."

Leo and Lepo laughed, which sounded more like a roar. Rhino snorted. Ellie squealed. Z barked.

Someone hissed.

Hiss-hiss-hiss.

What was that?

Leo, Lepo, Z, Rhino and Ellie looked up. Way up. Not seven feet up, but double that to 14 feet up. There, looking down on them from four skinny legs and a very long neck was a giraffe.

Giraffe – who became known as "G" – moved his lips, chewing feather-like, green leaves that were not from the tea plant. With a hiss, some of the leaves fell to the ground from a height four times taller than Leo, Lepo, and Z and three times higher than Ellie and Rhino. Softly, as softly as the hissing sound, he spoke.

"More precisely, the machines are called safari vehicles. The two-leggeds are humans of different colors and from different places all around the world and who think they are smarter than us. They go on safaris specifically to observe us in our natural habitat – as natural as it can be nowadays, that is."

Leo, Lepo, Z, Ellie and Rhino exchanged glances. Who was this too tall, too soft-spoken giraffe interrupting their tea with this too know-it-all talk?

Obviously unaware of his intrusion, G continued, "In some places, but thankfully not here, there are safaris for the purpose of hunting and killing us."

Z shuttered. Leo and Lepo looked down. Ellie and Rhino shook their heads. For Ellie, the shake of the head caused her trunk to scatter the pile of tea leaves.

Now, G had really done it.

It had taken at least a year for Z to be comfortable at the table with Leo and Lepo because their families attack, kill and eat zebra family members, particularly the young and vulnerable zebras. Now, this G character had to bring that up again.

Even worse and apparently not sensing any problem among the group below, G had the boldness to ask, "Mind if I join you?"

"No" was written all over the five faces.

In the awkward silence, Rhino replied, "We will have to vote on it."

Head lowered – as low as it can be for a long-necked giraffe – and almost as quietly as he came, G walked away.

Nobody spoke for a really long time.

Finally, Z said, "Being different is okay. That's what brought us together in the first place. But G is just too different."

The others chimed in.

"Too tall."
"Too soft spoken."
"Too smart."
"Too new."
"Head too small."

Just weeks ago, they recalled, around 12 giraffes were brought in from another Ugandan national park that had close to 1,000 giraffes.

That much larger park is called Murchison Falls. The one dozen giraffes came to their park in a truck and, when observed by the other long-term animals, seemed uncomfortable and nervous. They chewed on leaves from a tree called "acacia" pronounced ah-ca-sha. Nobody wanted to hang around with them.

Now, one of these giraffes wanted to be part of their group.

"Let's not decide today," Leo said. "Let's think about it and vote next week."

So, away they went, leaving more tea leaves than usual behind. After the G conversation, nobody was hungry for tea or for conversation.

For Rhino, the week was spent with her herd and, as usual, sticking out because of her black color. The other rhinos were considered white even though they are light grey. They all had horns, which they use for digging and other purposes. Bad people want the horns to make medicine to cure fever, headaches and other illnesses. But it has never been proven that the horns, made into powder, help anybody's health. What is known is that people who remove the horns, leave the rhinos to die.

Rhino never felt like she belonged with other rhinoceroses because of her black color. She put her herd in danger because she is too black.

Over the next seven days, Ellie looked closely at the two ivory tusks extending on either side of her trunk. Like Rhino, she knew about people around the world who pretended to be tourists but were really hunters that would take the lives of her family just for their tusks. The thought of dying so somebody could use part of her – the ivory – in artwork or jewelry angered her. Ellie got so angry four years ago that she charged into a jeep full of sight-seeing, two- leggeds. She walked into the dirt road and pushed the jeep hard and over and over again, damaging the jeep and hurting some of the people. After that, Ellie became an outcast in her herd. She made them look bad.

Z spent the next week with her zeal. A zeal is the name for a group of zebras. The reminder that two of her weekly friends –Leo and Lepo – come from lion and leopard families that kill and eat zebras disturbed her. Z was a bit of an outcast already because her stripes were narrower than those of others. And she asked a lot of questions, such as why zebra backs were so weak, what are horses that she keeps hearing look like them and whether zebras might be able to get along with lions and leopards. She was told she was naïve, which means too immature and too stupid. And she asked too many questions.

Lepo never liked the fact that members of his family, or "leap" or "prowl," as leopard families are called, were smaller than the other "cats." The tiger and lion were bigger in size. Lepo also felt insecure that the numbers in his family were so few while there were so many zebras in those families. Lepo was told to hide and kill zebras, especially the smaller and younger ones. But he started to see other leopards kill just for killing and not for surviving. One day, his eyes and those of one zebra locked in a different way. That zebra was Z. Leo stopped killing zebras. Lepo's family was not pleased. He was, they said, too weak to be a true leopard.

Three things made Leo different. First, it was how he got food. He was taught to take prey – that's a word for animals killed for dinner – from other animals. He didn't feel right about taking someone else's work and calling it his own. And on occasion, he ate tree leaves. Second, it was how much he slept. Like other lions, he was to sleep 20 of 24 hours a day. He was seldom sleepy. Instead of closing his eyes and stretching out on rocks in the heat of the day, he was playing and running. Third, he was expected to leave the cats that were there when he was born. When he grew up, he was to find another pride to join, but he didn't want to leave. He was too rebellious.

Rhino and Ellie and Z and Lepo and Leo met in the middle of all their differences.

Nobody is sure exactly how and when it happened except they all remember noticing each other and how they were considered too much of something in all their families.

Lepo and Leo proposed the meeting day and time – the time to avoid their family suspicions since lions and leopards all sleep at 11 a.m. and the day because Tuesdays have fewer tourists. Rhino, Ellie and Z suggested tea because Uganda has a lot of it; Lepo and Leo went along even though they don't eat it.

For four years, they shared their family stories, their frustrations and, occasionally, their love for each other. They realized they had so much in common. They lived in and around the open spaces, the forest, the watering holes. They lived under the same hot sun in the daylight and the stars at night. They shared their displeasure with lack of rain and their amusement about the people who interrupted their lives.

None of them liked that they had a week – seven days – to think about how odd they were except when they were together each Tuesday. They remembered that nobody likes feeling left out.

So it was that as they gathered together a week later and around the table, which some might say is too odd-shaped, and on chairs that some might say are too small, they cast their votes. With the usual stack of tea leaves in the middle and G trying not to hiss above, they spoke their individual decisions.

"When you sit down, you won't' be too tall," Lepo said, addressing G. "I say yes." "We need somebody who speaks softer than me," Leo said. "From me, it's a yes." "You're not too smart; I think we can learn a thing or two from you and you from us." Z chimed in, adding. "Yes." "It must have been hard for you to leave the other giraffes and travel all that way here, leaving a larger group," Ellie said. "We were all new together four years ago, so another yes." "I just realized you have horns similar to me, but smaller," Rhino observed. "I give the final yes."

Looking up at G and in unison, Lepo, Leo, Z, Ellie and Rhino asked, "Would you like to join us for tea?"

Patty Huston-Holm is a journalist and communications professional from Canal Winchester, Ohio, USA. Since 2009, she has been traveling frequently to Uganda, Africa, to assist with various writing projects, primarily at Uganda Christian University in Mukono, Uganda. She is the grandmother of Ava Holm, who lives in Florida. On one trip in 2016, Grandma Patty spotted a handmade, wooden set of six African animals.This handiwork, which she purchased to support a Ugandan artist and to delight Ava, is the inspiration for the story of "Inviting a Giraffe to Tea." This is a story for Ava, for children ages 6-10 and for the forever young.