time passing quickly and keeping busy

It’s hard to believe that the shortest day of the year has come and gone (longest day for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere). Time is passing quickly and we have been keeping very busy. As you’ve read the last three weeks have been filled with trips to the bush with our out of town guests – Central Kalahari Game Reserve to scout a new route for the trans-Kalahari trip in August, Moremi Game Reserve twice to find the new mobile operators campsites, Savuti to see the channel filled with water (hasn’t had water in it since the 1980s - see photo below with me looking at the channel from the Rock Painting Hill), Kgwebe Hills to visit a new lodge under development by friends where Paul wants to market astronomy safaris, Meno a Kwena tented camp for a star show, and back to Kgwebe Hills to transport some investors for a new copper mine under construction. If you add to that a couple of flights over the Delta (one scenic flight with our guests on their last day before they departed and the other with the Deputy Permanent Secretary to survey the water situation and see the road and bridge conditions), no wonder I feel busy.

The flights revealed the massive amounts of water over the entire region. With the buffalo fence completely under water in spots (the fence erected by the government in the early 1980s to separate the wild life from the cattle), the animals have free range of movement (if they can get through all the water). Where there used to be well used roads there are now lakes (see the photo below of the water taking over the road). Bridges have submerged and whole areas of the Delta are completely cut off from traffic. It is quite impressive. Paul was asked to fly with the government official to represent the mobile safari sector as he knows the area quite well and could take photographs for him to use in a presentation to the President. I just tagged along for the day.

As is typical on these tiny flights, I am put in the back due to weight distribution. I try to mentally convince myself that I’m fine, as I’ve never actually thrown up on a plane, but as we “buzzed” the game scouts’ camp up in Savuti to signal our arrival (one big radically tilted loop over their camp), I turned a little green and was really happy when we landed so I could get my feet on the ground for a few minutes. Fortunately, when we took off again I wasn’t too queasy and my continued self-reassurance worked as I made it through the day without barfing!

Winter arrived last Monday night while we were at Meno a Kwena doing a star show (see photo below of me lounging outside the luxury tent). Fortunately, it didn’t arrive until the middle of the night so Paul’s show was not too cold. It came in around 2 AM with some big winds and has stayed since. We are now getting close to freezing temperatures every night and in the 70s in the day. The dip in temps coupled with the frolicking elephants in the river outside our tent kept us up a bit that night but the elephants seemed like they were having such a good time, it was hard to be annoyed by them. Splash! Splash! Dip! Spray! Drink! Drink! Drink!

Working with the copper mine folks has been fascinating. As you may know, mining is big business in this region of the world and there is some exploratory mining for copper taking place near the Kgwebe Hills lodge I mentioned earlier. The trays of core samples (ten or so cylinders of earth to a metal tray) stacked 10 high spread across two expansive fields look somewhat like a grave yard. While the Ngami Times recently reported a “successful” EIA – Environmental Impact Assessment for the project the three “benefits” seem to me far from beneficial to the community. First, the article pointed out that new waste piles will be created (is this good?). Second, that the open pit mines may be a hazard to the local cattle (I envision them casually chewing, not paying attention and...falling into the pits!). And finally, that migrant laborers will come to the area to work at the mine and production plant (again, is this good? With migrant labor comes the spread of diseases like HIV). Anyway, I try to keep my mouth shut. The safari company's job is to transport the investors down for a visit (not to raise moral and ethical questions about the venture).

My birthday on Friday was lots of fun and, although I resisted Facebook for some time, it was so nice to get intercontinental birthday wishes all day long. This year we even managed to find a yummy chocolate cake (last year’s failed attempt at ice cream, which had melted and re-frozen leaving only sweet sludge at the bottom, still hovers in our minds).

With just two months left before I return to the states I’m now turning my attention more concertedly to preparing for the fall semester and the courses I’ll be teaching. I’ve been reading a lot (as always) but need to start updating some lectures…I’d rather be in the bush!

PS: Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention that I saw Prince William at a restaurant near the airport the other day. He was in town for a fund raiser. He and his brother Harry are regular visitors to Botswana. He looks just like his Mum!

enough said

 Beautiful male lion in Savuti. Photograph by Roberta Pickert.

small treasures and big sightings

One of my favorite things about being in Africa is being in the bush. You never quite know what you’re going to see. Sometimes it is just small encounters with typically shy animals that let you watch them while they go about their daily activities. I like to think of those as “small treasures.” Other times it is big sightings when you see the things that most people who come to Africa are hoping to see.

With visitors in from the States we’ve taken the opportunity to combine work with pleasure over the last week or so. First, we took a three night trip down to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve so that Paul could check out an alternative route for the trans-Kalahari trips he’ll do beginning in August. You may remember the lion in camp story from last August, this is the same touring company that will offer three trans-Kalahari trips this year. We were scouting out an alternative route to cut some of the driving time off in the South to North transit of the Kalahari in order to incorporate more animal viewing opportunities and a visit to a traditional bushmen village.

The Central Kalahari is such a unique place with vast open spaces (can’t help singing the Dixie Chicks “Wide Open Spaces” in my head), beautiful sunsets and abundant populations of gemsbok, springbok, jackal, kori bustards, and other critters. While we didn’t have lions in camp this time, we did have an amazing encounter with three bat eared foxes foraging at sunset. Unfortunately, due to the lighting, we did not get great pictures of them which was sad because one of them was so close to the vehicle. They are about the size of a raccoon or smallish dog. They have tiny little masks, like raccoons, so they look like little bandits but rather large ears the swap between straight up like rabbits or angled to the side like Yoda (although I’ve honestly never seen a bat with those types of ears). Quite cute! This is a classic example of a “small treasure.”

The visit to Molopo was also interesting. This is a bushmen village that, for a period of time was abandoned when the government forced the removal of the bushmen from the Central Kalahari. A lawsuit in 2007 resulted in their gaining permission to return to the Kalahari.The new transit route will work but unfortunately, since it is not used much, all the thorny brush have grown over into the road and it scrapped the heck out of the vehicle's new paint job. It sounded like a thousand children with pointy sticks standing on the sides of the road scratching the vehicle as we drove by. Ouch!

Yesterday we took a day trip up to Moremi Game Reserve (our third day trip so far this winter) to do some mapping of the new campsites for the mobile safari operators. They occasionally move the campsites so that the previously used ones can rehab and return to their natural state. After a full day in the park driving around, on the way out, I spotted some movement about 200 yards off as we barreled down the bumpy dirt road. My brain didn’t know what it was but it registered as something out of the ordinary. It looked like something long, straight and brownish red going up the side of a tree. A cheetah tail, perhaps? I ask Eddy (Paul’s partner who was driving, we had to leave Paul in the office to work – sad!) to stop and go back. This is always a potentially embarrassing thing to do as I’ve many a time spotted what I call “stump creatures” (things I think are animals but are actually stumps).

But when we backed up and I pointed out the tree I thought I saw it in, Shadreck (one of the guides for Hemingway safari company) spotted it. “Ma Paul. There it is. A leopard with his kill in the tree.” (He calls me “Ma Paul”, a common way of referring to the spouse of someone.) I thought he was kidding and punched him in the shoulder for teasing me. But he wasn’t kidding. Far off in the tree was the carcass of the dead impala on one side and the head of the leopard on the other.

We made our way over to get a closer look and had one of the most amazing leopard spotting I’ve ever had. He breathed heavily with exhaustion. The kill had been recent as what I saw a few seconds earlier had been his first effort to hoist his kill up into the tree. When we departed, he grabbed the kill by the neck and powered him even farther up the tree. A few minutes later and we wouldn’t have seen anything at all. Leopard sightings are always lucky.

Today we go up to Savuti. Last time we camped there a hyena took a chomp out of our wash bowl!

Meme Maria's Megameno Miracle

Megameno is the name of the orphanage the Furman Study Away program has worked with since 2007 in Windhoek, Namibia. While the story of its origins is fuzzy, from what I can gather in 1998, Meme Maria Shaalukeni opened the doors of her two bedroom home to the twenty something kids she had become discouraged seeing abandoned on the streets. I don’t know how it happened exactly. Did she take in one or two? Did word spread that she had created a refuge for kids who had no one else?

The acronym “OVC” (Orphans and Vulnerable Children) has become all the rage in the HIV/AIDS community but my guess is that long before it became “fashionable” to help OVCs, Meme Maria had opened her doors and let them in.

When we first met them in 2007, they lived in a small 3 room house in the Katutura neighborhood of Windhoek. Looking back, I’m not sure how she managed. It is never clear how many children are actually living there and how many have simply stopped by from the neighborhood to play with the other kids or get a much needed meal. But on any given day you can find upwards of twenty kids around the home. Officially 21 live at the orphanage and it is estimated that only half of them are enrolled in school and rumored that as many as five or six are HIV positive themselves.

To say the conditions we found the children in back in 2007 was “desperate” is an understatement. Our group spent our time picking glass up out of the back yard (basically a fenced in dirt plot), hand washing all the kids clothes in big wash basins in the backyard, helping to make pap over a fire (a corn meal based staple of most Southern African diets), washing the babies assembly line style in a small wash bin in the house, and simply holding the many very young children that were there without enough adult arms to hold them. It was overwhelming. I distinctly remember wondering how long they would survive in this condition. The silence was deafening. How can there be this many small children around and no noise?

We were beside ourselves with what we could do to help. There had to be more. Every day we went we brought snacks for the kids. I recall that one day the students took up a collection among themselves and with their own money purchased food, diapers, and KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) for all the kids. I remember our tear filled departure as we placed all the small babies on the ground lined up near Meme Maria as she couldn’t possibly hold all of them.

The change I observed in 2009 almost brought me to tears. It was hard to believe. Donations had contributed to the building of a dormitory style structure that now housed most of the kids in bunkbeds in separate boys’ and girls’ rooms with proper toilets as well. The building has separate classroom space and our 2009 group donated funds and energy to help build a patio between the new building and Meme Maria’s original house so that mud would not be tracked into their new space. As always we brought snacks for the kids and that year tried to take them on a couple of excursions, once to the public pool and a second trip for a hike around a dam, a rare treat for kids who rarely get to leave the neighborhood.

By the 2010 trip, the desperation is less visible and I worry a bit that, because their situation is not so overtly desperate, the urgency to help may dissipate. I hope that is not the case. Our visits to Megameno have had (and I hope will continue to have) a dramatic impact on my students. One of the students from the 2007 trip actually went back to Namibia for a yearlong internship after graduation and worked with Megameno to help establish its status as an NGO and assist in the building project. Students from the 2007 travel group,  sponsored a silent auction and raised $3,000 to support a new building for the children.The group from 2009 raised over $2500 for Megameno through another silent auction and the individual efforts of one student through a university wide competition.

We talk a lot on the trip about “the West’s” responsibility to “the rest”. I fear some students get discouraged and feel they should simply throw their hands up because the task is too large, bureaucracy too burdensome, or corruption too likely but when I look at Megameno it reminds me how, even a limited amount of donations, can help sustain the lives of children born into a harsh world. Money can help Meme Maria sustain her Megameno Miracle.


For more on Megameno see:

1.     Anna Bartolini, a student from the 2007 Study Away trip wrote an article for Furman’s Alumni Magazine and her sorority, Chi Omega's magazine.

2. Liz Lineback, a student from the 2009 Study Away trip did a blog on Megameno for her Communication Studies Class.