Whoops

Hello, all! Sorry about the lapse. I spent a surprisingly social long weekend in Maun and when I got back - lo and behold - it was the final week in the office! Believe me, it is a MISTAKE to take a quasi-holiday the weekend before your real holiday - this week has been moving at a snail's pace, and I dread to tell you the number of Very Important End-of-Year Meetings that I've just about dozed off in. I have discovered, however, that sitting in the lotus position is a good antidote to drowsiness... The awkward pain in your ankles prevents you from falling asleep. The good thing is that Africa is informal enough that you can sit in the lotus position while in a Very Important End-of-Year Meeting, thus allowing me to discover this delightful trick (sadly inapplicable in most other parts of the world).

Anyhow, the long and the short of it is that I'm hiding out in the office as the Komku Farewell Braai is prepared - we've spent all day like a big dysfunctional family, chopping vegetables in the office and making endless batches of chakalaka, rubbing spices into huge bowls of meat, including an enormous spiral of sausage that looks bizarre and disgusting, but tastes delicious. S and I introduced the office to feta cheese and parsley. Bonus! We have balloons (only pink and yellow, because there were no other colours), four tinsel-and-bow Christmas garlands (because that's all the store had), and one string of Christmas lights (which I paid for, and will take back to my house later. If they don't get broken.) All in all, it's set to be a good night.

Tomorrow I go to Maun to sort out some visa things, and on Sunday I fly to South Africa - first to Jo'burg, then to Cape Town, where I will spend approximately three weeks in the company of a wonderful family I met while I was in India. In fact, we spent last Christmas/New Year's together, on the Andaman Islands. I should have written about that, but I think my India blogging petered out long before Christmas. Anyhow, I'm delighted to be spending time with them again, and I can't wait to see South Africa! I plan to write a longer summary-type entry while I'm in Maun, but the best-laid plans of mice and men... So this is the hasty stop-gap to reassure you that I'm still alive, and if I don't post for awhile, it's because I'm on a beach in South Africa. TAKE THAT, MY SNOWBOUND FRIENDS.

Lots of love to all! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and really, I DO plan to update again in a couple of days....

lifestyles

I have several ambitious new entries planned, but for the moment I think I'm going to let them lie and instead relate some peculiarities of white life in Botswana (tongue-in-cheek, don't take me too seriously).

Exhibit A:
THE MUKWA LEAFS
Botswana's only roller-hockey team, the Mukwa Leafs, play in Maun and have their very own rink (“Mukwa Gardens”) which hosts the annual “Tequila Cup” tournament. This amazing Kalahari phenomenon was started by S, who is the partner of R, a woman who works part-time for Kuru... which is how I found myself chasing two small blond boys across a patchy cement roller-rink, trying not to injure them or myself as I charged along on roller blades for the first time in about 10 years. The game, sadly, was not “tag” - it was “you chase us! And then you chase us again!” I am familiar with this game from my time as an elementary school teacher.

The Mukwa Leafs are currently seeking funding to resurface their roller rink with some kind of synthetic tiling – total cost estimated at $20,000 US, each tile $1.50. Please let me know if you have any wealthy hockey fanatics as friends. It's for a good cause – I almost tripped and smashed my face in on a roughly-patched crack in the cement.

Exhibit B:
GHANZI DISTRICT DEBUTANTES
Not really. If only there really was a debutante ball. However, nearly as good, there was the 18th birthday party of the daughter of a prominent local landowner, for which purpose her parents rented out a local safari lodge and invited all of Ghanzi district. “In Ghanzi, if you don't invite someone, you will never hear the end of it,” her mother sighed theatrically, as I watched her double-check the computer-printout pages of invitees and their phone numbers, with RSVP status noted carefully beside each name.

I had been invited somewhat by accident, and managed to snag a ride with some other Kuru employees. What to expect? I had no idea. Not dresses and white gloves and waltzing; Africa is never formal. Drinking, definitely. We pulled up and I stepped out of the car. The parking lot of the lodge was packed to capacity with pick-up trucks and battered land rovers, and the path to the bar wound through thick-trunked palm trees festooned with fairy lights. When I entered the bar itself I had my answer to what constitutes a rural-Botswana debutante ball: not dresses and white gloves and waltzing, but instead belly-baring shirts, pink-sequined bunny ears, and the “sucky-sucky,” a strange Afrikaaner two-step that (for some reason utterly unfathomable to the non-Afrikaaner) they all love to dance.

I milled around looking for food, and quickly realized the strict divide between adults and children. There doesn't seem to be much of a twenty-something stage in Botswana, be it white farmers or Batswana (not sure if this is due to less of a university/intern period – or less of a philosophy of needing to “find yourself,” which I suppose is the rather pointless activity that most of we twenty-somethings spend our time on). People are fond of saying “You're youth till you're thirty!” and indeed, the party was divided into two groups, which I am going to title Pink Sequined Bunny Ears, and The Price of Cattle.

The youth, whether they be 15 or 25, were dedicated to dancing, drinking, and making googly eyes at each other, generally sans conversation. The adults were dedicated to discussing their children and the finer points of maintaining a cattle ranch and associated cattle-rancher lifestyle (“Jim is having his 50th soon – I'm wondering, how much meat will we need for the braai? And if we use Sarah's campsite, I don't know, it's five hours drive and we'll have to bring all of the equipment...” “So you're trying ___ cattle? I had a friend in Namibia who tried those, it didn't work out...” “Oh I know, repairing fences is a pain...” “I loved the last Dan Brown novel!”)

All of which was very interesting, but gave me little hope for my social future at this sort of party. Then I found a twenty-something who was going to university in South Africa and seemed equally out-of-place among the pink sequined bunny ears, and I spent the rest of the night chatting with her in a corner, drinking wine which her father had kindly purchased for us – really, who am I to ignore the benefits of extended childhood?

Renegade Research

I've spent the past three days in Maun participating in a fantastic impromptu workshop led by a couple of English botanists. They instructed the two Kuru oral history research teams on such topics as: collecting plant specimens to the approved botanical standard, setting up a database of traditional medicine, and pulling incredible research positions out of thin air.

The (brief) story of the researchers:

Botswana, as a tourist destination, is definitely one for the wealthy. The tourist camps are set up for maximum luxury, minimum impact – if you only have a handful of very affluent clients, the wilderness remains pristine for the lucky few that can afford it. Prices run as high as $2300 per person per night, for such camps as the Abu elephant-back safari camp. (At Abu, I believe you have to stay a minimum of 3 nights – otherwise it upsets the elephants. There are probably even more expensive options – someone is always willing to provide the opportunity to pay more, after all.) The tourist camps must also make a commitment to conservation – they are either part of a national park, in which case park rules and management make sure they contribute, or they are on wilderness areas leased to communities or companies with certain restrictions on usage that also require conservation efforts.* Different tourist camps keep to those requirements to varying degrees of success.

This English couple had been visiting the same camp for many years, but they were approaching retirement – him from banking, her from archaeology – and they were heartbroken at the thought of no longer being able to afford visits to their favourite safari destination. On a whim, they asked the camp managers if there were any way in which they could be useful to the camp, any job they could do that would permit them to camp there for free. Surprisingly, the camp replied that they had a research project investigating elephant impact on vegetation, and they needed some support. The English couple signed on immediately, and returned the following year to work. However, they quickly realized that their vegetation assessments were hampered by the fact that they didn't know what most of the plants were, and in seeking more plant resources, they got in touch with The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. They started collecting samples. Soon enough, with absolutely zero official scientific training, they parleyed the elephant-impact project into their own, independently funded plant research project, and to this day they work at cataloguing the plants of the Okavango Delta.

I'm not sure if you can appreciate how awesome this is. Facts: NO training, just a lifelong interest in botany. NO association (then or now) with a university. THEIR OWN CAMP on Chief's Island, one of the Okavango's most prized destinations. TOTAL OFF-ROAD ACCESS. They drive instead of walking because there are close to 200 lions on Chief's Island, which is a very small island.

It's like a shout back to a more frontier-like existence, when rugged men in leather hats (and leather pants as well, if the ladies were lucky – even luckier, ladies in leather pants, though those were probably rarer – anyhow, I digress) just showed up in the wilds of Africa, jumped into a Land Rover and trundled off to do some renegade research. Just because they liked plants. Or elephants. Or whatever. There's a wealth of information at the University of Botswana's campus in Maun from precisely that kind of source – a man named Peter Smith who just showed up in Maun in the 1970s and decided that he wanted to catalogue Okavango plants. So he went off into the Delta and collected them. I love it. It's just the opposite of my own training – I doubt Peter Smith gave a rat's ass about getting a technical article published in the leading botanical journals, or having a PhD from a well-known university. The U of B (definitely not well-known) is currently working on a project to digitize his map notes – he had a lot of big charts of the Okavango upon which he pencilled innumerable, illegible notes about his observations. “Water high this year.” “Found new species here.” And so on.

It delights me to know that you can still do that, though it's becoming more difficult – if you have a passion for the living world, if you are in essence a naturalist, you can just show up and make a go of it. Persistence and luck, persistence and luck. Of course, these two English amateur botanists are now doing legitimate research that will be of great value to the world of botany, but it's the beginnings, the impromptu, informal nature of it all that fascinates me. Credentials are no substitute for passion and determination.

I'm not sure if this is a very un-PC sort of fascination – in a sense I suppose I'm clinging to a colonial illusion where Africa was a utopian wildland, full of resources and animals; forget the people who lived there. It was a frontier, a jewel-box of precious metals and beautiful animals, an open book for the colonists to write on as they pleased. A place where you could still live a “rugged” life, free of modern complications, free of bureaucracy and urbanity. Where you could disappear into the bush and just observe nature as you pleased. I know that's not true. But I can't help my attraction to that vision (however inaccurate) of the continent. We all need a frontier to dream about.

Go siame,

Jenn

* The area that the Huiku Trust controls is one such wilderness area – unfortunately, the Western Kalahari is not the Okavango, and nobody wants to set up a $2000/night camp here.

** Notes on The Plant Formerly Known As Epiphyte (see entry “Pula”): it's not an epiphyte, which is technically a plant that survives above the ground in a non-parasitic way, e.g. by perching on a branch and living from rainwater and the nutrients in decaying bark, fallen vegetation, etc. This plant is some variety of mistletoe (so the British botanists inform me), and it taps right into its host tree and sucks out what it needs – that's why the trees with mistletoes take so long to green up, because the parasite plant takes up the water before the host plant can use it. Only after the mistletoe has quenched its thirst, so to speak, does the host plant start to leaf out. Parasites! Aaah! I could honestly write every entry about a new type of bug, if I so desired.

***Related note: Apparently, if you go out into the Okavango Delta and do nothing but collect beetles for a week, you're pretty much guaranteed to discover a new species. IS THAT NOT TOTALLY CRAZY?! Let's all go become renegade entomologists! We could all have a beetle named after ourselves!