Shakawe!

Today I'm off to Maun, and on Monday to Shakawe for a meeting. Haven't been to Shakawe before, and it's more up in the Okavango Delta than anywhere I've been so far, so that's exciting. I hope to update with lots of photos of lush greenery when I get back on Friday.

Managed to get a bunch of GIS data from the department of wildlife, and let me tell you, it's amazing. I love maps and I love technology!

Government offices in Botswana are funny places. In some ways they're much more efficient than my office, and I suppose they must be in order to keep the great machinery of government bureaucracy churning away, but in other ways? The man I spoke to, quite a high-up fellow in the Ghanzi department of wildlife, had no idea where his reports were, and no idea of how to use his computer. He kept excusing himself by saying he'd only been in the office for a short while, and initially I thought he'd just arrived a few weeks ago and hadn't found all the old files left by his predecessor. "So, how long have you been here?" I asked, trying to make polite conversation as he rummaged in a filing cabinet. "Oh, since early 2007," he replied.

He did try to be helpful, but it was obvious that nobody had ever asked to see those reports before, and indeed he had never cared to look at them himself. What are they DOING in those nice, air-conditioned offices?? Playing spider solitaire, probably. Just like everyone else.

In other news, on Thursday the cat brought a common pouched mouse* for her kids to eat - the orange cat ate it up, but apparently devoured it a bit too quickly, because he promptly vomited the whole mess onto my floor. Chewed mouse fur. Bits of kitty kibble. Scraps of tail, slimy with bile. And the head entire, its neck quite literally a bloody pulp, eyes still open and staring glassily up at me as I wiped it away with paper towels. Ah the little horrors of domestic life.

*Saccostomus campestris! Thank you, Jonathan Kingdon. I use my field guide mostly for identifying the small critters that Melissa delivers to my doorstep. So sad!

seasons (unfinished)

1.
Seasons are a slow sunset,
the integral of five, sixty,
three hundred twirls of the earth.
They are the practised artistry of the sun,
washes of light, heat
and their absence. A thousand layers
cast across ground stone, saturating
a thousand miles of Kalahari.
In my short life, never
have I seen such a pure canvas
as those thousand miles -
the dry scrub, the bleached thorns
the endless shades of sand.
They are scattered
thin and gasping
across the flatness of the land,
thirsty for the paintbrush of autumn rain.

2.
It falls. The thorns fade.
Edges slur and silver
and colour spreads like a virus,
laddering swiftly across the sand.

3.
I notice the small leaves
falling from the acacias.
Their quiet accumulation,
their congregation
with the dust. I notice
brittleness in the old thorns,
the spare grey bones of trees.
I notice cages, claws, empty ribs
shapes elucidated
by winter's desiccating grasp.

4.
The wind is blowing.
It scours, scraping clean the stones
sweeping ahead of it
the shivering corpses of mosquitoes.

5.
When summer storms in, she commands.
Electrical storms scorch the veldt.
No rain falls.
Her heat is a confrontation,
a steady aggression, a war of attrition -
each living thing wilts in turn.

6.
The days overflow with sun
hours heavy with the pressure of light
as the clouds sublimate and disappear.
Photons spear every shadow
invading retinas, skin cells,
ovenlike houses
burning past closed eyelids
and t-shirts, sandal straps and leather hats,
inescapable. It comes from everywhere:
the flecked pale sand, car windows
as they drive past white buildings,
tires melting on smouldering asphalt
but most of all the sky,
bone-blue and hard as a rock.

Easter

I don't have anything in particular to report, nor have I any particular thoughts to share. However, this hiatus seems unacceptable - two weeks! - and so I will resort to brief summaries....

1. I spent Easter in Francistown, on what proved to be a fruitless mission to meet up with an old friend from Australia... Fortunately I ended up hanging out with the friends I'd driven with, meeting a parade of crazy characters from all over Botswana and South Africa, and generally spending an extremely irreverent Easter weekend.
To be honest, I didn't like Francistown very much. It was a midsize, modern city with a peculiar air of trying to catch up with its own modernization. There were malls reminiscent of the gorgeous outdoor malls in Southern California, where you stroll down beautiful open shiny-tiled walkways, glancing into the shop windows, sitting under the carefully manicured trees to consider your next purchase. Nandos and KFC and the Hard Rock Cafe and grocery stores with pre-packaged produce in little labelled plastic bags. Nice cars, parking lots without potholes, and internet cafes. Yet all of these sparkling amenities of affluent modern life were curiously empty - the broad, clean-swept boulevards of the malls were occupied by just a few people, the restaurants empty but the parking lots full, flooded by people in souped-up cars drinking beers. The government of Botswana seems to have poured money into infrastructure that the population hasn't quite caught up with.

I'd rather be in Maun, dusty and terribly planned, spread out like a spider over the dry ground. "Donkey capital of Botswana," according to one friend. Rivers and crocodiles and safari disasters. There's more personality.

2. Nobody reading this probably cares, but the borehole at the game farm site for Huiku has FINALLY been successfully equipped.

It's amazing how difficult such a simple task can be... But there you have it, everything here takes 10x longer than it should. After drilling the borehole, we hired someone to equip it (i.e. to install the pipes and pumping mechanism). The problem was that the person who came to equip it was either an idiot, or didn't know the full depth of the borehole; the equipment he used to lower the pipes into the hole was too weak, and it broke, dropping the pipes into the hole and therefore bending/breaking them as they trainwrecked at the bottom. For months the problem was left uncorrected; the idiot refused to fix it or to give a refund, blaming the problem on us, and eventually we decided to just give up on him and fix it ourselves. So last week a team went out to extract the bent pipes, replace them, and lower the full length of pipe back into the hole.* I was highly doubtful that this was going to work, but lo and behold, the pipes were not that badly damaged - they managed to extract the whole shebang - and successfully installed the new pipe! Hurrah! Water!

This is very important because it means establishment of the first of our planned water points in the game farm area - there isn't any other surface water on the 4000km2 of land, so even one small watering hole will attract animals from far and wide. It's an extremely exciting development - the crucial first step into creating an area that will be attractive to tourists, and will actually improve the resources we've been given.

3. A cow walked through my garden. It ate all of my cucumber plants and crushed dozens of seedlings. After a day of mourning, I have rallied and begun replanting... WM advises me that the end of April is the best time to plant anyhow, because then everything comes to maturity during winter. That seems counter-intuitive, but winter is the only time that your crops won't be plagued by swarms of insects - such as the little orange-and-black beetles that devoured my spinach and kale.

4. I successfully set up a wireless network in the office, which I think qualifies me to start my own IT consulting business in Ghanzi District. SWEET.

* Equipping boreholes 101: Pipe comes in lengths of 3m, which screw into each other. The team, using the apparatus shown in the picture, lowers one length in, then screws the next length onto it, lowers it, then screws in the next... etc. I think this borehole is about 70m deep.