safari kalahari

Victoria

2010-10-15T02:16:00.003+02:00

What's Next?

I keep pressing the "new post" button and then staring at the empty box, thinking of the millions of long, long posts that I could compose. It's too intimidating. Instead, I'm going to break myself back in slowly, by posting pictures (as usual).

Now that I'm back in Victoria, the theme for this blog is decidedly less obvious. (In case you were wondering, the previous theme was: "Woo! Exotic travel! Life with the Bushmen!") I want to think a bit about what I'm going to write. Until I settle on a theme, it's going to be disjointed short posts interspersed with the occasional Botswana retrospective. I'll also post about the West Coast Trail.

Today it's the familiar mixture of excuses and amateur photography!

I took these last week, as I walked home from the university.

This October has felt like summer to me, but the leaves are still changing...

This isn't the most original or fascinating photograph, but the fact that I walk past this - through this - on even my most mundane strolls is... Remarkable. Moving through extreme contrasts gives you new eyes, a more acute sense of detail. From the Kalahari to the Pacific Northwest, I haven't quite gotten used to it yet.

To quote from the book I finished this morning, Nabokov's Pale Fire -

All colors made me happy: even gray.

My eyes were such that literally they

Took photographs.

Till next time...

back at home

2010-08-31T18:06:00.003+02:00

1. I am back in Canada.
2. I will continue writing in this blog.
3. I should write about What It All Meant, but that's very hard to do.

I've brought a lot back with me, and I've changed a lot. But it's all so overwhelmingly internal. Whatever I've learned, whatever I've experienced, has stunningly little impact on life in Canada, in North America. If you boil my two years down to a collection of abstract ideas, it's relevant: land issues, conservation, indigenous people, non-profit grassroots organizations, race, colonialism, poverty, disease. I'm back in Canada and I suppose I can talk about those things with people. The specifics, however, hold little meaning or relevance for anyone but me.

To be fair, many of my friends and family have been interested in hearing about my experiences. However, I am more aware than ever before that Africa as a whole, and particularly Botswana - small, overshadowed by South Africa, free of any front-page-worthy African Atrocities - registers as little more than a blip on the radar of the collective North American psyche. Africa is an uncomfortable topic. The questions I most commonly receive are, "Weren't you afraid you'd get AIDS?" "Was there a war going on?" and "Were you safe?" It makes sense; the overwhelming majority of media tends to cover Africa for three reasons: war, disease, and poverty. And pirates, but I suppose you can see the pirates as a consequence of the first three.

It is difficult for me to talk about my everyday life in Botswana. There are so few points of reference for someone living here. While I was there, I didn't do very much that contributes to the accepted life trajectory of a twenty-something. I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have been to Botswana (not counting the ones I met in Botswana, of course). I don't think I've ever seen Botswana appear on television or in the newspaper in Victoria. And why should it, really? Two million people, a lot of desert. A local Canadian newspaper has other fish to fry.

I often have the unsettling feeling that the past two years didn't even happen.

I existed, for 24 months, in a strange alternate dimension known as Africa. I lived with a dwindling, semi-mythic people. I gave my blood, sweat and tears to a project that may never succeed.

I know it happened, I know I was there, and I can feel the changes within myself. The San are not myths or bizarre midgets, they are wise, wonderful, real people who became my closest friends. We email each other. Even if the campsite project doesn't succeed, the Huiku Trust now has an office, staff, funding, and the precedent and know-how to plan and implement their own ideas. I know these things. But sometimes I feel as though I must repeat them to myself, in my head, a private litany to remind myself that D'Kar was not a dream.

i've left, i've left, i've left my dusty love

2010-07-28T13:43:00.004+02:00

Jo'burg airport. I'm typing at the counter at the Vodacom store, trying to organize phone numbers, SIM cards, credit cards, flights, all the while praying that my extravagantly overweight baggage doesn't cause me to go completely bankrupt.

I've left Botswana.

I left D'Kar yesterday, amidst tears and last-minute farewells, and the usual disastrous detritus of my procrastination - loose ends, half-empty cartons of milk, dirty floors, nails and paper and clothespins lingering in the corners of my house. L is going to take care of it for me - thank god for my friends, I would never manage to stagger through life without them.

Bus to Maun. The river is still flooded - we took the detour around Toteng, the make-shift bridge looking just as sketchy as always, water being sucked under in disturbingly powerful whirlpools, lackadaisical water unit workers lounging around in their neon orange jumpsuits. Four tall, beautiful Herero ladies were on the bus, and they strode gravely across the bridge, their enormous petticoats swinging with each step, their bizarre cross-beam hats identifying them immediately. A drunk woman in a dusty red dress was shouting on the other side of the bridge, tottering to and fro, as her husband tried to call her back to the village.

Maun. Warmer than Ghanzi, the familiar smell filling the faded streets - what is it? Where does that so-particular Maun smell come from? There are any number of candidates - the proximity of the river, the humidity, the soil which is grey instead of Ghanzi's red... the mophane trees, the goats and donkeys, the trailing bougainvillea and occasional stands of eucalyptus. The exhaust from a thousand intrepid, broken-down taxis. I don't know. But I love the smell of Maun. It's a warm smell, with just an edge of something sharp, sour, dry. The smell of donkey dung or scorched dust, spilled beer outside of a roadside bar or a labourer's sweat. Exhaust from Land Rovers, the small splattered refuse of jicanas or sandpipers flying low over the river.

I've left Botswana.

I don't want to cry, but I don't know when I'll be back.

lunch in the delta

2010-07-15T15:52:00.004+02:00

Sketch from one of our lunches in the Delta, picnic on a little island. Watercolour and pastel pencils.

The Mobile Safari

2010-07-14T11:55:00.003+02:00

Like last time (see Okavango I and Okavango II, from last May), we went into the Delta with the mobile safari guide RD. RD is a guy I was introduced to through the Princeton alum that set up my position with Komku, and a fabulous safari guide – the best. We had a wonderful time with him last year and decided to reprise it this year, with a new round of family members. The trip was five: myself, my mother, my father, my aunt A and my cousin A.

We saw fantastic beasts, large and small, from tiny bee-eaters to kilometers-long congregations of elephants. I suppose everyone has their own favourite sighting from the trip, but my own was on the afternoon of the last day of our five-day safari. It was dramatic – hundreds of buffalo with a few giraffe mixed in, big male lions, the thrill of a predator-prey interaction (no active hunt, don't get TOO excited). It was aesthetically thrilling – the sunset, the waterhole and the big open sky and the thousand tines of sharp, pale buffalo horns poking out of the sea of brown hides. But overall, it was an afternoon spent observing animal behaviour. This is something you rarely get to experience on safaris; with most tourist safaris, it's much more of a drive-by shooting sort of event. The guide gets a tip that the lions are at water hole X, and you immediately rev into high gear, dash over to the water hole, snap photos of the lions, and are off to the next destination. This is a good method to get pictures of the Big Five in a short amount of time, but not a good method for understanding what's going on around you.

Having spent quite a lot of time observing animal behaviour for my studies and my thesis, I'm more inclined to be interested in animal behaviour than most tourists. But I believe that every safari tourist can and should be given the opportunity to understand and appreciate some of the behaviour going on around them, instead of just the pretty colours and big claws. As Richard Despard Estes, author of the renowned “Behaviour Guide to African Mammals,” (recommended reading!) writes in his introduction,

“Through daily contact with Ngorongoro visitors, I had become aware that the behaviour of the animals, which I found so engrossing, was largely unnoticed by most visitors and their guides. Their main effort went into seeking out rare or glamourous creatures like rhinos, cheetahs, lions, wild dogs, and leopards, and they spent hardly any time just sitting and watching the more common species that surrounded them. How often I saw vehicles drive right past (or through) herds of plains game that were involved in interesting and even dramatic activities. Whereas the sought-after species were found most of the time doing nothing more interesting than sleeping.” He goes on to write that, however, he found all such tourists were interested in his talks about animal behaviour, and I agree that almost anyone would be interested in animal behaviour if given the chance to explore, observe, and understand it.

Our adventure on the last afternoon was a great example of this.

We had been driving around in the morning, looking at everything we came across but aware that there were lions in the area and hopeful that we would run into them. However, by lunchtime we hadn't seen any. We returned to camp and settled in for our final safari lunch, tucking into the cook's usual extravagant smorgasbord – cold smoked meats, freshly-prepared meatballs, freshly baked breads, several salads, a cheese plate, and so on. Just before we'd arrived in camp, another guide had crossed our path and informed RD of the lions' latest position, as well as the approximate position of a large herd of buffalo that the lion were most likely tracking. We discussed this information over lunch, and RD did some thinking.

After lunch we headed out as usual. Not half an hour after leaving camp, we saw the buffalo crossing the road – we hadn't seen very many of them, and suddenly there were hundreds, rustling in the grass all around us, sticking their stolid bovine faces up to look at us and then bending back down to continue cropping the grass.

“Okay,” RD said. “Given where the buffalo are right now, I'm pretty sure that they're headed to these pans.” He raised his hand and gestured off to the right. “I'm also pretty sure that those two male lions are following them. They came out this way to follow the buffalo, and they're still going to be following them. They'll track them all day, singling out targets – looking for ones they might be able to take down, the ones that are lagging. Then they'll attack later, at night. So at this point they'll just be tracking, watching, not stalking. That's good because we'll be able to see them; they're not trying to stay out of sight right now. We probably won't see a hunt, because they tend to hunt at night, and the park rules say we have to be back at camp by dark – but we'll see the lions.” He paused, looking around at the bush, and the herd of buffalo, which was slowly moving off through the grass and bush. “These guys are pretty nervous. They know the lions are following them, and they've had tourists bothering them all day. I think we should leave them for now, and go wait at the pan – that way we won't scare them, we'll just be a silent part of the scenery when they come out to drink, and we can watch them drink and hopefully those lions will be there behind them, so we can watch the whole scene unfold. But if we keep following them they're maybe going to stay nervous, go back into the bush and just stay there, hiding.”

After a short discussion we all agreed to go along with his suggestion, and we made our way over the rough road to the pans. When I say “rough road,” I mean it: not a gravel road, not a dirt road with a few stones, but a dirt/mud/sand road bulging with tree roots, blocked by fallen branches, sticky with mud and eroded by the floodwaters and rain so that it boasts huge puddles that block the entire road (necessitating a detour around it, on the grass and through the bush). There are holes of black mud that can suck the staunchest 4x4 into a standstill; undulating sections of sand road that make your vehicle bounce up and down as though you were in a hip-hop music video; stretches of swamp where you must drive through a foot of water thick with flooded grass. The way Moremi is now, most self-drivers and tour guides refuse to go on many of the roads. For RD, it's a delightful challenge – test your knowledge and the ability of your vehicle, dredge up the memory of back roads you haven't used for 10 years and find that old alternate route, routes that younger guides have probably never heard of, much less traversed. We bushwhacked through roads that hadn't seen traffic for years, occasionally hopping out to machete branches out of our way as we muscled through.

But back to the buffalo.

We parked at the pan, perched on a hummock overlooking a wide, shallow pan and a line of bush that we hoped the buffalo would emerge from. RD cut the engine and we sat there quietly, talking and listening. I drew a picture. We all tuned our ears for the sounds of the buffalo. Another tourist car, thinking that we had spotted something, stopped and waited for awhile; after five minutes they lost patience and drove away. We continued to wait. There were several giraffes in the bush, their heads and necks visible above the vegetation, and we watched them to see what they would do – the buffalo, RD explained, were also watching the giraffes for their decision, relying on the great height and excellent eyesight of their neighbours. We would watch the giraffes to see what the buffalo would do. After about 30 minutes, we saw the giraffe moving towards us, and then we could hear the buffalo rustling in the bush. They began to emerge. We readied our binoculars and cameras.

But horrors – another car pulled up just as the buffalo began to walk towards the pan, engine roaring, occupants talking loudly and excitedly. The forerunners of the herd threw up their heads before they reached the pan, and regarded the new arrivals with suspicion. After a moment's consideration, they turned and headed back into the bush. The tourists drove away, satisfied with their quick snaps of the buffalo, little suspecting the huge herd that lurked in the bushes just out of sight.

Frustrated but not defeated, RD said that we were at the beginning of a series of several pans, and the buffalo would probably just move on to the next one. We fired up the engine and drove to the next pan, a few hundred meters away, and found a new viewing point.

This time we were rewarded. As if on cue, the herd appeared, melting out of the bush and moving towards the water. The first few were tentative, but then they seemed to deem it safe, and hundreds of buffalo surged out of the protective cover of the bush, splashing into the knee-deep pan and drinking deep. Where before there had been an empty field and a quiet pan, there was a splashing, crashing, chomping, chewing, snorting, shuffling, endless sea of buffalo. They milled around drinking and chewing mouthfuls of grass, their dark coats splattered with mud and their wide, wet noses glistening above their constantly-moving mouths.

Buffalo are one of the Big Five – one of the five African animals considered most dangerous to hunt. The other four are elephant, leopard, lion, and (black) rhino. The buffalo is deceptive; to the average tourist, it must remind them irresistibly of a domestic a cow. Buffalo don't move very quickly unless pressed, and they have a habit of standing and staring at you with big dopey eyes and a mouthful of grass, flicking their tails absentmindedly to rid themselves of flies, and tolerating the agile oxpeckers that cling to their backs searching for ticks. It is not a very intimidating stare. They look quite comical, especially when they have long wisps of grass hanging out of the sides of their mouth. Their huge horns, curling down on either side of their face, looks like a judge's wig. But arouse them, and they will overturn your vehicle, gore you and tear out your intestines or toss you high into the air with a flick of their razor-sharp horns. The horns form a thick, literally bulletproof plate on their forehead, and from there curve down into wicked points. They can run like hell if they feel like it, and when a giant brown tank with a bulletproof battering ram and two scimitars of death on its head is running towards you full-tilt, you tell me it's still a comical cow. Buffalo will protect each other within the herd and have been known to kill lions. (If you haven't seen Battle at Kruger, please go watch it now. Seriously.)

We sat in the car, snapping photos, studying the buffalo through our binoculars, and just enjoying being part of the enormous herd. The omnipresent rustling of their hooves and teeth, their breathing and the flick of tails, the fluttering of the ox-peckers – it was marvellous. The sun was setting and a rich golden light was cast over everything, bringing out the colour in their coats and limning their horns with light.

Suddenly, on the edge of the herd, appearing from the bush like dreams, the lions came. When the buffalo noticed them, every single head turned towards them, every ear pricked, every set of horns oriented towards their hunters. We all watched them, as the two male lions slunk along the edge of the bush, unhurried, gazing calmly at their prey. Presently they came to a stop and lay down behind a large stone. We couldn't see them anymore. The buffalo resumed grazing.

“They're not interested in hunting right now,” RD said. “They're still picking out their prey. They don't bother hiding from the buffalo; the buffalo know that they're there, they've known all along. When night comes, the lions will begin stalking, and they'll try to surprise the individual prey. But the buffalo know what they're planning.”

As we watched, the lions rose again, and then suddenly we heard the sound of roaring... but from behind us. At the first sound, the buffalo lifted their heads as one, and as one turned sharply towards the roaring. It was another group of lions, far off, calling to the two males.

The two males began walking across the plain, and as they reached half-way across, they began roaring in reply. It was bonechilling, the sound of impending violent death and primordial power. It sounds nothing like the MGM lion. It is a deep sound that has no beginning or end, no well-defined “roar!” that children can imitate. It shakes the ground and echoes across the land, a rough, throat-scraping sound that must surely come from the very tip of the lion's claws to travel like a wave through its body, gathering strength, before tearing its way out of the great cat's mouth. We were spellbound, like any other prey.

As we watched, pinned to our seats by instinctive terror, it seemed that the lions walked straight towards us. In reality they probably did not care about us at all – we were simply in the middle of the shortest path towards where they wanted to go. They stalked towards us on their gigantic, heavy paws, never ceasing in their roaring. As one male stopped to draw breath, the other would pour forth his roar in turn. They slowed as they passed us and looked up at us, amber eyes arrogant and incurious, huge jaws gaping slightly to show the edges of their teeth. They moved with heavy, powerful grace, their steps buoyant and elastic, the tips of their thin, muscular tails bobbing just above the ground. Their manes were thick and rough, wild matted shields to keep them safe from killing bites during their fights. Their fur was short, the skin stretched tightly over muscle and sinew, veins and tendons.

For a moment we all held our breath, filled with the delicious but terrifying knowledge that the lions could easily leap into the vehicle, tackle us in one fluid motion out of our seats and onto the bare earth beyond, and tear us limb from limb. But they wouldn't. And they didn't. They walked past us, resuming their roaring, and we all sank back in our seats.

The buffalo continued to watch with total alertness as the lions padded into the tall grass on the other side of the road, and then melted like tawny shadows, suddenly and completely, into the bush. “They're probably trying to get downwind of the buffalo, for the hunt later this evening,” RD said. We heard one last roar, and with that, it was time to move on. The park rules said we had to be back in camp by dark, and we were pushing sunset, with twenty minutes of driving left to go. Awed by the encounter, we left the buffalo to their eternal struggle to survive the night, and drove back to camp.

What made this day so remarkable was not that we saw a huge herd of buffalo, or that we saw lions, or even that we saw lions following a huge herd of buffalo; it was the way we followed the interaction for the entire afternoon, understanding where the buffalo were moving and WHY, and the pattern of the lion's behaviour. To understand is to be able to spend an entire afternoon enthralled and rewarded; to lack that understanding is to take five minutes of snapshots and drive away, never discovering the meaning behind the encounter. I'm delighted that we were able to have the former experience.

okavango drawings

2010-07-09T11:36:00.002+02:00

I did quite a few drawings on this most recent trip to the Delta. I'm not sure if I've ever posted drawings/paintings on this blog before... I suppose because they're just quick sketches, nothing particularly finished or impressive... But it's nice to have a different view of the trip, so I'll be posting a few.

I love to draw when I'm travelling - drawing, though it cannot capture the detail that a photograph can, fixes the moments much more clearly in my memory. Something about the act of sketching, the intense concentration, puts my brain into a state more conducive to forming detailed long-term memories. When I look at a photograph, most often I cannot recall the exact moment that I took it; when I look back through my sketchbook, I can remember the weather, the people around me, the sounds, what I was thinking at the time.

Grey lowrie bird and a tree... I drew these at lunchtime, sitting on the ground by our camp, looking out over the pan and trying to draw the bird as it hopped around pecking for food. The tree, thankfully, sat still. Drawing animals is wonderful, but an exercise in patience and quick drawing - for every drawing that works out, there are several that fail because the animal just will NOT return to the pose you began drawing.

Giraffe - I was quite happy with these drawings. We came across a large herd of giraffe (if you want to be persnickety about your collective nouns, it was a "tower" of giraffe) and watched them for over an hour, as they bent their graceful heads to the treetops and walked majestically back and forth with their slow-motion steps. A young male was beaten off by the dominant male of the herd - their fight was like a gentle ballet, necks swung with heavy, ponderous movements, reminding me somehow of bull kelp swaying in the tide. Every motion of a giraffe looks slow-motion, underwater, as their impossibly long limbs swing through the air. When they stretch out to run (fast!), they appear to be moving too slowly to generate the breeze that blows back their tail-tassels.

Naukluft Preview

2010-07-06T16:41:00.004+02:00

Okay, so this photograph isn't actually from Naukluft. We met up with the Cape Town Crew two nights before the hike started, and spent the day before the hike on an unexpected bonus day trip: Sessriem and the Sossusvlei dunes. Basically, without planning it, I got iconic dune photos as well as the exact photo on the cover of Lonely Plant: Southern Africa. Sweet deal! This is AH and I on top of one of the dunes.

The Naukluft Trail was mountainous, desert, and rocky. It was also stark, stunning, at times austere and at times voluptuous with colour and warmth.

Quiver Tree (Kokerboom)

Tree with social weaver bird nest.

a few okavango pictures

2010-06-29T16:45:00.003+02:00

Elephant Family, Okavango Delta

Hello, faithful readers! I'm back from the Naukluft Trail, which was spectacular, and back ONLINE, which is a mixed blessing. I've just spent one month without regular access, two weeks without going online at all, and 8 days completely out of range of any kind of wireless signal. Spy satellites, I know you're out there, but for we average citizens I was utterly disconnected. Bliss! I know that an entire month of more-or-less no internet access seems impossible in North America, and it's difficult to force yourself into it (I certainly spent enough time raging impotently against the failed internet connection in D'Kar), but I highly recommend it. In fact, I might try to make it a point to spend a month out of each year without the internet... or at least two weeks, if a month seems too harsh.

As you can imagine, I've got a thousand and one things to catch up on around here, so I'm going to pepper you with brief photo entries until I can get myself organized enough to do some proper writeups! I've got less than one month remaining of my time in Botswana - trying not to think too hard about that deadline - and I want to write down as much as I can before I leave. No matter how many times I tell myself I'm going to go home, decompress, process everything that's happened, and really do a good job of writing it - it's never as good as writing on-site.

Enough of that, here are some gorgeous Okavango photos from my talented father and his spiffy new camera!

What a magical place! No caption needed, really - just lovely. The Delta was unusually cloudy for the season, which made for fantastic sunset and sunrise photos.

Herd of Cape Buffalo at twilight. We tracked this herd - numbering several hundred - for the afternoon and were rewarded when they came out of the bushes at last, to drink en masse. More on the buffalo in a later entry.

Giraffe, taken at the same place as the buffalo photos.

All photos this entry were taken by Frank Ruskey.

Apologies and extended hiatus

2010-06-15T12:03:00.002+02:00

HELLO DEAR READERS.

Since I posted my last entry, the internet has not been working in D'Kar... it's still not working, I'm writing this from the post office in Ghanzi. Tomorrow I leave for Namibia with A, to hike the Naukluft Trail, an eight-day backpacking trail in the Naukluft Mountains. It promises to be a fabulous and demanding trip, and we'll be hiking it with 7 other people - one former Princeton in Africa Fellow who is now living in Cape Town, and six of her friends.

I know that I'm severely backed up on the posts I'm supposed to write and the pictures I'm supposed to share... But really, I promise I'll take care of all of it when I get back from Namibia!!!

Till then (month-end).

Dear Family: Meet Africa

2010-06-01T13:25:00.004+02:00

I returned this weekend from my two-week holiday with my family. We had a wonderful, adventurous, fantastic time and I have a bunch of stories and some gorgeous photos (mostly courtesy of my dad and his super new camera!) to share, as well as some of my sketches; however, I'm going to take this entry to be a bit more personal than usual.

---
Africa

I love Botswana. I love Africa. The first time I went to Africa, I started this blog – I went to Kenya with the Princeton University Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department, and I fell in love. I couldn't tell you exactly why – or I could tell you so many reasons, but they wouldn't add up. I love the open space. I love the tropical light, the sunsets and sunrises, the passionate rainstorms. I love the people – all of them, from the wise, resilient villagers, to the un-politically-correct, adventurous, independent white farmers, to the sassy urban youth with their big dreams and fantastic outfits. I love the animals. I love goats running around town all day, and I love crossing paths with elephants in the middle of the bush. I love the heat and the sense of the frontier.

There are many things I can list that I love about Botswana. Yet, if I were to talk about India, I could compile as attractive a list. I loved many things about India; there were many things that I loved far more in India than in Botswana. (Food, for example. I could write a thousand paeans to Indian food, and just one word about Botswana's: BORING.) In India, I loved the heat and the light and the people, along with the architecture and the mysterious depths of spirituality, and the hectic, energizing press of the population. So many things were easier there, and many things were more interesting. On the whole, I was happier in India than I've been in Botswana. But I didn't love India.

I left India with no desire to live there, no fierce yearning to make my way, to find a way back there, to intertwine my life with the people I'd met. I loved Kodaikanal and I have a fierce yearning to visit, of course, but it wasn't at all the same feeling I have about Africa. I suppose it's an irrational feeling, as many loves are. It can't be easily explained, and it's not the most logical choice. It's certainly not convenient, and perhaps not what someone who knows me would predict. And there are many places I've never been; this may just be the warm-up for my upcoming mad love affair with Peru, say, or Mongolia. I doubt it, though. Africa has my heart.

...

Family

I love my parents. I love my family. I would say that I am closer to my family than the vast majority of my generation; that we keep in closer touch, enjoy each other's company more, and find the idea of living with each other to be much more appealing. I feel extremely lucky to have such a close relationship with my family. It is a combination - like many things - of genes, love, luck, and effort. On both sides, I come from families who value family enormously, who have used their families as an anchor through difficult times, and an inspiration. As a comfort and as a source of friends and fun. I come from a family whose members are not afraid to show their affection for each other.

My parents and my brother are the best roommates I could have. I recognize, of course, that living at home forever is not a good option – and like any roommates, we have our disagreements. But I love splitting dinner duty with my family. I love talking and cooking and watching television, and just being in the same room. I love being free of the need to perform some kind of expected persona; I am not any of the various characters I've built up or grown into over the years. I do not have to produce any sort of special knowledge or demonstrate any sort of special skill; I do not have to look hot, or offbeat, or professional; I do not have to reel off travel tales or dish gossip or try to sound smart. I am just myself, whatever sort of self I was from the beginning and will always be.

My family is my heart, my root, my anchor. The shore to which I will always return. The reason I am able to do everything that I do. The nest I took flight from, and the ocean in which to scatter my ashes at the very end.

---

Dear Family: Meet Africa

This visit, for me, was a chance to try and introduce two of the great loves in my life: my family, and Africa. How could my family understand my love for a continent they've never been to, when I can hardly explain it myself? I am certain, as I am certain of very few things in my life, that I will return to Africa. Yet it was a place totally unknown to the most important people in my life, and deeply misunderstood by the rest of the world.

Two weeks is a brief visit, but it was full. It was not a particularly carefree holiday. I hadn't realized just how important it was to me to have my parents visit – to have them, for the first time, understand a piece of me that was never accessible at home in Victoria. They came at a time when I am preparing to leave Botswana, preparing to desert my love with the promise of return. They came at a time when I am trying to map out the next five years, knowing that this place will be part of it. They came to a place and a time that I hadn't shared with them very much, or indeed shared with anyone from home.

I suppose that as children grow up and move away, their parents inevitably know them less. Any employee of Kuru understands my day-to-day life better than my mother and father. Yet no people will ever know my essential self better than my parents; no matter how long I leave for or how far I go, nobody will know me more honestly or more completely. This, I think, is also difficult for me. I don't think my parents treat me like a child; yet the person they got to know the best was the young me. I am the same person, but I've added layers, I've changed. It is always difficult for parents and children to really know each other as adults and allow their relationship to adapt, particularly as it will always remain a balance of parent/child and adult/adult.

For some, the relationship swayed towards adult/adult far too early; children who had to counsel or escape their parents. I was lucky enough to stay firmly a child (now and forever!) for a long time, and it therefore means a lot to me for my parents to see me in a working, “adult” environment. On the other hand, I find it difficult to interact with them as a responsible adult, perhaps because I have so little practice doing it. Somehow I revert to a more dependent self, while feeling resentful that I must become a child again, and crushed by the pressure to prove that I am a functioning adult with a meaningful life. I imagine that, in a way, my parents have the same conflict; the desire to behave towards me as though I were a responsible and independent adult, and the desire to have their little daughter back. The trick for us all is to accept that I can be independent without losing my connection to them.

After a time apart, you must re-learn each other, particularly if it is in a new context. The same dance is performed every time you reconnect with friends that you haven't seen in a long time; you have to work for a little while to reconcile the old image with the image built up from the emails and phone calls that were exchanged in the interval, and with the new reality in front of you. After awhile, the three images blur together. If you really were friends, you'll be happy with what you see.

This visit was necessary, wonderful, difficult, a learning experience. It was also a fabulous holiday involving all manner of wild creatures, the most luxurious camping on the planet, and a five-star resort... As well as atrocious service, bush camping with no water or amenities, and too much driving on dusty gravel roads. I feel that my parents know me better after this crash course in Jenn's Life in Africa, and that is hugely important to me. Perhaps Africa, having met my parents, understands me better as well - to know me, you must know where I come from.

Enough of the emotion! Tales from the bush coming later this week.

To my family (including my brother Albert, who couldn't make it – but we watch Survivor online together, so that's kind of like being in the bush, right?): I love you very much.

FAMILY VISIT

2010-05-14T14:25:00.002+02:00

Here I am with a pineapple on my head at C's farewell party. She left Botswana today.

My parents, my aunt, and my cousin are all coming to visit me. They arrive tomorrow, and we're spending 2 weeks together. As such, I'll be out of touch for awhile... But when I get back, I'll have new adventures to relate!

In other news, I've booked my ticket home: I'm leaving Botswana on the 28th of July.

handwritten

2010-05-10T22:16:00.002+02:00

From my personal, handwritten journal, sometime earlier this year...

We had a welcoming party at L's last night, for the new volunteer, S. I made borscht, which didn't turn out as delicious as I had hoped, but was still good, and well-received. Ziggy [L's cat] and Shaka [L's dog] also enjoyed the borscht, even though it was vegan. Then we drank, and drank. S wanted to see the local lifestyle, so around midnight we drove to the bar. The bar was closing up but we hung around in the dark outside the defunct filling station for awhile, talking.

The night was mildly humid and overcast, the stars indistinct under a veil of cloud but the arch of the Milky Way was still discernible. You could hear and smell the penned-up sheep next to the bar. K's Hilux was idling on the road, playing - of all things! - Australian Aboriginal music. The eerie thrum of the didgeridoo wound out into the night, punctuated by the shrieks and chirrs of the musician barking into his instrument, that termite-hollowed cylinder of wood. As the didgeridoo faded away, low chanting and drumming rose to take its place. K's half-dozen passengers got in, got out again, went to pee, wandered drunkenly around, and generally prevented him from driving away.

C [my boss] was there and we talked, happy and tipsy, telling each other how much we like to know WHY things are the way they are. "I like you," he said, "because you are always telling me the whole explanation - like when we were in Swakopmund and I asked why the ocean waves move like that, you told me the whole reason, with the moon and the tides and everything. Most people won't tell you."

"Wow! Well, I like you," I replied, "because most people are not interested in knowing how things work and why they do the things they do!"

"I know!" he said, laughing.

We both laughed, and clapped each other on the shoulder. A drunken exchange of sentiment, perhaps, but so important to me. I will miss C a lot. He's one resident of D'kar that I really want to return to in the future.

Donkey Cart Bachelorette

2010-05-07T16:47:00.003+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, I went to K's bachelorette party. She's a Peace Corps volunteer who's getting married in August, as soon as she returns home (to a very happy fiance!). However, since her Botswana friends are so dear to her, she decided to double up on the bachelorette parties. It occurs to me that this is a brilliant idea - more than one bachelorette party?! In fact I had never attended one of these infamous excuses for debauchery before, but it was loads of fun and I think that any excuse to have more than one is a good idea.

One of K's best friends, L, decided that the party needed an authentic Botswana twist. Her brainwave? A donkey cart to pick her up at her house and take her to the party. (In lieu of a limousine, I suppose.)

I ended up with the task of riding the donkey cart from the farm into Ghanzi, along with another Peace Corps. We rode for about 8km, first on the rutted farm road, and then on the thankfully smooth paved road. Cars that passed us slowed down to gawk at the two giggling white girls on the donkey cart - occasionally whole families would pass with their heads turned sideways to stare at us. As we rode, a light rain began to fall, and the light slowly faded from the sky. By the time we entered Ghanzi proper, we were shivering and the rain was falling in earnest, and by the time we reached K's house, it was dark. Nevertheless, she was delighted to see the donkey cart and happily rode it all the way to the Kahalari Arms with an umbrella to keep her dry.

kalahari clouds & moon

2010-04-30T09:50:00.003+02:00

You could sell this place on the skies alone. I wish I had the equipment to take some super-long-exposure night sky photos... They'd be stunning. Oh well. A mission for when I'm older and richer, and return to Botswana.

On Wednesday night I spent the evening with C and H, the creators of the Naro Language Project. After a delicious supper and some interesting conversation, H and I went outside to fiddle around with his telescope. I'd never actually looked through a small telescope before; I've been on various school field trips to observatories, but to look into this relatively small device was something completely different. There's a sense of removal when you go into a big observatory, with a Real Astronomer in a lab coat, and peer into a gigantic apparatus whose full extent you can't even see. There's too much incomprehensible technology in the way. It seems possible that those sneaky "astronomers" could plug a television into the eyepiece of their "telescope," and you'd never know the difference.

When you aim the telescope yourself, it's different. When you can hold the entire thing and pick it up, see the spindly metal arms of the adjustors and the gleam of the lenses - then it seems real. H found Saturn and I sat on a kitchen chair, knees on either side of the telescope's tripod, one eye screwed shut and the other intently focused on that tiny, glowing white dot - Saturn! Saturn is about 1.2 BILLION kilometers away from Earth, and it takes light bouncing off of Saturn about an hour and 15 minutes to reach the Earth. So far! The dot visible in the telescope was tiny, an infinitesimal dust mote - yet with H's encouragement, when I looked very closely, what I had previously thought to be just a blur was in fact the incredibly thin but incredibly precise thread of Saturn's rings. It was more exciting than I can explain without sounding like a doofus - just a tiny, barely-visible line on a tiny, barely-visible dot. Exciting? YES! When I realized that I was actually seeing the rings in perfect definition, I almost jumped out of my socks. It's real.

And then we looked at the moon, which was also crazy (it's so close!), but more about that later. I'm going to go back to H's house and look at the moon again when it is about half-full, to see the shadows.

cheep cheep

2010-04-30T07:44:00.002+02:00

Baby blacksmith plovers, found on Kanana.

This nest was precariously balanced between two dead acacia branches, out in the open, the wind blowing on the poor unformed feathers of these two babies. It seemed like an awfully risky place to have a nest - but on the other hand, the babies are remarkably well camouflaged, aren't they?

Sticks and stones may break my...

2010-04-27T09:31:00.003+02:00

See previous entry "water or paper?"

Last week we were holding kgotla meetings in Qabo and Grootlaagte. On Thursday night I stayed at J’s house in Grootlaagte, along with a young man from the Ghanzi Department of Wildlife and National Parks. We made supper and then talked as we sat in the dim candle light eating our goat meat, phaletshe (stiff maize meal porridge) and merogo (spinach).

The conversation turned, as it so often does, to comparisons of life in Botswana and North America. This topic is impossible to exhaust; there is always another cultural quirk that can be brought up for consideration. This evening I revealed that I had spent a year living in India, and they pounced on the opportunity to question about a new country. After a few rounds of fairly innocent questions, the guy from DWNP started looking a bit crafty. “So,” he began, already stifling a giggle behind his hand, clearly uncomfortable. “So I heard that… Over there… People, um, when they are going to the toilet, they… they don’t use T.P.” He paused, and J looked confused.

“No T.P.?” she asked.

“No T.P.,” he confirmed. He turned back to me. “I heard that they use… that they use water! And their hand!”

He burst out laughing and J joined in.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, they do. I did too, when I was living there.”

Shocked silence. Then more uproarious laughter. Spluttered bits of commentary, between guffaws: “Ahaha! Disgusting!” “But then their pants must be all wet!” “No T.P.!” “How do they eat!?” “I can’t believe it!” “WET PANTS!” “Where do they get the water?” “Everyone?”

After they had calmed down a bit, I explained how everything works; that I’d found it to be no problem at all; and that for India – a country of a billion, with extreme poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and no history of using T.P. – water actually made more sense. However, my audience was not convinced.

“But it’s not clean!”

“Well, you do splash the water a bit, and you only use your left hand… and then the left hand isn’t used for anything else, it’s considered the unclean hand, your right and is used for everything.”

J held up her left hand and turned her face from it, miming disgust. The man from DWNP burst out laughing.

“And the pants!” he said, “the pants! After you went to the toilet, you’d be – with the splashing – it would be -“ he gestured at his crotch and then started laughing so hard he couldn’t continue.

“All wet!” J filled in. “It would look like you – like you – AHAHAHAHAH!”

“Well, come on!” I reasoned, “What else can they do? There’s not enough T.P. for everyone! Even in Botswana some people can’t afford T.P. , and in India nobody is accustomed to using it. They’ve always used water. Surely you must have used something else in Botswana, in the past.”

They were silent for a moment, and then chimed in with answers.

“People in the village! You will find them even now – going out into the bush, squatting and then just rubbing their bums in the sand afterwards!”

It was my turn to be shocked. “In the sand?”

“In the sand! Just like that.” J used her hand to illustrate the motion of someone in a squatting position swinging their butt back and forth on the ground.

“Or some people will use rocks,” the DWNP man contributed.

“Or sticks!”

“But the sand, it can be a problem. Sometimes there are those sticky things – burrs – or thorns! - hiding in the sand – and then, OUCH!”

Both began to laugh again.

“What about leaves?” I asked, thinking this would have been top of the list.

“Yes,” J said, after some thought, “people also use leaves. But sometimes the leaves are not there.” She was silent for a moment, and then something occurred to her which brought upon even more uncontrollable laughter.

“What?” I asked, wondering what could be better than stones and sand.

“Well,” she said, “when I was in primary school, back in Gweta, we got those flush toilets for the first time. We - the children - had never seen them before, and suddenly the school gets these Western flush toilets. We thought they were amazing but we didn't really understand them.

"Soon, of course, they became blocked, and my friends and I got assigned to unblock them. So we had to reach in and find what was blocking, just pull out all the stuff and unblock those flush toilets. And we found that people were just treating it like the bush - we found everything in there! Sand! Soil! Stones! Sticks, twigs, grasses... Leaves! Even the old maize cobs! Pages from books, empty packets of chips, more sand... Everything you can think of! Nobody understood how these things worked and they had just been using anything to clean themselves, just like the bush... It took a long time for all of us to know how they worked, and every time they would block, just like that... full of sticks and stones!"

It was my turn to become incoherent with laughter.

After this discussion, J and the DWNP man conceded that there might be something to the water idea, after all.

"It is better than sand," the DWNP man admitted.

"Better than a maize cob!" J agreed, choking on giggles.

TRUE. Maybe this really IS my calling in Botswana.

Photos - Huiku & Kanana

2010-04-26T08:12:00.005+02:00

Flower at Gam Xho (Huiku camp site)

Two posts in quick succession! What's going on here? Well! As I wrote at the bottom of the last entry, the internet here has been an absolute disaster, and in the past 2 weeks when it's come on, blog-updating has been a low priority. Now it seems to be back, so I'm going to start madly posting to make up for lost time.

View from the top of the rocky outcropping, Huiku camp site

Two weeks ago, we took the Huiku board members out to Gam Xho to look around and make some decisions about how we want to situate the camp site. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the area is still lush and green from the rains. Too many rains, actually - it's unusual for the rainy season to last this long, and though it's good for the animals, it's starting to drive me crazy. Despite coming from one of the rainiest places in the world, this grey weather is wearing on my nerves. I'm in Botswana! The weather shouldn't be like this! It's pouring rain as I type this, and it's been dreary and grey continuously since Saturday. Even in the height of the rainy season, that would be strange; generally the rain will pour for a few hours in the afternoon, and the sun will be out the rest of the time. This has been steady cloud and rain for almost three days straight. It doesn't bode well for winter.

Board members sitting on Gam Xho

Fossil river bed, Huiku camp site

Typical camping set-up; this is in Grootlaagte, at the Huiku office

Luckily, it was quite dry two weeks ago when the above picture was taken - though we didn't have such good luck last week, when torrential rains struck at 3:30 a.m. and soaked through the board members' tents!

The above is a fairly typical camping scene - tent in the background, heating water for a bath, stirring or morning activity. Let me go through it, item by item:
(1) The yellow container in the front is full of water; there isn't a tap on the Huiku office plot yet, so we get water from the tap outside the kgosi's office, and carry it over in a plastic jerrycan.
(2) The sheet of corrugated tin on the left acts as a windbreak. I have no idea where it came from, but it shelters the fire.
(3) Next to the metal sheet, a small 3-legged iron pot, used for cooking EVERYTHING. It just sits in the fire on its little legs. These things are very heavy and do a good job of cooking most foods.
(4) To the right of the 3-legged pot, a fire-blackened Ricoffy instant coffee tin. This tin is being used to heat water for a bath. Once heated, the water will be poured into a big plastic bathtub, topped up with cold water, and a bath will be had!
(5) Really long log. Also typical; nobody has an axe, so long logs are just fed into the fire a bit at a time. It's generally so dry in the Kalahari that this works very well - there's no need to construct heat-conserving teepees or criss-crossed towers.
(6) Man drinking tea. He is sitting on a stone, I think.

Motswiri Lodge, Kanana

The other reason for my break in blog posts is that I've been spending most of my weekends away from D'Kar. Why? Because I've been beg-borrow-and-stealing lifts up to Kanana, to spend time with my boyfriend, A. He works on Kanana, which is a game farm on the way to Grootlaagte.

I waded out into the pan to take this picture; it is a shallow, temporary natural pan, and never becomes more than 2 feet deep.

Sunset view. I'm going to miss these Kalahari colours.

That's all for now, folks!

Wedding Weekend III - River Cruise

2010-04-26T06:41:00.002+02:00

It was a beautiful Maun afternoon. The air was warm, the breeze sweet, the sun declining in the sky. The water birds were calling to each other across the calm surface of the river and swimming between the reeds. We boarded the pontoon – Sir Rosis of the River (get it? Say it out loud..) – after a hearty round of group photos, and then pushed off into the river. The point of these boat rides is simply to float around getting drunk and having a good time; there are speakers and an ipod jack, and a cooler full of drinks. This particular boat ride was a peculiar mix of A’s family and A&L’s friends… The family members were mostly sober and extremely nervous. I think most of them had seen rivers before, but none of them had ever ventured into one, much less floated down one for hours on a boat, and they were filled with apprehension at the prospect of boarding Sir Rosis and casting off into the stream. However, they all sat down with brave faces and accepted cans of coke or juice. A&L’s friends, on the other hand, were tipsy and looking to get more so, and perfectly happy to be floating down the river on a pontoon.

We cruised down the river with music blasting from the speakers. Floating down the river in Maun is always a lovely experience; what could be better than sitting down in the sun with a bottle of beer, watching the long stretches of overgrown riverbank drift by you? The idyllic scenes of river life reel past as though they were a film screened especially for you: villagers fishing with wooden rods, families hastily bathing in the shallows, children playing with abandoned mokoros, gape-mouthed tourists speeding past in hotel motorboats. Ibises, herons, African darters, jicanas, kingfishers, fish eagles, swifts and even a marabou stork flapped overhead or perched on dead trees as we drifted by. It was the first opportunity for real conversation between the bride and the family; between glasses of champagne A&L spoke with each family member and delivered on their familial responsibilities. Later in the trip there was dancing and singing, toasts and jokes and laughter until we finally returned to shore just after dark, around 7:30.

We drove back to the wedding party in a tipsy convoy of cars. Here I again enter controversial territory by admitting that YES, there were people driving in a less-than-perfect state of sobriety. I believe that in most rural locations in the world, you will find people driving under the influence. If buses, subways, and taxis are not readily available – or if the distances involved, over rough country roads, make the price of taxis prohibitive – people will drive after drinking. In Maun, a considerable number of my friends live in places that taxis simply cannot go; especially in the rainy season, their homes require a 4WD to access. Education and police vigilance certainly make a difference, and I’m sure that due to the strict laws and frequent checks in the USA or Canada, there are probably fewer people driving drunk. However, particularly in rural areas, where checks are less common, distances greater, and alternative transport less available, people drive under the influence. It happens.

Ideally the least-drunk person is selected to drive; when I refer to driving under the influence, I’m not talking about slurring, staggering, vomiting drunkards getting behind the wheel of a car. I’m talking about the buddy who had a few beers in the course of an evening, is mildly buzzed, and drives back with a high degree of caution. It’s still not a great idea; a mild buzz will undeniably slow your reflexes, and if your friends are raucous and distracting they can add to the danger. But many people, in many places, consider this to be an acceptable risk.

Botswana is a terrible place for drunk driving. There is no part of the country that does not involve large distances over rough roads, and the police are not particularly vigilant about checking for drunk drivers. The risk of accidents is decreased because there isn’t much traffic, but vastly increased by the number of animals – wild and domestic – that are on the road. Before I came here, I was warned that driving at night was the most risky activity (well... second, perhaps, to unprotected sex…) that one could undertake in Botswana. I think that’s true; between the animals and the other drivers, it’s a truly hazardous activity. People regularly go 120 km/hr on the Trans-Kalahari at night, even though they can’t see cows on the road until they’re almost upon them, and a rogue kudu could jump out at any moment. Drunk driving is rampant. Apparently the police, in a vain attempt to crack down on drunk drivers, did some nighttime road-blocks in high-traffic areas; they found that over 50% of the drivers were drunk. Oops.

At any rate, we made it back to the wedding without mishap. The party was in full swing, and the beleaguered organizers had already had to turn away a variety of uninvited guests, ranging from completely random people to (uninvited) casual acquaintances, to the local councillor. This is another common feature of parties in Botswana; if a person is wandering down the road and hears music, they feel free to walk into the party, grab a plate of food, and ask the host where the nearest cooler-box is. The councillor in particular felt entitled to a large plate, a bottomless glass of champagne, and other hospitalities. L kicked him out without further ado.

NOTE: I am not endorsing drunk driving; the death toll is high, it’s a stupid idea, etc., etc. I try to avoid getting into vehicles with people that have been drinking to ANY degree, and I have never gotten into a vehicle with someone that was clearly out-of-control. However, it is a bald fact that people drive drunk all the time. I’ve tried to explain a few of the reasons why. Of course a major reason is simply that people are stupid, all the moreso when they've had a few drinks.

FURTHER NOTE: Sorry for the long hiatus. Our internet connection has been an absolute disaster since I last posted.

wedding weekend II

2010-04-14T07:05:00.003+02:00

Continued from wedding weekend.

The champagne toast brought with it a certain sense of relief; it marked the beginning of the party. For myself and the other friends-cum-caterers, we'd been on a frantic high of cooking and decorating, and felt that we had just barely made it. With that first glass of champagne we moved from work to play. For L and A, they had been out late the night before and struggled through hours of tedious officialdom in the kgotla, pandering to the Botswana authorities and A’s traditional family. The first glass of champagne for them marked the moment that the wedding changed over to their style – all of the T’s dotted and I’s crossed, all of the family obligations fulfilled (at least for the day), time to relax and start the party with friends.

For a couple of hours we popped champagne corks like there was no tomorrow. The rain had stopped, the music was blasting, and J was cooking up a storm on the braai. At about 2PM, it was time for the first costume change of the day.

At this point let me say that the wedding costumes were carefully coordinated – the first outfit of the day was, for L, a bright turquoise knee-length bubble dress with a halter top that her mother had made and sent from America. L also wore a wreath of white roses, baby’s breath and leaves, which she kept on all day. L’s mother sent extra turquoise fabric, and a matching dress shirt was tailored for A. He wore it with black tuxedo pants, a vest, and a bow tie. The best man and maid of honor also matched – they wore a dress shirt and a knee-length sleeveless dress, made of a rust-red crinkly fabric, designed and sewn by a friend in Gaborone.

The second costume was spectacular. L had been dreaming of a dress made of ostrich feathers but couldn’t find a way to make it a reality until running into her friend T a fortnight before the wedding. T is an up-and-coming young designer in Gabs, and he mentioned that his father owns an ostrich farm. Serendipitous in the extreme! L immediately described what she wanted, and a week before the wedding T began sewing. He brought the finished dress to the wedding with him, praying that he wouldn’t have to do significant alterations – and when L put it on, it was perfect. The dress had a strapless white bodice and a short skirt made of many layers of black tulle. The front was a frothy fan of ostrich feathers held with a black sash. Paired with extremely high black stiletto sandals, L was breathtaking. The maid of honor kept her red dress. A and the best man wore matching brightly-colored tunics from Ghana, courtesy of a friend.

Following the costume change, we drove to River Lodge to get on the party boat – L and A, trying to provide a special activity for the out-of-town guests, had rented a pontoon for an afternoon river cruise.

Oops... I meant to write more, but at the office we're in the middle of a small crisis related to financial reporting, and I can't find the time to continue... I'm off to Qabo and Grootlaagte till Monday!

spit-braai; not-braai

2010-04-12T22:50:00.004+02:00

Do I seem obsessed with dead animals?

Possibly.

There's a blog in itself! Unfortunately, I am up late typing up 40 hand-written pages of minutes from an exceptionally horrendous board meeting, and I do not have time to muse about food, death, and Our Animal Nature.

a few wedding photos

2010-04-08T22:03:00.002+02:00

Like I said, I don't really feel comfortable posting photos from the wedding, but I couldn't resist sharing a few...

The traditional dancers leading everyone in.

More of the traditional dancers. It's hard for me to express in words how... joyful this was.

Just before we left for the boat cruise.

Boarding the boat.

Woo-hoo! Wedding! (This is actually from Saturday night.)

wedding weekend

2010-04-07T20:28:00.002+02:00

So. Last weekend was WEDDING WEEKEND.

My friends L and A got married in Maun.

L is an American woman, 28, and has been living in Botswana for the past 6-7 years. A is a Motswana man, also about 28, who met L many years ago.

It was a beautiful wedding. Boldly non-traditional, while cherry-picking some of the best aspects of tradition from the various cultures involved.

I wish I could post photos but it really doesn't seem appropriate - a wedding, after all, is one of the most personal events of your life.

The wedding events - for those who were thoroughly involved, like myself - lasted from wednesday till monday. Wednesday we arrived and began cooking/cleaning/setting up - there was no hired help. Thursday was the wedding. Friday was hangover and half-hearted cleanup. Saturday was serious cleanup, and then major afterparty. Sunday was hangover and half-hearted cleanup round two. Monday was final cleanup, dreadlock day (for me), and drive home.

The wedding day:

We woke up at 6:30 in the morning so that we could get to the kgotla by 7:30 when the ceremony began. When you get officially married in Botswana, you must start the process with investigations and announcements several weeks before; then the day before the wedding, you go to the District Commissioner with your witnesses and fill out a bunch of paperwork. The day of the wedding you go to the kgotla along with whoever else is getting married that day, and the marriage officiator gives speeches, hears your vows, and seals the deal. I went along because I was supposed to be the "official" wedding photographer; it was long and boring and it started to POUR with rain. I left early to go back and help the "caterers" (i.e. a handful of friends) who were starting to panic because the ceremony would be over soon, guests would be arriving, and the food was nowhere near ready.

Back at Wedding HQ - R's house, a big beautiful ramshackle place on a big riverfront plot - there was a boiling anthill of activity. We struggled to cook food, put up decorations, and at the last minute move EVERYTHING into the covered kitchen area because the rain was torrential and unrelenting. Amazingly, it all came together just in time and everything looked beautiful when the wedding party arrived.

This was the most beautiful part. M from D'Kar and her small troupe of traditional dancers had come to the wedding to perform, and as the wedding party pulled up the drive and got out of their cars, M and her dancers - in traditional costume - greeted them, singing and clapping and dancing the guests down the drive and into the festivities while we showered them with rice. It was so beautiful to hear the throaty, birdlike singing of the San drawing L and A into the wedding, with L in her brilliant turquoise dress that her mother made and sent from the States, and A's family in their traditional Setswana clothes trailing behind, grinning. At this point I started crying, and kept tearing up intermmitently until the traditional dancers stopped.

We made it to the main patio - it had finally stopped raining - and the wedding party filed in past the trailing rainbow peace flags hanging from the trees, the vases full of peacock feathers and birds-of-paradise, the strings of balloons and colourful tablecloths and dripping trees. Once we were all assembled, the San dancers gave a proper performance, cavorting one by one with the bride and groom, singing and stamping their seed ankle rattles, bringing a piece of D'Kar and a sense of unbridled joy to the celebration.

When they had finished, A's family got up and burst into song - apparently this is part of a traditional Setswana wedding - and began dancing in a circle with the bride and groom at the head of the line. For over half an hour they sang and danced in this endless conga line, harmonizing perfectly on traditional songs, singing about cows and lobola (bride price), relatives travelling long distances, and so on.

Then there were speeches, then a champagne toast, and then the braai!

.. That's all for now, to be continued ..

whoops

2010-03-23T08:11:00.003+02:00

So... I haven't updated in ages. I'm going to cop out again today and just write about a few things that have been going on in my life, and hopefully later this week I'll get my act together and write something more serious.

Looking back at my trusty Mozilla Sunbird calendar of the past 2 weeks, I've done the following:

- Went to a birthday party for K, on the game farm he manages outside of Ghanzi. A bunch of people from Maun came up for the party, which is nothing short of a miracle - it's like pulling teeth to get Maun people to come to Ghanzi. They revile it as a sleepy cattle post full of inbred Boer rednecks. Likewise, it's difficult to get Ghanzi people to go to Maun - that debauched bordello full of immoral city folk and their crazy ideas! Come on, people. Bridge the gap. K's birthday party did involve both Ghanzi people and Maun people, but for the most part they stuck to opposite ends of the party, going so far as to set up two strictly segregated beer pong tables. Le sigh. We did have a spit-braaied warthog, which was pretty exciting - I'll post pictures once I've gotten them off of my camera.

- Spotted the following Live! Wild Mammals: Brown hyena (spotted on the side of the road between Ghanzi and D'kar - awesome!), Porcupine (always fun to see - they look so busy, shuffling around industriously with all of their quills dragging behind them), Giraffe, Kudu, Impala, Springbok, Jackal, Warthog, Dormouse (ok, this one was dead - killed by my cats), at least 2 species of bat, Mongoose, Squirrel, Waterbuck, Red Hartebeest, Blue Wildebeest, Black Wildebeest, Springhare, Rabbit.

- Eaten the following animals: Cow, Kudu, Chicken, Warthog, Pig, Tuna (canned).

- Handed out copies of the Environmental Impact Assessment to various government offices, all of whom responded to the 200-pg tome by saying, "Ah! But this is too long! I will never read it!" (Not so encouraging...)

- Argued endlessly with the donor about our disbursement request, going so far as to write an irate and stiffly formal six-page letter full of passive-agressive bureaucrat-speak. I dislike writing letters like that, but they do roll off the keyboard so easily - six pages in no time at all, when all you're doing is repeating things like, "in light of our earlier agreement..." "when taking into consideration the financial situation currently experienced by the trust..." "it was the impression of the Trust that..." etc etc etc. I hate doing this, but when dealing with a giant bureaucracy, writing an endless series of letters is often a very effective tactic; if you keep writing letters, they can't give you an outright "no."

- Acquired a boyfriend. Sort of. We'll call him AH.

Okay, cheers for now! Upcoming: pictures of the warthog!

dead baby beliefs

2010-03-11T08:49:00.001+02:00

A couple of weeks ago I was in the coordinator's office, and the subject of dead babies came up. Conversations about tribal beliefs can be very interesting in the Komku office because we have a fairly diverse crowd, and many of them have travelled and learned about the customs of other tribes/cultures as well. In particular, we have an employee from Zimbabwe, and his beliefs - about the Zim political situation, as well as Shona traditions - are always new and interesting.

We've discussed topics as wide-ranging as bride prices, marriage laws, Islam, how much to cook your meat, Obama, why there are tides, and now... dead babies.

In these situations I often find myself caught out - does Canadian culture have a specific tradition for dead babies? Not really, except that it's a tragedy. There haven't been any babies dying recently, but our finance officer's 23-year-old daughter died a few weeks ago, which is what brought us to the topic.

"Do you bury your babies in the house?" E, the Zimbabwean asked, out of the blue. "When I was working with the Kgalagadi," he continued by way of explanation, "they told me that they buried their dead babies in the house. In Zim we would think is very strange."

"Yes," CC replied, "we do bury them in the house. But for us it's different from the Kgalagadi. For a Nharo person, the baby is a very new person - it hasn't lived long and it shouldn't feel lonely. So we bury it in the house so that it can be close to everyone. When the tribe moves on, the baby is left there in the house. Sometimes old people who are going to die are left behind in the house as well."

"But it's different for Kgalagadis," Z cut in. "For Kgalagadis, they believe that if you bury the baby in the house, it will attract more children, and the mother will conceive again. If you bury it in the graveyard, it will attract no children and the mother will be barren."

"Hmm," said E. "For us in Zimbabwe, it is again very different. We put the baby in a calabash, and bury it in a shallow grave on the edge of the river. When the river floods, it washes the baby away." He pondered for a moment. "But I don't know why we do that!"

Afternoon Snack: Mopane Worms

2010-03-09T14:54:00.005+02:00

Surely one of the Top 10 Required Activities when visiting a foreign country is to sample the weirdest food possible. While in India I ate zillions of mysterious street foods; while in Kenya I ate a live winged termite (alate); while in Botswana I have eaten many different game meats and various organs; and now I have added to my repertoire possibly the most frightening treat of all: the mopane worm.

I think I posted pictures of the live mopane worm in a previous blog, but here they are again: big and juicy, and not-so-edible-looking. Mopane "worms" are actually the caterpillar form of the mopane moth.

Mopane worms are nutritious and "delicious," much valued by everyone in Botswana as a convenient snack and good source of protein. Women and children gather them off of trees (usually mopane trees, but the caterpillars can live on other trees as well) and dry them for later consumption. Before drying, the picker will squeeze out the leafy green guts (gross!), leaving just the empty worm with its spiny exterior and tasty yellow interior meat.

Today, J brought in a bowl of dried mopane worms. She'd brought the worms all the way from Gweta, her home village, where she had spent the weekend. A couple of weeks ago, I had seen some mopane worms and confessed to J that I'd never tried them before, which she thought was ridiculous... So she brought a big bowl of them for me.

Mopane worms are not difficult to procure; you can buy them from countless ladies who sit at the side of the road with a big sack full of worms, ready to dispense them as though they were any other roadside snack. However, I've never been brave enough to try them before. I mean, eating caterpillars? This is some serious Fear Factor shit, guys. But J was adamant.

"They are very tasty! You have to try them!"

Really? Let's get a closer look at the dried mopane worm:

Mmmmm. Wormy. But I was committed. And these aren't some weird tribal ceremonial specialty - this is a common and coveted snack item all over Botswana! Nay, all over Southern Africa! Bringing mopane worms to a party is like bringing a tray of totally awesome nachos. People love 'em. So I went for it.

Aaah! I decided the best way was to just throw the whole thing in my mouth and chew. It tasted a little like dried fish or seaweed, except milder. The texture was like eating... hmm, I don't know, dried wood? Soft, slightly crispy dried wood? It wasn't difficult to chew, and the exterior was sort of crunchy, but the interior was dry yet solid. Basically a fairly tasteless, slightly salty, weird-textured snack. The grossest part was simply knowing that it was a caterpillar. I ate two, and the rest of the office hoovered up the rest of the bowl in no time flat.

If anyone would like to place an order for mopane worms, please email me or comment below! I'm not sure if it's legal to ship dried caterpillars, but probably customs will never notice...

*CBNRM = Community-Based Natural Resouce Management, the policy which guides the activities of the Huiku Trust.

Sparky Gets Spayed

2010-03-07T20:29:00.003+02:00

Disclaimer: if you think that reading about getting a cat spayed in a semi-sketchy way – I’M IN AFRICA, PEOPLE! – is going to send you running, screaming “Cruelty to animals! Abuse of pets! Horrible, horrible human being!” then please don’t continue.

This entry is a bit overdue – Sparky was spayed on the 7^th of February. On the other hand, I’ve gotten a lot of flack about posting too many entries related to cats, so I suppose the space is good.

So. Sparky (a.k.a. Melissa) the cat has had three litters while I’ve been in Botswana, and lord knows how many before then. I decided that after this most recent litter, it was high time to get her fixed. No more babies. I waited until I was sure she had stopped lactating, and then sorted out a date with Dr. C, the new vet for Agriculture and Animal Production in Ghanzi. He is Zimbabwean, and will provide private veterinary services on the weekends for a little extra cash. I’ve actually consulted with Dr. C in his official capacity, when asking about the status of the Ghanzi/Ngamiland fence which forms the top border of the Huiku property – he is a huge man, both tall and fat, and has a face that says, “I am in control.” He doesn’t look worried, he doesn’t look inquisitive. He looks bored, and he looks like the boss.

I called him to set up the appointment. We agreed on Saturday morning at 10 a.m., and I arranged to use a Komku car for the weekend so that I could transport Sparky back and forth. (I cannot even imagine the nightmare that would be trying to hitch-hike with an angry cat.)

On Saturday morning, my boss, CC, pulled up at my house with the car. I asked him to wait for a moment and help me get Sparky into the car – I’d taped up a cardboard box, cut a couple of small holes for airflow, and with CC’s help managed to stuff her in the box and tape it shut. I put Sparky in the backseat of the car and left her with CC watching over her while I went back to my house to grab my bag. While I was in the house, I suddenly heard a frantic shout – “JENN! JENN! JENN!” I dashed out and saw CC helplessly pointing at Sparky, who was streaking away from the car and into the bushes, as though someone had set her tail on fire.

the box.

Not good. There was no chance of catching her in the bushes, so I went over to see what had happened: she had put her paw into one of the airholes and literally torn her way out of the cardboard box, making a slightly larger hole and then desperately forcing her whole body through it. It wasn’t a very large hole. CC sheepishly admitted that she got stuck halfway through, but he was afraid of being bitten, so he didn’t stop her from escaping.

Sparky was obviously terrified. I spent an hour trying to catch her again, but in the end I had to give up and call Dr. C to explain what had happened. We rescheduled for Sunday at 10.

I spent the afternoon at the Gat with some friends, and then went back home to wait for Sparky. Sure enough, around 9 p.m. she crept back into the house looking for food, and I promptly shut all of the doors and windows to make sure she would still be there in the morning. I succeeded in that, but failed to get any sleep, as the now-paranoid Sparky spent all night meowing as loudly and piteously as she could in an effort to get out. At one point she managed to leap up and cram herself between the burglar bars and the screen in a frantic attempt to escape. She clawed at every window-handle and sat staring at the door and meowing incessantly. All night long. Her kittens picked up on her desperation and started to meow as well, following her around the house as she tried to find an exit.

Sorry, Sparky.

The next morning, I called M to help me out, and stuffed Sparky into a duffel bag. This sounds cruel, but I couldn’t risk another cardboard box disaster, and the duffel bag was pretty stiff, holding a nice boxy shape for her to sit in. It was about the same size as a normal cat-carry cage. I drove, and M sat in the back seat with Sparky. With the furious Sparky packed inside, the duffel bag looked like a mad amoeba - a demon-possessed, amorphous khaki object which thrashed and bulged as Sparky dug her claws in, trying to tear the bag apart, and then threw her whole weight against it trying to force her way through. At one point she managed to get a paw into the gap between the zippers and had her head all the way out before M realized what was happening and quickly stuffed her back in. M held the zippers closed for the rest of the trip.

We arrived at the “vet’s office,” i.e. Dr. C’s house, with his three curious-looking daughters watching TV in their pyjamas. I held out the duffel bag, and he said, “OK, well, let’s get a look at her.”

I pulled out Sparky, who was thrashing like a wild thing (which she is) and seemed to be overheated from her half-hour in the duffel bag. Feeling terrible, I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and held her down on a little wooden table while Dr. C jabbed a long needle full of general anaesthetic into her thigh. “Cats have very strong skins,” he commented as he plunged the needle into her. “Need to use a sharp needle!” Strangely, Sparky didn’t jerk away while he put the needle in, but only when he’d injected the full dose. Then she convulsed so violently that she almost got out of my grip, but half a second later she was passing out. Dr. C instructed us to come back in just over an hour.

“I’d… kind of like to watch,” I said tentatively. I was curious.

“Well, I don’t like an audience,” he said, raising his eyebrows. M and I left, got some lunch and went to the china shop, where I bought a green dress.

Then we went back. Dr. C, as promised, was finished with the surgery – Sparky was lying on a towel on the table, with a four-inch slit in her left side that was stitched up with blue thread. The fur had been shaved off and her skin was light grey. She was completely limp but her eyes were half-open, the pupils dilated completely. Her mouth was slightly open and she was breathing slowly and shallowly. The sight affected me far more than I thought it would – she looked completely fucked-up, as though she could die at any moment. Then Dr. C dropped his bomb:

“She was pregnant, you know.”

“WHAT?”

“There were four kittens inside. I took them out.” He shrugged, dispassionately.

I was stunned. “How big?”

He made a shape about the size of an almond with his finger and thumb. “Maybe three weeks.”

I didn’t know what else to say. Not only had I taken away Sparky’s reproductive rights, I’d unwittingly aborted four kittens! On the other hand, I’d prevented the birth of potentially dozens of kittens that would find, at worst, an early death – at best, a short life on the farm, chasing mice and being fed scraps. Either way, those kittens would dilute the gene pool of the local wild cats, and kill hundreds of native birds, lizards, and rodents.

Anyhow, the decision had already been made. “Shall I put her back in the duffel bag?” I asked, dreading disturbing her with the fresh gash from the surgery staring me in the face.

gross!

“Sure,” said Dr. C. Without further ado, he grabbed Sparky’s front paws in one hand, her back paws in the other, and put her back into the bag. She was scarily limp, a nerveless bag of skin with an assortment of liquids and solids bundled inside. I suppose she couldn’t feel anything anyways, and there really was no other way to get her back in… But all I could imagine was the hideous squash of tissues moving and rearranging around her new lack-of-reproductive-organs. Yikes.

“She’ll come awake later today,” said Dr. C. “Just keep a cloth over her face – the anaesthetic will make her eyes stay open, and if you don’t keep a cloth over them her eyes will dry out.”

“OK,” I said. “Thank you.” I paid, and M and I drove back to D’Kar.

At home, Sparky was in bad shape. She was unconscious for about an hour, but then she started to move – first just twitching, her limbs straightening out convulsively, rolling around in the duffel bag (I’d left her in there, to reduce movement and to keep the light/air away from her eyes) – but soon enough she regained consciousness and tried to get out of the bag. I was doing something in the kitchen and by the time I heard her struggling, she’d lurched halfway out of the bag and was staring crazily around the room. Her pupils were still fully dilated and she didn’t have full control of her body – she wormed her way out of the bag and staggered about a foot across the floor before falling over. Not a controlled collapse, but a complete wipe-out. You could hear her skull hitting the linoleum with a sharp "clunk." It was horrible. I tried to get her to return to the duffel bag – then to lie still on the floor – but Sparky is mostly a feral cat, and being enclosed was absolutely driving her crazy, even in that drugged-out state. Her deepest instincts were clearly telling her, “You are not okay. Something about this is not okay. You need to get somewhere safe, somewhere outside, somewhere in the bush.”

Over the course of a few hours, she staggered around the house in confusion and disoriented distress, frequently falling. She wouldn’t drink any water, but she did have a bit of food – which she promptly threw up. After awhile she became aware enough to locate the door, and scratched feebly at it, meowing. I wanted to keep her inside where I could monitor her and feed her, but she was clearly distressed, so I let her out.

She promptly clawed her way across the lawn, drunkenly, like a sailor on solid land for the first time in a decade, and sat under the pointsettia bushes. She stayed there for the next 24 hours, as I fussed around anxiously, bringing her tins of tuna and holding off her kittens (who were still trying to nurse, crazy animals.)

After that she resumed her normal schedule, more or less. About a week after the surgery, I randomly ran into Dr. C at the pharmacy, and he said in a rather offhand manner, “Oh, in a few days you should just take the stitches out. You know, when it looks healed.”

What?! I just nodded, and a few days later, dutifully removed the stitches. None of this self-dissolving shit for Botswana! I held Sparky down with one hand, under my desk lamp, and with the other hand I picked, dug, and snipped the stitches out with a pair of nail clippers and some tweezers. Sparky was remarkably calm, though I imagine it hurt her. When I released her, she hopped down, gave me a dirty look, and went to have a bit more supper.

Now she’s back to normal – happy, healthy, and free from the burden of birthing and raising up-to-three-litters-per-year.

weekday/weekend

2010-03-02T20:27:00.004+02:00

WEEKDAY PHOTOS: Trip to Grootlaagte to conduct various Trust business (this is the same trip on which my face swelled up); governance training workshop in D'Kar.

Horse and donkey hobbled together in Grootlaagte. It looks like the beginning of a farm animal sitcom... Or a farm animal porno, considering that the donkey's johnson is hanging out.

The location for the Huiku camp site. Beautiful and green right now! Come visit!

Me, standing on top of the Lion Killer Stone.

Governance training workshop, held in the church in D'kar.

WEEKEND PHOTOS: A few shots from my favourite weekend activity - hanging out on the river in Maun.

never no flashlight

2010-02-25T20:11:00.002+02:00

10:00 p.m..

Walking home at night, alone, from L's house.

It's about a kilometre to my house. This walk used to terrify me. There are, of course no lights – and using a flashlight just makes it worse, because you get a tiny island of light and the rest of the dark is even darker. I haven’t used a flashlight on this walk for about a year. If you have ever walked a country road, not a single electric light visible in any direction, you probably know what this is like.

It’s dark, of course. So dark. But it's never true dark. There's no such thing as a completely black night sky – the stars give more light than you’d imagine, and when the moon is out it’s like daylight. When the sky is cloudy, it's dark, but if it gets too cloudy then there's lightning, and either way the stars shine through somehow. If the cloud is thick enough to block out the stars entirely, then it’s also stormy enough that the wind shreds the cloud here and there and you can see the sky. If the cloud covers the entire sky, then it’s not thick enough to completely obscure the moon and stars.

I walk home in this dark. On a cloudy night, I cannot see my hand in front of my face. I can see only the barest distinction between earth and sky - bushes converging as a lumpy horizon, a line between pure shadow and the slightly lighter sky on the horizon. It gets darker up in the dome of the sky, where the cloud is thicker. I walk towards that convergence, the V of lines of perspective showing me where the road is. It is a straight road, gravel, lined with acacias. Occasionally I can see a dim cooking fire in the bush, or hear the murmur of voices, but at 10 p.m. almost everyone is sleeping.

On a night this dark, there is sure to be lightning, and when the lightning strikes it lights the world IN COLOUR. At night, you don't expect colour, even if you never thought of it that way. Your cones are off. Your rods are on. Your brain adjusts to the greyscale night, and when the lightning flashes it shocks – it's not just the light, although it makes you feel the craziest kind of high, your pupils dilated 110% for the dark and suddenly stunned by the sheet lightning blowing up the world – it's not just that, it’s the COLOUR. Colour when there should never be any colour, no, not at midnight, and somehow your brain knows this, interprets the sudden appearance of the spectrum as severely strange, an anomaly, an unreality.

It is so dark I literally cannot see my hand in front of my face, unless I hold it against the sky to get the dim silhouette against that slim band of light on the horizon. There are always goats asleep on the road at this time of night, and I smell them before I hear or see them – the pungent odour of goat fur and hooves and dung, and the smell of the leaves and grass they have eaten, half-digested and flavouring their exhalations. As I get closer, the goats scuffle to their feet and I can catch glimpses of the white ones as I walk among them, feeling the air stirred by their passing, the movements of the pebbles kicked up by their hooves. The darker goats are invisible.

I know the route well, of course. It’s impossible for me to measure a kilometre when I walk in the dark, and it always seems to take longer than the 10 minutes it actually does, so I have to judge my progress by landmarks. I steer by the big square water tower, which can usually be discerned as a fuzzy silhouette against the inky sky. After that it’s not so far to my house, and I look for the shape of the particular bush that marks the turnoff. Usually someone’s left a light on in the office, and if I peer through the bush at the right spot, I can see it and it will guide me home. If the office light isn’t on, I wait for flashes of lightning to show me the special bush that heralds home.

I've been here so long now that I know the bushes. I never miss my house, never walk too far, never turn too early. I love this walk, my solitary journey home in the dark.

I don’t even bother bringing a flashlight to L’s anymore.

The Gat

2010-02-15T09:52:00.003+02:00

"The Gat" is the premier local oasis. It used to be a quarry, and has since been transformed into a cool haven in the dusty, burning-hot expanse of Ghanzi. If I remain in D'Kar for the weekend, the Gat is my favourite excursion - I'm sure you can see why!

Terraces of beautifully maintained green grass lead down to the water, and a large thatched pavillion provides shade. The quarry is about 100m across, and 6m deep, clean and clear. The owner stocked it with fish, which occasionally nibble your toes. Less charming are the water beetles lurking at the edges, which will give a sharp bite to whatever part of your body they happen to encounter. I try to get in and out very quickly.

There are flowers all over Ghanzi right now - foamy spray of white on some of the bushes, tiny powdery yellow flowers, bright yellow daisies growing in any shade available, cactus flowers, acacia flowers, and so many more.

And there are always the desert plants, hardy little herbs popping up in the sand.

There's never a day without a new weird bug. This little guy is actually facing downwards - the long light-green things are the antennae, not the brown ones.

Reflection.

And of course... what trip to the Gat would be complete without a braai?

Wasp Attack!

2010-02-14T21:44:00.002+02:00

On Wednesday morning, I went for a run with R. We ran the village loop, and when I got back to my house I decided to do something I hadn't done in a little while: climb the water tower behind my house. This is a metal tower about 10 meters high, on top of which is the big green water tank. Standing up there, you get a lovely view of the village in the morning, and I used to climb it about once a week. Wednesday morning, I climbed up with my camera and got a few nice shots, then started back down.

However, one critical thing had changed since the last time I climbed the tower: some very large red-orange wasps had made a nest at the top. I disturbed this nest as I placed my hands on the top rungs, and had just enough time to hear the angry buzzing, see the incoming wasps, and think SHIT! before bracing myself for the stings and starting to scramble down the ladder as fast as humanly possible, taking the rungs two at a time. The wasps came at me and stung me three times: once on my forehead, and twice on my left arm. I swatted away the last wasp, hit the ground, and dashed away while swearing my head off.

The stings hurt, but I considered myself lucky to have gotten away with only three, and after about ten minutes the pain subsided. There were tiny puncture marks but no swelling, and only mild itching. The stings got a bit worse throughout the morning, but never became more severe than a bad mosquito bite. I had a trip to Grootlaagte and Qabo scheduled for the afternoon, so we packed up the Land Rover and drove out to Grootlaagte around two. That night we camped out on the floor of a VDC house, laying out sleeping bags and mattress pads on the linoleum floor. I had trouble sleeping due to the heat and the itchiness of my arm; but again, no worse than a bad mosquito bite. Okay, maybe a really bad mosquito bite. Still, I thought nothing of it.

When I woke up on Thursday morning I thought my eye felt a bit funny, like it was clogged with sleepers or swollen the way your eyes will be after crying. No problem, I thought. Wash it out with water, blink rapidly. Solved.

Then I looked in the mirror. The whole left side of my face was swollen, an ugly line dividing my forehead into the level, normal plane above my right brow, and the Frankenstein-esque bulge above the left. I could barely open my left eye. My left arm was swollen and angry red above the elbow, and itching with a fiendish intensity.

What to do? I was torn between dismissal – it's just a wasp sting, you'll get over it! - and concern – this has never happened to me before, what if it gets worse? Also, I have a party to go to this weekend and I cannot show up like this....

After a brief conference with my companions, we decided to go and see the clinic in Grootlaagte and ask them for help. Unfortunately, the nurse had gone on a mobile clinic trip to provide services to the people working on nearby cattle farms, and without her the clinic was closed. “I'll be fine!” I said, optimistically. “We can try the clinic in Qabo when we get there later today.”

The rest of the day proceeded in an extremely embarrassing fashion. The purpose of the trip had been to introduce the new manager for the Huiku Trust to the relevant village authorities, and of course we carried on as planned. This meant that I met such important village figures as the kgosi (chief), the Huiku board members, the councillor, and the chairman of the village development committee while sporting a giant lump on the left side of my face. “Dumela!” I said to each of them, holding out my hand and ignoring the curious looks. “This is our new manager!”

We drove to Qabo in the afternoon. By this time, my left arm felt like it was permanently encased in one of the inflatable arm bands doctors use to test your blood pressure: the swelling from the stings was pressing in on the rest of my arm. When we drove over bumps I could feel my fluid-filled, Popeye-sized biceps jiggling. My eye was a little bit more open, but the swelling was moving down, and – more worryingly – over to the other side of my face. “We are going to the clinic as soon as we get to Qabo,” I said, firmly.

Unfortunately, the Qabo nurse was in Ghanzi. We decided that it was time to take matters into our own hands and chanced a visit to the traditional doctor, while waiting for the nurse to come back.

The traditional doctor was a plump, jolly old woman in a blue dress with a lot of plastic beaded necklaces around her neck. She sat back from her laundry bucket and listened as P explained the situation in Naro, and then gave me her advice, which consisted of three main points:
1.People that complain about wasp stings are huge wimps.
2.She didn't know much about plants/herbs to help stings; that was the specialty of the other traditional doctor, who was very conveniently out of town.
3.However, in a pinch, she suggested that I rub the swellings, vigorously, with soil. She demonstrated, picking up handfuls of soil and rubbing them roughly into her arm.
This was not what I had hoped for – I had envisioned a steaming hot poultice of some kind of bitter-smelling, mashed-up roots and leaves. The poultice would burn at first, then soothe and immediately relieve the itching, draw out the poison, and visibly reduce the swelling before I even left the doctor. Alas, it was not to be.

We trekked back to our camp site and I began dutifully rubbing soil on my arm, though I couldn't bring myself to rub it on my face. It didn't seem to have much of an effect, but it did feel wonderful to itch the whole area.

After that I had a short nap, and a brief board meeting.

Following the board meeting, at about 6:30, we decided to go and see if the nurse had returned from Ghanzi. She had, but was not at the clinic, so we ran around the village searching for her – eventually, we found her, and she agreed to come back to the clinic and help me out. Nurse K, a cheerful 28-year-old woman, spent about 15 minutes telling me about her dreams to move to Canada to become a nurse there (and could I get her a visa?), and then searched the clinic for some appropriate medicine. “I want to give you an injection!!” she said, with more gusto than I felt comfortable with. “I want to give you ____, but I'm not sure if we have any left. Otherwise I'll give you hydro-cortisone.”

Soon enough she returned with a needle and a little bottle of hydro-cortisone, set up a white folding screen, and without further ceremony asked me to lift up my skirt. I did, and she stuck the needle into my butt, injected, swabbed, and it was all over. She filled out a patient record card for me, gave me some Panadol for any pain that might result from the shot, and then showed me out.

I know that there must be at least one person reading this who is thinking something along the lines of, “Dear god! INJECTIONS? In AFRICA?! At a clinic in the village, where they don't even have electricity?!?! Is she TRYING to get HIV?” To this I respond, calm down. There are problems with health care in Botswana, but the nurses are well-trained, the clinics clean and well-supplied (in fact, some people make a living stealing anti-retroviral drugs from clinics in Botswana and then reselling them over the border in South Africa), and a dirty needle is not even a possibility.

And it worked! My arm is back to its normal size, my eye is open, and I was not disgraced at my party over the weekend. I guess we'll never really know, though, if it was the soil or the hydro-cortisone that did it...

chameleon & goats

2010-02-06T09:07:00.006+02:00

A few weeks ago, I found this baby chameleon sitting in my flame tree sapling. Obviously I had to photograph it. A lot of people here are terrified of chameleons - I suppose because they have the creepy ability to change their skin. The office was horrified that I would be crazy enough to touch one.

What a bizarre creature!

When I walk home at night, the goats are usually sleeping in the middle of the road. This is the herd anxiously running away from me.

"The State of Africa"

2010-02-04T08:28:00.003+02:00

There is no shame in not knowing, the shame lies in not finding out. (Russian proverb.)

I've just finished reading Martin Meredith's "The State of Africa" (2005) which, as its tagline suggests, is "a history of 50 years of independence." It received stellar reviews as a general overview of the history of the continent over the last half-century, and I have to agree; Meredith's book covers the entire continent, giving satisfying summaries of the stories of a multitude of different countries. He illustrates the immense differences between the countries and regions of Africa, while at the same time showing that their problems have been, at heart, the same. His writing style is concise and readable, with enough colourful language to keep his readers engaged, but not enough to distract from the subject. He includes enough statistics to drive home the outrageousness of corruption and the tragedy of poverty, but never so many numbers that it becomes dry or tedious reading. Brutal massacres are presented with compassion but without sensationalism.

For me, "The State of Africa" will hopefully prove a springboard to easier reading. I find history in general difficult to read, although I love to learn about it; I suspect that the reason I find it so difficult is that I start from such a weak base. When I read through a chapter in which every name and every event described is more or less completely new, it takes an awful lot of backtracking, re-reading, referencing the index (and occasionally Wikipedia), and furious underlining before the story becomes clear. The chapter about Angola went slowly; the chapter about Rwanda went at least twice as fast. The more I learn, the easier and more exciting it becomes to learn more. I suppose that's the way all learning works. At any rate, after this thorough introduction to the subject, I hope some of the other books on my bookshelf will go faster.

Meredith offers very little editorializing throughout his book; in fact, I found the last chapter disappointingly free of opinion. I suppose any historian invokes their opinion to some degree, simply in how they choose to present their material and interpret the chain of cause and effect. There are a few main choices for "cause" (or perhaps we should say "blame") when people write about Africa: (1) The Evils of Colonialism! (2) The Evils of Tribalism! (3) The Evils of Corrupt Dictators! and (4) The Evils of Western Economic Imperialism! Meredith weaves carefully between these three, with the majority of blame landing on (3) The Evils of Corrupt Dictators!, which I tend to agree with. (Hold your horses, I know that colonialism set the stage for terrible leaders, but do you really want to make excuses for Charles Taylor?)

Many books about Africa end with a summary of hopes (or least predictions) for the future, but Meredith offers nothing more the sum of his 700 pages - which is that anything can happen, and even the most promising new leaders can quickly go bad. The common people of Africa have been screwed every which way by pretty much any power that has become involved in their continent,and there has been extraordinarily little positive leadership to reverse the trend. But as Meredith writes in his author's note, "What has always impressed me over the years is the resilience and humour with which ordinary Africans confront their many adversities. This book is intended as a testimony to their fortitude."

Amen, Martin Meredith!

a few photos

2010-02-02T11:44:00.002+02:00

Baobab flowers, Namibia

The actual Lion-Killer Stone, Huiku Trust land, Botswana

Another view of the Lion-Killer Stone. Doesn't it look like a nose?

Nothing much to report. It's been hot. Two weeks ago we had pounding, pouring, incessant rain for over a week- the sides of the main road filled with water and then the road itself was half-submerged. Ghanzi looked like the Okavango. Houses flooded. The gravel road to Grootlaagte was filled with treacherous ponds over two feet deep, threatening to drown my vehicle. Jojos (water tanks) overflowed. The lot outside of the Komku office was covered in water. My drainpipes gushed water and the garden exploded. The nights were cool enough that I wore light pajama pants and cuddled under my blanket. Then, abruptly, the rain stopped... and now it is hot as hell again. I sleep in a tank top on top of the sheets and wake up with my neck uncomfortably clammy with sweat. My cats sprawl flat on the floor in an effort to make as much of their bodies as possible touch the cool linoleum. When C and I go running, it's twice as painful. But in theory the rainy season should last at least another month, possibly two... So I'm hoping for the rains to return.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Botswana

2010-01-29T15:42:00.001+02:00

I hitch-hike frequently in Botswana. Usually I am going from D'Kar to Maun, which is a distance of 270km; sometimes I go from D'Kar to Ghanzi, which is 35km. I have hitched rides in the open backs of pick-up trucks, with the wind and sun (and occasionally rain) beating down on me. I have hitched a ride in a government truck carrying nothing but thousands of brooms, with a cab so high it practically needed a ladder. I have hitched rides in a beat-up black sports car, a tiny white import, a bush-outfitted 4x4, a refrigerator truck for a catering company. I have happily squeezed in the back of a truck next to three giant filing cabinets, as the driver expressed his amazement that a lekgoa (white person) would deign to sit in the back. I have fallen asleep in the front seat with my head leaning on the shoulder of the massive Herero lady sitting next to me, my book abandoned in my lap. I have accepted dozens of rides, and in turn picked up dozens of hitch-hikers, when I've had a car at my disposal.

In North America I would never do any of this.

In North America, I only bring up hitch-hiking in one of two contexts: (1) Kerouac-style hipster fantasies about an era that no longer exists; (2) gruesome urban legends about axe-wielding psychopaths. I have never picked up a hitch hiker in North America – indeed, they always seem bearded and desperate and poorly-placed for drivers to slow down and pick them up. Their battered cardboard signs are illegible, particularly as you speed past them at 100km/hr. I can count on one hand the number of people I know personally that have hitch-hiked in North America; in fact, I know more people who have jumped rides, hobo-style, on freight trains. (That number can also be counted on one hand.) I have never tried to hitch-hike myself.

The very concept of hitch-hiking being “normal” seemed strange. When I was in grade 11, in preparation for a band trip to Cuba, I read a book entitled “Mi Moto Fidel,” about a man who travelled the island on his motorcycle. Although he obviously wasn't hitch-hiking himself, he described a culture of hitch-hiking that seemed absolutely bizarre to me – anyone, everyone, single women, schoolchildren, old people – at any point on the road – just stepping out of their house, or their village, and expecting a ride. Usually they'd get one within the hour. It was considered a reasonable way to get from one place to another, even for something as simple as getting from your house to the beach, or from town to a neighbouring village where your cousin stayed. It was something you could rely on as a form of transport.

It's the same in Botswana; hitch-hiking is a normal, reliable, and necessary means of getting from one place to another. As an example, consider the Peace Corps policy in Botswana. If you are a Peace Corps Volunteer in this country, you are restricted by a mind-boggling variety of rules; two of the most pernicious are Thou Shalt Not Drive, and Thou Shalt Not Hitch-Hike. The driving rule is enforced with draconian strictness and Big-Brother-esque spying; when Peace Corps supervisors visit, they ask volunteers if they've spotted any of their fellow volunteers behind the wheel of a car. If so, the unlucky rule-breaker is shipped straight back to America without a second thought, much less a second chance. The hitch-hiking rule, however, they turn a completely blind eye to. This is because you literally cannot make your way around the country without hitch-hiking, particularly in some of the remote settlements in which Peace Corps are placed; to enforce the no-hitching rule would empty the country of Peace Corps within a month.

It is a necessity.

In a country where the population is under 2 million, and the distances are vast, there is no frequent and reliable bus service. Perhaps a third of the population, located in rural settlements or farms, has no bus service whatsoever. There is a Ghanzi-Maun bus which passes by D'Kar twice a day, but it is generally crowded, hot, slow, inconveniently timed, and unreliable. Usually hitch-hiking is faster; the bus might go 90km/hr and stop every half hour to let off passengers, on top of which you have the tedious wait at the foot-and-mouth checkpoint, where every passenger must get off, have their bag searched, dip their shoes in disinfectant, and then re-board the bus. If you manage to hitch a good ride, the car might go 140km/hr, and not stop at all. At the foot-and-mouth checkpoint, the guards might just wave you through, and even if you do get out, there are only a few people to have their bags searched and shoes dipped. The difference between a slow bus ride and a fast hitched ride, on the ride from D'kar to Maun, can be two hours.

Getting picked up is straightforward, though not always pleasant. Every settlement in Botswana has a “hitch stop” where hitchers sit waiting for a ride, sometimes for hours. The waiting involves baking in the hot sun, and taking what shelter you can in the scanty shade of rusted rubbish bins, wilting trees, or your own tented clothing. Usually the wait doesn't take so long. I have always been picked up within an hour. Passing vehicles, be they livestock trucks, beat-up pickups, tiny Nissan 4-doors, or bush-ready 4x4s (though these ones rarely stop), pull in and the driver rolls down the window – the hitchers crowd around gabbling their destinations, and the lucky ones hop in. I've seen an empty bakkie pull up, then drive away with twelve passengers crammed into the back.

Of course, being such a regular means of transportation, drivers charge their passengers. The usual rate is a little less than the bus would cost, or about P15 ($2.40) per 100km. A pick-up truck with a single driver is like a renegade mini-bus, dropping off and picking up passengers at every major hitch spot. Farm workers will try to flag down a ride at any point along the road, emerging from rutted farm roads or just indistinguishable spots in the bush to trudge up to the paved road and stick out their hand. Nobody uses their thumb. To indicate you want a ride (as opposed to just casually wandering along the roadside), you put out your arm, palm down, and flop your hand up and down from the wrist as though patting something in the air.

If you really want a ride, you flop your hand very enthusiastically, step out into the road, and maybe jump up and down in the air a little. I am not above doing this, particularly as I've almost driven past hitch-hikers and then resigned myself to stopping at the last minute, simply because they looked so desperate. I also tend to put myself out in front of all the other hitch-hikers, for two reasons: (1) There is no hierarchy of “who got here first” - if a car pulls up, the ride goes to whoever pushes themselves in front of the driver first. So being first off the mark means you'll get a ride instead of being forced to wait for the next car. (2) I am white, and there are some cars that are far more likely to stop for a white person.

That is the less PC aspect to my hitch-hiking adventures... There are definitely occasions when cars have stopped only because I was there, sometimes going so far as to give only me a ride, and ignoring the other hitchers. These cars have been driven by both black and white people. It's a prejudice based partially on race, and partially on class. Possible driver profiles:

It is a white driver, and they hate black people and/or bushmen. This driver is usually a farmer. Tourists don't usually pick up hitch-hikers. This driver would never stop, except for a white person, and they would pick up ONLY the white person and nobody else. They don't feel any sort of unusual emotion towards me; they just don't really see black people at all.
It is a white driver, and they are generally indifferent to hitch-hikers, but feel horrified that a young, single white woman is faced with the hardship of waiting at a hitch stop all by herself. This driver, once they'd stopped for me, might pick up others as well; but ordinarily they would not stop. They feel sorry for me, and probably think that volunteers are crazy.
It is a black driver, and they hate all bushmen (and I am at a hitch stop with only bushmen). This driver would pick up other black people, or white people, but NO bushmen.
It is a black OR white driver, and they like the idea of picking up a cute girl. (Note: in all this time, I have never been picked up by a female driver, probably because female drivers make up about 1% of all drivers in Botswana. I'd like to think that a female driver would pick me up out of feminine solidarity, if they ever passed by.) This driver exists in both benevolently flirtatious and Evil Rapist form... I've never encountered the Evil Rapist variety (Mom, please don't have nightmares over this, but I'm sure they at least EXIST) and hopefully my instincts will continue to steer me right. I do exert SOME judgement when deciding to get into a car or not.
It is a wealthy black OR white driver, and they don't like the idea of picking up lower-class people, but they figure that a white person would be interesting/upper class company. This driver would not usually make me pay for the ride, and probably doesn't pick up many hitch-hikers, but they would also stop for a black person in a suit with a briefcase, or other external indicators of wealth/status.
It is an impatient and/or greedy black OR white driver, and they wouldn't ordinarily stop for a big crowd of people who might swarm the vehicle and/or not have any payment, but they don't mind picking up a single person who is definitely able to pay. This driver would make me pay for the ride, and would pick up hitch-hikers of any race as long as there weren't too many of them; they're not interested in giving free rides.
It is a helpful black OR white driver, and they suspect that I am in some kind of trouble, because it is rare to see a white person hitch-hiking. This driver, once they'd stopped for me, might pick up others as well; ordinarily they would not stop; but they would stop for a person of any race who seemed like they were in trouble.

So there you have it, a brief introduction to hitch-hiking in Botswana.

As a final note:

DON'T PANIC, and always bring the following: at least P15 for every 100km you plan to travel, your cell phone, a snack and a drink, aaaaand.... a towel. (Sorry I couldn't make this whole post one giant reference, but I'm just not that funny and/or clever.)

Holiday Photos

2010-01-27T07:15:00.003+02:00

The wild west coast. I spent a few days in Tofino with my family at the Pacific Sands Resort, hiking along the coast and watching the waves. It is almost always cloudy and rainy on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the temperamental wind and fog creating a permanently untamed, surreal atmosphere. The wind off the sea bends the trees into yearning, twisted shapes, and the waves continuously crash onto the shore, pushing raw-looking driftwood up and down the sand.

Trees and mist. There were a lot of surfers on the beach - clad in head-to-toe wetsuits, bravely splashing out into the waves.

Every photograph presents a choice: beautiful faces or FEARSOME FACES?

Mussels and barnacles, clinging to the rocks. Delicious! Have you ever watched a barnacle in a tide pool? As the tide washes past them, they open at the top and a little fronded feeler, like a tiny feathery hand, strains against the water to capture plankton or other tiny food. When the water recedes they close again.

The drenched and restless expanse of beach. There's a part of me that will always prefer this sort of beach to white sand and palm trees. (Though both have their charms, of course.)

Patterns in the sand.

More patterns in the sand.

The Tsawassen ferry terminal in Vancouver. There's a beauty in industrial constructions as well as in nature.

View of San Francisco, from the airplane.

Heathrow Airport, in the snow. I like this picture because I think it shows the mysterious impersonality of airports - all of those buildings, blockades, fences, vehicles, paths traced on endless fields of tarmac that only the flight-control computer really understands. There may be people flowing through the interior all day long, but out on the runway it's all machines, computers directing the feeble movements of baggage loaders or flare-bearing signallers. The machines and the weather. Nothing to do with man at all. Most modern airports seem that way - each of them equally artificial and perfectly managed, the interior temperature the same exact 20 degrees celsius whether you're in Dubai or London or Tokyo. The same expensive brand-name shops, the same duty-free items, the same characters: tired-looking business-class travellers with their briefcases, college students, out-of-place families in traditional dress with patched luggage and overwhelmed eyes.

Too many flights, too many time zones! All of this, to reach one tiny, extraordinarily specific point on the globe: the village of D'Kar.

water or paper?

2010-01-19T16:31:00.003+02:00

I often wonder: how much would the world environment benefit if everyone used water to clean themselves after urinating/defecating, rather than toilet paper?

I have wondered this ever since moving to India in 2007, which was my first exposure to the wet and wild world of water-wiping. (Sorry, couldn't help myself.) Perhaps some of you have never even heard of this - you may have been completely unaware that for countless millions of people, toilet paper plays no role in their life whatsoever. I myself was barely aware of this when I went to India, and my first bathroom experience was a true eye-opener: bleary and jet-lagged in the Chennai airport, I nervously abandoned my suitcase and nipped into the public toilet. After locking myself in the stall, I looked around: a ceramic rectangle inlaid in the linoleum floor, with ridged treads for my feet, and a long oval hole in the middle. A small tap, about a foot off the floor, and a small plastic bucket sitting next to it. What was this strange apparatus, and why did it bear so little resemblance to what I would've called a toilet at home? I squatted, managed to dip the end of my scarf in the toilet (ugh), and completely ignored the tap and bucket, having no idea what to do with them.

Soon enough I learned - through some matter-of-fact tips from my new Indian acquaintances, and a bit of trial and error - how to use water rather than paper, and at long last I came to prefer it (at least in hot climates). How does one accomplish this "alternative" toilet exercise? Simply fill the bucket (or other receptacle provided) with water, and using your right hand to hold the bucket, splash water on your bits and pieces. Use your left hand to do a bit of extra cleaning, if it seems necessary. This is why - in India - it is considered insult of the highest order to shake hands, eat, present money, etc., with your left hand. Of course you wash your hands afterward, but it is strictly left hand toilet, right hand food.

After mastering this ritual, I found it a fresher, cleaner, and certainly less wasteful alternative to toilet paper. I make my disclaimer about hot climates because in a cold climate, that extra water can be a bit chilly, or take longer to evaporate - and nobody wants to walk around with a wet crotch, regardless of how fresh it may feel. (Perhaps those with more skill and accuracy in the splashing department will argue with me here.)

But back to my question. What if we all switched to water? How much waste would be prevented? Consider the stages of production in toilet paper: the materials used in the creation of the paper itself; the chemical- and energy-consumptive process of making paper; the plastic packaging for the paper; the dyes and perfumes used to make more luxurious toilet papers; the costs of transporting all of these products; the marketing and publicity and advertising that goes into convincing a consumer that Charmin is superior to all other toilet papers... And then post-flush, what happens? The toilet paper is washed out to sea in a hideous mass of sewage. While t.p. is probably one of the more biodegradable items we dump into the ocean, it's certainly making more of an impact than a few cups of fresh water.

I'm not going to advocate that everyone to switch to water; I realize that water is not for everyone. I still use a blend, myself, and have a roll of toilet paper as well as my trusty 700mL blue plastic water pitcher sitting next to my toilet, but I knew Westerners who had lived in India for years and still carried emergency toilet paper with them in their pocket at all times. It's hard to relinquish the feathery caress of triple-ply, printed with fluffy pink bunnies and subtly perfumed. I understand. But what about Botswana?

Here in the village, I think people tend to use an assortment of newspaper, toilet paper (but it's pricey!) and leaves; there's a particularly soft and friendly bush known as bluboos* (blue bush) in Afrikaans, which is more colloquially known as "Bushman toilet paper." I've sampled its superior t.p. qualities, and it richly deserves its title; as an experienced and experimental bush-defecator, I can easily rank bluboos in my top three bush t.p.'s. It is certainly a revelation in the Kalahari, which tends to be full of vicious thorns rather than soft, tender leaves. Yet when living in the village, there can't be enough bluboos to go around, and I imagine the leaves don't keep well - if gathered in advance, they must quickly dry and become brittle and useless.

So perhaps the revolution is waiting to arrive - perhaps the people of D'Kar are ready for the Good News of water. Could this be my calling as a volunteer? Improved hygiene and comfort for all, including the over-taxed environment... or horrid backfiring and a fearsome cholera outbreak? I wonder if it's possible to apply for a grant to spread the word, perhaps from the WHO. Water must be superior to old newspapers...

Just kidding (I mean, water IS superior to old newspapers, but my mission in life is probably not revolutionizing the world's toilet rituals)...

* I find it very funny that the Afrikaans word "rooiboos" has attained such a dreamy, beautiful, neo-hippie aura in North America; it's AFRICAN tea, it's so cool, what a cool name! But it's really just "red bush" in Afrikaans, which is possibly the least dreamy and romantic language in the world. (Sorry, Afrikaans.)

here and there

2010-01-15T20:53:00.002+02:00

Maun, Botswana

Tofino, Canada

rainy season

2010-01-15T19:13:00.000+02:00

It has been a typical rainy-season day in Ghanzi. The dawn broke slowly into an overcast sky, still troubled from the showers of the previous night. By 8:00 a.m., the sun had burned off all of the clouds and the heat began, rising through the morning and into the afternoon. During lunch at the Kalahari Arms, I languished under an umbrella on the patio, crushed beneath the heavy blanket of midday heat. There was no wind. The heat descended through the weak canvas of the umbrella, falling in waves onto my head and shoulders, making a mockery of the supposed shade. “It's hot,” I commented to my companion. “Yes,” she replied. “It is hot.” On such days, there's really nothing else to say.

Around 6:00 p.m., the clouds started to move in again, creeping across the sky in counterpoint to the setting sun. The wind began to rise. That particular deep, saturated blue-grey that means rain flooded across the horizon. And at 7:00, the first rain began to fall.

When the rain falls in the Kalahari, the heat breaks so quickly that it's like turning on the air conditioner full blast in a very small car. It is no caressing, bathwater rain. It bears no similarity to the muggy, sauna-like monsoons of India. The rain falls, and the world is cool. Immediately a new, cool wind streams through my house, gusting in the front door and windows and blustering back out the kitchen windows with the curtains fluttering behind. The rain falls, hammering on the roof as the gutters spout water frantically, as fast as they can.

I am back in Botswana.

Swakopmund! and other pictures.

2009-12-18T12:27:00.003+02:00

Photos from the Komku End-Of-Year trip to Swakopmund on the gorgeous coast of Namibia, smack dab in the middle of the Namib Desert. This is true desert, nothing but sand and a few dark spots that are vaguely identifiable as plants. We saw the famed dunes, but I didn't get any good pictures. It just means I'll have to go back...

Driving into Swakop.

The gorgeous, minimalist coastline. The sea is full of life, however - kelp and seaweed and jellyfish rolled in and out with the tides of this somewhat chilly corner of the Atlantic.

Displaying the aforementioned kelp...

An oasis en route to Swakopmund.

NOT in Swakopmund: voting at the Huiku Trust Annual General Meeting, for the new board members.

One last Kalahari Sky... and now I'm off to Victoria for Christmas! That's right, on Sunday I'll be flying home to spend my first Christmas at home for the past 3 years. From sand and swimsuits to mist-drenched evergreen rainforests, and possibly a bit of snow. Next update from Canada (or perhaps from the airport).

Namibia Trip - in Photos

2009-12-12T10:15:00.005+02:00

The journey begins - Car1, packed full of our tents and bedding.

The hippo pool at Tholo Safaris. It's beautiful but completely artificial - the area would have been a seasonal pan, but it was landscaped a bit and then pumped full of water from a borehole so that it is always full. Now hippos live where they would otherwise never survive, in the middle of the Kalahari. Stranger things have happened... did you know that if you want to, you can go shoot a zebra in Texas? Or a sable antelope... oryx... springbok... impala... any number of African game?

Traditional dance at Dqae Qare - this is the oryx dance, in which two dancers pretend to be dogs, helping the hunter chase down the oryx, usually played by one of the most agile dancers, holding two long sticks up to mimic the horns of the oryx. Extra flash and weird lighting is courtesy of a tourist group from Britain.

Viewing some run-down traditional dwellings at the Omaheke San Trust camp site in Namibia.

At Omaheke San Trust in Gobabis.

At Treesleeper Campsite in Tsintsabis. The stairs you can see just behind the sink lead up to the "tree deck," a platform on which you can pitch your tent or just sit and relax.

Inside one of the bathrooms at Treesleeper.

Lizard!

Crafts and jewelery displayed at a Ju/'hoansi village on Nqa J/aqna Conservancy.

Giant baobabs on Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. I have always felt that baobabs got a bad rap in Antoine St.Exupery's "Le Petit Prince," and until I saw my first baobab, I always had a slightly suspicious feeling about them. They were the scourge of the little prince's planet, after all! But in reality, baobabs are the most mystical, incredible trees I've ever seen.

Dreadlocks & Movies

2009-12-09T11:50:00.003+02:00

On Saturday, December 5th, I went to Maun and employed the excellent Mma T to crochet my hair into dreadlocks. Yes, folks, that's right: crochet! Using the tiniest crochet hook in the world, its handle wrapped with innumerable rubber bands to give her a better grip, this unfailingly cheerful woman spent eleven hours knotting my hair into dreadlocks.

Set up on the floor of my friend G's house, we watched five movies between the hours of 3:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m.:

1. Children of Men, which was not exactly what I'd expected, but becomes more and more wonderful the more I think about it. I was expecting the wonder to be in the plot, but instead it was all in the atmosphere and the imagination of the dystopian world that was created. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given Cuaron's earlier films... I ought to go rewatch Great Expectations. When I watched it the first time, I think I was too distracted by the stirrings of adolescent hormones to really appreciate it.

2. Garden State, which was just as charming as I had been led to expect. It's the New Jersey I always believed was out there and never quite found... A particular brand of delightful, quirky, utterly unique Americana that I will always continue to search for. You have to go looking for the boats at the bottoms of abandoned shopping mall construction pits, or even the strange loopholes in hardware store return policies (that would NEVER happen in Botswana!)... Those bizarre and beautiful "only in America" phenomena. I remember going to look for things like that with a friend at Princeton. We drove miles and miles on a freezing cold fall afternoon, searching for a cavernous and reputedly satanic abandoned train tunnel that we'd read about on the internet. In the end, all we found was some offensive graffitti and a barbed-wire fence. Luckily we made up for the disappointment with another American phenomenon: really good, really cheap pizza.

3. Crank, which was just as terrible as I thought it would be, and therefore just as awesome. Apparently you don't need a big budget to create ridiculous action scenes. Jason Statham will never do Shakespeare, but he knows his place in the Hollywood pantheon and he fills those boots to perfection. (I am also, admittedly, a sucker for appallingly bad action movies.)

4. 88 Minutes, awful though it could have been so good. Sorry, Al Pacino.

5. The Fifth Element, which I have seen many times before and still love. Bruce Willis is the man, Milla Jovovich is an unearthly beauty, and apparently the costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier!?!

Halfway through.

Complete!! I've always wanted dreadlocks.

A brief history of Jenn's Hair: I did not cut it till the age of 19. Prior to that, it was gently trimmed, first at a place in Victoria called Tickety-Do's, which provided its pint-sized clientele with tiny personal TVs to watch Disney movies while their hair was cut. They also had a picture book of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," which started my lifelong obsession with Jessica Rabbit. When I outgrew Tickety-Do's (which was later revealed to be a money-laundering front for some local drug dealers), my mother trimmed my hair for me. I always intended to cut it - my vague plan was to wait till the moment was right, get dreadlocks in the whole waist-length mane, and later shave it all off . However, one day in Kenya, on the biology department's Semester in the Field trip (which began this whole blog!), I thought idly to myself, "what if I cut off all my hair, right now?" After that, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and a few days later we had an impromptu fireside ceremony in which, armed with a head lamp and a pair of scissors, my friend Mark chopped off nineteen years of hair.

Since then, I've had a few "real" haircuts; I've shaved it off to a half-inch again; I've cut it myself, reaching around the back blindly with a pair of scissors and hoping for the best; and now I've finally fulfilled that original dream of dreadlocks. I'm very happy with them. It now remains to be seen how long it takes before I get tired of them and shave my head once more! (The next time, I intend to Bic it to the skin.)

Huiku Study Tour: Outtake 1

2009-12-08T21:05:00.003+02:00

A pan on Nyae-Nyae Conservancy

From the 17th till the 28th of November, I took the Huiku Trust board on a study tour through Ghanzi and Namibia to view other San community-run tourism projects.

TRIP SUMMARY:

We began the trip in Ghanzi, picking up the board members from their settlements and parking at the Bokamoso hostel in D'Kar for a couple of days. During that time we visited two Tholo Safaris camps, and I madly raced to finish the ADF quarterly report. Next we drove to the Dqae Qare game farm and spent two nights there, seeing the facilities and chatting with staff. Saturday morning we clicked off the safety and set out on a massive road trip through Namibia. To give you an idea, I covered almost 4000km over 10 days, on roads ranging from good-quality paved road to 4WD 10km/hr sand road.

In Namibia, we entered via the Mamuno gate, drove to Gobabis, and saw the Omaheke San Trust (2 nights). Then we drove to Windhoek, stayed one night in the Cardboard Box Backpacker's, and proceeded the next day to Tsintsabis Treesleeper Camp. Two nights in Tsintsabis, and then onwards to Tsumkwe and two nights at Tsumkwe Country Lodge in order to visit the Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. Then a gruelling one-day journey back to D'Kar through the Dobe gate, dropping off the board members, and finally returning to my house at 9:30PM. I woke up the next morning at 6:00AM to drive the rental car back to Maun.

OUTTAKE ONE:

We're driving through Nyae-Nyae Conservancy. This is an interesting and largely successful San community project in Tsumkwe, north-eastern Namibia: they have a large area that they manage as a conservancy, which has a healthy and diverse game population. They make most of their money off of the hunting quota, which is quite a good income; however, (in my opinion), they severely under-utilize the potential for photographic and other tourism income. They also mismanage the redistribution of benefits to the community. However, they do an excellent job of managing the conservancy, and they DO milk the hunting quota for all it's worth – they sell, for example, three or four elephant hunts a year, which bring in huge amounts of money. There was ample sign of elephants everywhere we went on the conservancy – with typical disregard for international borders, many of them cross Nyae-Nyae en route to the Okavango Delta.

Anyhow, we're driving through the conservancy. Half of the board members are in Car 1, with the guide. I'm driving, and we're in front. N is driving the second car with the other half of the board members. We've been driving in near-silence, watching the scenery pass by, when suddenly I hear some muttering in mixed Nharo and Setswana start up behind me. All I can really catch is the word “plastics,” meaning plastic grocery bags.

The place we stopped

Suddenly, the muttering cuts off, and K shouts “STOP THE CAR!” Obediently I stop, and everyone leaps out, plastic bags in their hands. The other car stops behind me, and within a few seconds the occupants of Car 2 are also running around brandishing plastic bags. I cannot figure out what is going on.

They spread out and then drop to the ground and begin carefully picking through the giant boluses of elephant dung scattered on the roadside. After somehow identifying the best parts, they chuck the dung into the plastic bags and avidly continue collecting.

“What are they doing?” I ask N, after a few moments, completely bamboozled by this mysterious behaviour.

“Oh!” he says, laughing. “This will make you very strong! You make a kind of soup, and bathe in it before sleeping. It is the belief of these people that it is a medicine, it will make you strong – when other people are trying to witch you, you do this thing with the dung, and then their witching you won't work.”

“Yes,” P adds, interrupting his cheerful dung-collecting, “this is very good medicine.”

So I watched and waited as they ran around collecting as much dung as possible, and learned that the careful sorting was to avoid any insects that have burrowed into the dung. Once they had about two bags each, as well as some twigs from a toothbrush bush (don't know it's English name, but it's a bush whose twigs can be used to brush your teeth – I tried it, but didn't like it very much), we all piled back into the cars and continued our tour. There was a visible glow of happiness and excitement on all of the board members after this episode; I guess it's a very highly-valued medicine in Ghanzi, where there are very very few elephants. I wonder if it's as prized in areas where elephants are common.

3 kitten photos / but is it moral to post them??

2009-11-13T14:12:00.005+02:00

I'm not sure if the excessive posting of kitten photos reveals some kind of frantic desire for control on my part? Rather than photographing the world outside, I photograph my own little microcosm?

I suppose it is an issue of control in at least one sense; the control of an individual person over photographs of themselves. I mentioned in my dance festival post that it's a very touchy point just to photograph locals, much less use those photos in a public arena. Kittens, at least, don't mind if their photo is on the internet. Other people... well, that's a different story. I've only started to think seriously about this in the past year, as a result of being here in D'kar and learning just how big an issue it is to the people. There's a huge amount of suspicion and resentment towards tourists who show up, snap a bunch of photos, and leave without giving anything in return. There's an unreasonable paranoia that the tourists will use the photos for profit, which isn't usually the case, but sometimes true; and also a highly justifiable anger about being objectified as Traditional Tribal Zoo Animals. In a more general sense, however - do we have the right to own images of ourselves?

Back at home, people are running around TRYING to get strangers to photograph them - mugging for party photographers, street style bloggers, and so on - it seems that everyone wants a bite of reality TV fame. But those photos are (for the most part) taken and used with consent. In a foreign country, tourists often photograph the people around them, never asking for permission. Why? Awkwardness, timidity, fear of the foreign language, but also thoughtlessness and just plain old arrogance. Though the people photographed may never know what happens to their images afterwards, and it may never in a material sense affect them, do we have some abstract moral right over images of ourselves?

What if that image will be taken out of context? A man with a job at Komku, for example, who uses his email address to keep in touch with a friend in London, and likes reading the newspaper, may have his photo presented in a family slideshow or a church get-together back in America as a tribal savage of some kind. Look at the tiny ears! And those shoes, held together with duct tape... and the funny hair? Yeah, they were all like that... Or perhaps the photo will be used for profit, on a brochure to advertise tours of the area or as part of a photographer's portfolio. Should the individual be compensated? At the very least, should they be informed of the uses their photograph may go towards - should their permission be asked?

If we do have a moral right to control images of ourselves, is that right a modern, legal right - a product of this new age of information-obsession and copyright laws, in which an image may easily be reproduced a million times onto a million screens and make its owner rich? - or is it a product of a more age-old instinct, that to take someone's photo is to take their soul, to gain power over a part of them?

I don't really have an answer for this, and I have to get back to banging out spreadsheets for the Huiku study tour, but that question is part of the reason (along with my own neurotic craving for control over some part of my life, I'm sure) that I post photos of kittens rather than photos of other people. Kittens don't care, nor do they - as far as my reasoning and ethics go, anyhow - have any moral right over images of themselves.

... or do they? Just kidding ...

squeak squeak

2009-11-09T12:01:00.002+02:00

There are bats living in the air vent in the ceiling, and I can hear them squeaking all day long. I thought that bats slept during the day, but apparently not... Either that, or they're having one hell of a recurring nightmare, because they are echo-locating like crazy up there in the ceiling. It doesn't sound so much like a bird's twitter as it does like a very high-pitched version of the sound of a squeegee being pulled across a wet car window. Almost like the high-pitched bleep/chrrr of a modem dialing. (I guess most of you haven't heard that in awhile...) More artificial than organic, anyhow.

Funny creatures. I love bats. I wonder how many of them are living up there, and what species they are - few people suspect how many different bat species there are . They're one of the most diversified and successful orders of mammal around, second only to rodents. Order Rodentia has about 2000 species; Order Chiroptera, the bats, has 1000. Third place is Insectivora at about 450.

walking

2009-11-06T15:35:00.002+02:00

It's more than likely that some of you are getting sick of these kitten updates... In which case, skip!

They're beginning to make their shaky way out of the closet; they haven't quite figured out how to walk yet, which results in this funny giant-stepping gait, wherein they put their front paws forward as far as they can and then shakily stretch forward, pull one back leg up in a elastic lunge, leaving the last leg stretched so far behind them that their bellies are almost on the floor. Then, still shaking from side to side, they pull the back leg up to meet the rest. Rinse, repeat.

They're rapidly improving, however, and soon they'll be rampaging all over the house, hiding in the cupboard and sleeping on top of the spaghetti like the last litter did.

I've worked the last two weekends and it looks like I'm going to be working the next four. Argh. It never rains but it pours. (Speaking of, I think it's going to pour tonight... hurrah!)

The Police Station

2009-11-05T12:41:00.002+02:00

Sometimes, I think about a VISA commercial I once saw. In it, a bumbling and helpless white foreigner in safari gear is lost in the jungle. He runs into some half-naked Real African Tribespeople who dance around him speaking gibberish, and drag him off to a dingy office with peeling paint, vegetation creeping in the window, and some grim-looking fellows sitting at the desk. Everyone looks hostile or crazy; the hapless foreigner looks worried. Then he tentatively says, "Visa?" and everyone erupts into a joyful dance of welcome and recognition.

My first problem with this commercial is that it doesn't work like that; my experience has been that, mostly, if you wind up lost in a foreign country and try to use your credit card, it will be turned down because the extra-sensitive security checkers think that your card has been stolen. This happens even if you called the company ahead of time and let them know where you'd be; somehow, remote African countries make them nervous. Use of your card in a suspicious location results in a hold on the card, which isn't removed until you speak to the company on the phone, which is of course extremely difficult when you're in the proverbial dingy office surrounded by half-naked Real African Tribespeople. (In case you couldn't guess from the sarcastic name, my other problem with the commercial is demeaning racial stereotypes...)

My other problem, which isn't really a problem, is that I've come to realize that scenes like the dingy police office exist in my life all the time, and I simply don't notice how strange they must seem to foreign eyes. I went to the police station in Ghanzi recently, to have some papers certified for my residence permit renewal. If you were to see it in a movie, there would be a slight sepia tint to it, either dry silence or cheesy Western music playing - everything bleached a bit by the harsh sunlight coming in. The paint is peeling, the faded blue-and-white Botswana colours covering everything but flaking away to reveal plywood, plaster, older layers of paint. Cracked linoleum covers the floor, so ancient that I mistook it for raw cement in some places. There are some stained, ancient cabinets, and an equally ancient counter that has been burnished deep shiny brown from use, deeply pitted and scarred on every square inch of it. An air-con unit which doesn't work is crammed into a gutted windowframe, and a dusty assortment of wires and cables spill from the same hole, tangling as they fall to the floor. Some haphazard clips attach a few wires to the wall - some of them end in bare split ends, no connection. There is a clock on the wall, still ticking but so faded that you can barely read the numbers on the warped paper backing. A black bobby cap hangs on a wooden hook next to a paint-peeling blue door.

Yet it all seems normal to me. The inhabitants of this office are all familiar players, though they too are strange: the short, stubby policeman in his strangely old-fashioned uniform, worn but impeccably clean, sitting in his chair. The younger assistant, wearing a strange assortment of presumably fashionable clothes, shirt untucked, smooth handsome face lighting up when he sees the white girl enter the office. The female police officer who was wearing the black bobby cap can be glimpsed through the half-open door - I recognize her, I think she is the Grootlaagte police officer - her hair is about an inch long, a perfectly regular combed-out Afro, and she stands in an assertive stance with her legs braced as far apart as her knee-length uniform skirt will allow. I wonder if she's arguing with someone. Sitting against the wall with me are an assortment of civilians seeking various services: a short, fat, drunk woman with filthy clothing and no shoes, gazing rebelliously at everyone through bloodshot eyes; a stick-thin and grizzled old man with a tattered blue coverall on, who sits so straight and looks out so calmly that he carries an air of perfect elegance, despite the holes in his canvas hat and shoes; a blustery middle-aged Afrikaaner with the requisite short-shorts and hiking boots, waving his papers in somebody's face. They all seem very ordinary to me. I have seen these characters each one hundred times.

It must seem like an outpost, I suppose - not just to people from the West, but also to the city slickers from Gaborone. Every time I go to Gaborone and tell someone I live in Ghanzi, they draw back with mingled disgust and disbelief. Can a somewhat well-dressed white American girl really be living in Ghanzi? It's true, and it's the city that seems strange to me now, that makes me uncomfortable. The shiny immigration office in Gabs, in its many-storied office building with air-con that works and a reception office with a huge modern desk was nerve-wracking. I bluffed with bush bravado.

I adjust quickly, of course. A few weeks in the city and I'm sure I'd be back in the swing of it. But for now, the outpost is my ordinary.

Halloween in the southern hemisphere

2009-11-04T12:14:00.003+02:00

Just a quick Halloween post. Despite being in 35 degree heat, and a country that has never heard of Halloween, we managed to cobble together a very respectable Halloween party. Costumes! Trick-or-treating candy! A seance! Two jack'o lanterns, carved by yours truly! If Kimchi were still around, we would have had a black cat as well.

I remember that when I was about seven years old, and my family was living in Australia (another country that doesn't celebrate Halloween), I convinced my neighbourhood friends that we should go trick-or-treating. "What are your Halloween costumes?" I asked them. "Huh? Halloween?" was their innocent response.

I promptly decided that these foolish children simply had uncool parents and had spent years being deprived of the free candy that was waiting for them . The idea that there was no Halloween in Australia never occurred to me. "It's simple," I explained. "You dress up in a funny costume, and go door-to-door saying 'trick or treat.' Then people will give you candy." My friends couldn't believe they'd been missing out on the gravy train all this time, and threw on whatever assortment of sheets, masks, etc, that they had lying around. We set out down the street.

Needless to say, we were met by a series of extremely confused neighbours, and I lost a lot of credibility with the other kids. Now I'm somewhat more grown-up, and therefore I can buy my own candy and pumpkins, and materialize my very own Halloween, no matter what the country.

Costume: Frida Kahlo, in case you couldn't tell. Should've had a paintbrush. I did have a bottle of tequila, which is unfortunately not pictured. (All for the sake of the costume, folks. All for the sake of the costume.)

Linga Longa

2009-10-29T20:35:00.002+02:00

Hello! I'm in Gaborone, having dinner by myself and working at a bar/restaurant (Linga Longa) in Riverwalk mall... I am also running late to go see the Michael Jackson movie with a couple of my colleagues.

IT ALL SOUNDS SO NORMAL!

Except that I had to run around to at least 3 places trying to find someone whose advertised internet was actually working, who also had a 3-pronged round-hole plug so that I could plug in my computer.

And of the two people I'm going to see the movie with, one has been to only one movie before, when he was a child, and the other has NEVER BEEN TO THE MOVIES BEFORE. I hope "This is It" is a good initiation to the joys of cinema. She wanted to see "Inglourious Basterds," but I felt that it would be a bit too much for her first movie in the theatre, ever. Particularly considering she barely speaks any English. Although a Tarantino film would be a kind of ironic first film to watch, being as he's so obsessively cinema-referential...

And the reason that I'm working from a restaurant right now is that I couldn't send a bunch of critical work emails last night, from D'Kar, because the power went out (I waited for an hour in the dark office with my laptop running on its batteries, hoping it would come back on), then came back on in the morning (at 4:30 a.m., when I woke up and went back to the office to finish my work before leaving for Gabs) but the internet STILL wasn't working, even though the power was back... Capricious bits and bytes, how I love/hate you.

So I'm here. And I'm waiting for a 2MB email to send (quotations for financial consultants which I am forwarding to the ADF so that they can evaluate my second disbursement request), which is taking about half an hour. ARGH. I'm missing Michael Jackson! I'm missing K's first reactions to a giant movie screen!!

Ooh, it sent. Gotta go!

not a do-gooder

2009-10-25T14:38:00.006+02:00

Two Huiku board meetings, several nights of drinking and reconnecting with friends, and three kittens later... I'm feeling really happy to be back, and back in the swing of things.

The villages seem so much more friendly and comprehensible now. The weather doesn't seem hot, even though it's almost 40 degrees (still, could be much worse). And the work, though frustrating, makes sense.

I was talking about work to a close friend last night, as we sat at Thakadu drinking beer and eating ostrich stew, among the grizzled old farmers and the small-town Ghanzi youth. My friend was saying he admires me for the work I do. I immediately started making as many excuses as I could for why the choices I've made are not actually admirable, and I just happened to stumble into it as the result of a bunch of coincidences and mostly-selfishly-motivated choices, and really I'm not "self-sacrificing," I'm just sort of stupid when it comes to money, and honestly anyone would do it except they'd probably be doing a better job, and I'm actually impatient and lazy and un-compassionate and mercenary and honestly, I just happen to be doing it because I got stuck, you know... At some point, I stopped myself, and wondered aloud, "why am I so unwilling to admit I'm doing a 'good' thing?"

It was actually painful for me to just type that. I'm not sure why. I have never considered myself a moral, do-gooder sort of person... Yet on the other hand, the thought of choosing a career which doesn't have some element of helpfulness seems strange to me. Become an I-banker? But why? What's the point? I suppose so that you can collect all that money and then go off and start a school for orphans in Nepal or something like that. Which I admit is tempting. Make the money, then spend it judiciously and at your own behest, rather than struggling though the complicated jungle of NGOs and donor funding? Sweet, sweet relief.

I had one or two conversations of this nature while I was visiting home - "I think you're doing some really good work." "Oh no, I'm not, I mean, the work itself is good, but I'm really not, believe me..." I don't work as hard as I could. I live an embarrassingly affluent lifestyle. I'm not planning on staying for too much longer (ideally a year). I don't know the local languages, I don't do as much for the community in my spare time as I could. I haven't started any fancy initiatives, I haven't even followed up on all the stuff I SAID I would do, and I spend too much time on the internet. If you want to bestow praise on people for "good works," I can point you towards a hundred - a thousand! hundreds of thousands! - worthier recipients. And then there's the question of whether development work really works at all, and if I'm just perpetuating a highly problematic system by being here at all.

Furthermore, while I'm here it's just a job. If I have to work on a Saturday, I get very irritated, rather than benevolently delighted at the chance to Do More Good. Everyone else around me is doing the same job, presumably the same Good Works, and it just doesn't seem like anything remarkable. And people all around the world, in different jobs and different situations, in different ways, are doing good all the time - whether or not they do something like working in a small village in Africa.

I think that my choice to do this job says, more than anything else, that I have been supported and loved beyond all reason by my parents. It is their support which has given me the freedom to make flaky decisions like this, which are not particularly sound in terms of economics or career advancement. I've always felt that this is true, and it leads me to see my decisions as those of someone who is perhaps too privileged, rather than someone who Does Good Works. I don't think I will ever believe in, or be comfortable with, the notion of myself as a do-gooder.

But I do hope I manage to do a little good, while I'm here.

New Kittens

2009-10-23T10:02:00.007+02:00

Hello, and welcome to the marvellous world of new-born kittens!

Melissa the Cat delayed her birth till I returned from Canada - she was looking a bit preggers when I left, and I thought she would deliver before I got back to D'Kar - however, she held onto her babies and had them the day after I got back. Friday night, she settled herself in my closet, and Friday afternoon, with surprisingly little fuss, she gave birth to kitten number one:

As you can see, it's still wet from the womb... I didn't notice in time to see the birth itself, or the sac being licked away, but this is still the newest kitten I've ever had the good luck to witness. She waited an hour and a half and then had a second one, also orange. At this point she still looked fat - as though she had at least one or two left in her - but she didn't deliver her third kitten until almost 24 hours later. This alarmed me, because usually such a long delay between kittens means something has gone horribly wrong, but Melissa seemed cheerful and healthy the entire time, nursing her two kittens and purring non-stop, getting up to eat and drink occasionally. Sure enough, the following day she delivered a third kitten, seen below:

This one was black, and proved to be her last. Feeling very pleased with herself, Melissa settled down in my closet to nurse her tiny, squirming, helpless little babies. Newborn kittens - like most fresh-new-born creatures - are not actually that attractive. They can't move around, their eyes are sealed shut, their tails are wormy and their paws and faces seem raw, unpleasantly vulnerable and unfinished, naked in an uncomfortable sort of way. Still cute, but it's like a newborn human child - wrinkly and raw, they're much more attractive several months later.

They are small, though. Which is cute. Their paws look like little raspberries.

And their mother is very proud. She just lies in the closet purring continuously. It seems like she LOVES the sensation of having three little furry babies nursing and pushing their tiny, weak paws against her belly. Newborn kittens are completely blind and almost completely deaf; their ears are folded over and their eyes are sealed shut. They interact with the world through smell, with a keen recognition of their mother's and siblings' individual smells. When I pick one up their noses go into overtime as they pick up the unfamiliar human scent, and sometimes they hiss, tiny little kitten hisses that sound more like a quickly-exhaled breath than the ferocious TCCAHAAAH that Melissa uses to ward off her enemies.

Kittens at two days old.

This one is my favourite - not only is it most comfortable with being held, it reminds me most of Kimchi. Also, it was last-born and there's a lot of mythology associated with youngest/third-born children. Look at those tiny little whiskers, and little white toes!

This was the first-born, and it's the most uncomfortable with being picked up. I don't handle them very much, but I had to get some pictures of their development...

At a week old, they're already so much bigger!

Their happy home in my closet (see bottom left).

10 days old, and their eyes are beginning to open! They definitely react now when you take them out into the light, and their sweet blue eyes are peeking out between half-sealed eyelids. Look how tiny this one is compared to it's mother's foot! Their ears are also starting to unfold.

Eyes open, with a nasty little bit of birthing blood on the bottom of my closet... Gross, I know. Sorry.

So, I know that there are at least a few of you that are thinking, "this isn't cute at all! This is a gross disregard for animal welfare and I'm disgusted that any friend of mine could be so irresponsible as to let her cat give birth, TWICE. What does she think the overflowing RSPCA means, anyway? It's people like HER that are responsible for animal misery in this world, and damned if she's going to make a blog about how cute they are! Criminal negligence, that's what this is." To a certain degree I agree with you - feral cats are a threat to many kinds of native wildlife the world over, particularly birds, and I don't want to add to that problem. Abandoned cats with nobody to take care of them are also a problem.

However, in my defense, the following points:
1. Cat overpopulation is not much of a problem in D'Kar. Dogs are much worse. Possibly there's a situation much like the one in India, where the overpopulation of dogs makes sure that the cat population stays low? Also, though people here like to keep dogs as guard animals, far fewer people keep cats, or want to keep them. Animals aren't pets so much as workers, here.
2. At the time that Melissa got pregnant for the second time, it was extremely difficult to get her fixed - although a vet has now come to Ghanzi that will fix female cats, a few months ago you had to either go to Maun or wait for the travelling vet to come from Gaborone.
3. I was sure the second batch would all have homes to go to - a lot of people in the office were interested in her first litter but there weren't enough to go around. I think they're gaining populatity as rat-and-snake catchers on the farms.
4. Though I've never thought twice about this before, it felt like such a betrayal to cut off her reproductive future. Melissa isn't a housecat. She isn't a docile tame animal, dependent on humans for survival. She's a wild thing, who would barely let me touch the tip of her tail when I first started feeding her; I've left her for weeks at a time and she scavenges or hunts, fending for herself very ably. I'm not her owner, her mistress, or her life support - I'm sort of like a doting sugar mama, and she's a proud individual who comes in irregularly to eat, when she wants to and ONLY when she wants to. Of course she's been a bit more regular since her babies were born in my closet, but otherwise she's quite independent. So - although I'm going to do it as soon as she weans these kittens - I still feel quite guilty about it. I think that this could turn into a long discussion about the ethics, definition, and consequences of domestication, so I'm going to stop here, but please don't be too horrified by the kittens. I know it's irresponsible, but life is a beautiful thing... isn't it?

Transit II

2009-10-21T10:45:00.005+02:00

Is there meaning in chaos? I realize that this account of my travels is overly long and somewhat repetitive, but I think there's some sort of buried insight about transience and transit, and the value of keeping connections alive though you may be half the world away...

------------

Upon arriving in Victoria, I spent most of my time with my family and taking care of various life-admin things, such as renewing my driver's license and going to the dentist. Boring yet necessary. I made one trip to Vancouver, getting a ride with a friend to the ferry and boarding that beloved boat, Swartz Bay to Tsawassen, an hour and a half of gorgeous scenery and terrible food. When BC Ferries handed over management of their cafeterias to White Spot, I wasn't very happy. (Random thought: I've just realized that Swartz Bay probably means “Black Bay,” right? Why? I've never thought about this before...)

I passed a blissful weekend in Vancouver with some of my best friends, then took the skytrain + bus back to the ferry terminal, for another ferry trip and then two more buses back to my house. Side note: the Vancouver subway/skytrain system is being overhauled for the Winter Olympics, and it was a fairly new system already – the contrast with the New York subway system is overwhelming. You almost wouldn't believe it was the same category of transit. Spacious, clean, dry stations? Equally spacious, clean trains? No clattering, no mysterious stains, no drafts of suspicious-smelling underground air? The Vancouver system may be objectively superior, but give me New York's subway anytime.

A couple of days later, my dad me to the airport at 5:00 a.m. and I got on a flight to Toronto. I was picked up in Toronto, drove to Guelph, and spent five days in Guelph. I'd always assumed that Victoria was a college town, but I now know better – though Victoria does have a lot of college students, it is by no means a college town in the way that Guelph is. The entire downtown core (if it can be called that...) of Guelph is dominated by students, in the form of hipster bookstores, cheap dive bars, late-night eateries, and of course the hordes of students themselves, partying every night in their ironic plaid shirts, too-tight pants, and I'm-An-Individual shoes. Aside from that, it is picturesque and peaceful. I had a lovely time with a very special friend, managed to meet up with a couple of other old friends in Toronto, and then on September 28^th found myself back at the airport.

My next destination: Ann Arbour, Michigan. However, being as I went for the cheapest flights available, I ended up flying from Toronto to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Detroit. In Detroit, I cleared customs & immigration with a stolid, swarthy, middle-aged man. He asked me where I was going, and upon hearing my answer, he announced in a gruff voice, “oh yeah, go Wolverines!” My only response to that was an extremely blank stare. “Not a football fan, then?” “No.” “Alright, go on through.” STAMP. STAMP.

My college roommate and VERY CLOSE FRIEND picked me up, and we drove to Ann Arbour. Arriving in Ann Arbour felt like I'd stepped through the “America” mirror and entered a very-slightly-different version of Guelph – the university is the same size, the town is the same size, the architecture and climate are roughly the same, and there are the same multitudes of organic grocery stores and cheerful college students. The first night there, I attended a small concert given by a travelling folk band. Their opening act was a 21-year-old girl who performed (among other things) a piece entitled “three generations,” which involved her mother, her grandmother, and herself all playing one cacophonous note on recorders. This subtle masterpiece of avant-garde performance art was greeted with enthusiastic cheering from the crowd. (The main act, thank goodness, was actually very good, if a bit twee for my taste – Anna Ash and the Family Tree - what can I say, I'm a sucker for a girl with a mandolin...)

Two days in Ann Arbour, and then on September 30^th I flew from Detroit to New York with the discount airline Spirit Air. (Discount airlines: good or bad? For short flights, I think they're fine – but if you have a lot of luggage, they do charge for every checked bag. The service was, in general, very good. I used to really like the Canadian discount airline Zoom Air, until they went out of business.) On this flight, I managed to sit down with some unusually friendly seat-partners: an extended-service plan salesman from Florida (with roots in Spain, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad), and a 40-ish secretary from Detroit who was fulfilling her high school dream of moving to New York City, and had her beloved cat Allie (get it? Allie the cat? ALLEYCAT?) in a carrier under the seat in front of her, ready for adventure in the Big Apple. We drank a couple of beers together and arrived in New York pleasantly tipsy and ready to take cheesy cell-phone photos of ourselves with Allie and the ubiquitous Montty.

In New York, I spent one night at my aunt's apartment, then took the train to Princeton, and spent one day/night there having various reunions and recollections. Not too much reflection here... only that I was sad to leave, perhaps sadder than I've ever been to leave the campus. It was a combination, I think, of (1) the wistful knowledge that the next time I come back, there will be no current students who know or remember me, and (2) a gradual fading of the frantic need I had to get out, which I felt so strongly when I graduated. I suppose I've made my peace with a number of things that happened while I was at school, as well as simply with myself and the experience of going to Princeton, or going to college at all. Anyhow, leaving campus on the noon train, watching the still-lush forest clackity-clack away, I felt a sorrow that I never felt when I graduated.

I slept one night in New York, then a night in Brooklyn with a very close friend from Princeton, then back to New York for some more reunions with various people, including a dear old, old childhood friend who came from Montreal to visit me in New York. Next, a mad dash to Grand Central to get a train to Brewster, Connecticut. At the Brewster station, I was met by old friends from my time in India, and we drove to Bridgewater, where we ate a lavish and delightful multi-cultural dinner, and reminisced about Kodaikanal. They have two young children (whom I taught while I was in India), and it was shocking to see how much they've grown up since I saw them last year. I suppose I must seem much the same to my aunts and uncles – young, growing quickly, etc. I've stopped with the physical growth but hopefully the intellectual/spiritual/emotional growth continues?

From Bridgewater, we made a hectic 5a.m. criss-cross of Connecticut, going at top speed from Bridgewater to the Hartford airport to drop someone off, then to New Haven to drop me off at the train station and another girl off at Yale. I got on the train back to Grand Central, but it was running late and I therefore missed my train from Penn Station to Princeton, where I was going to meet with my thesis advisor. With little sleep and a high stress level, I fed several dollars worth of quarters into the Penn station pay phones and tried to reorganize my already-crazy second visit to Princeton, then hopped on the next train. Luckily, my advisor managed to rearrange another meeting and we talked for about half an hour; next I had lunch with another old roommate, who took a two-year hiatus from her degree but has come back this year to finish it. She laid out a smorgasbord of cheese, substantial salads, crackers, breads, fruits and vegetables, and I did sweet delicious justice to it before speeding back to the train station to go back to New York. Once back in the city, I had just enough time to get back to my aunt's apartment, pack up my bags, and get to JFK for my next flight.

In JFK, I went to the Iceland Air desk – visions of Viking aircraft hustled along by Odin's lightning bolts running through my head – and checked in for my flight to London, via Reykjavik.

Transit I

2009-10-19T09:02:00.003+02:00

Montty in Toronto, CN Tower in the background

I've long believed that this newfound modern ability to traverse the globe as though it were our backyard is an unsettling thing; surely it does something very strange to the body and mind to zip back and forth between hemispheres and time zones, crossing lines of latitude and longitude as quickly as you'd pass mile markers on a dirt road, were you moving at a more natural pace. Jet lag proves the confusion of your circadian rhythms, but are there not other bodily rhythms, more subtle ones, which are disturbed by skipping through multiple time zones, kilometres of altitude change, and a complete reversal of the seasons, all in the space of 24 hours?

I don't mean to say that because it's “unnatural” it's bad – I love technology and clearly I love air travel, despite the appalling pollution it causes. (Every time I step on another plane, I see with guilt-wracked eyes the image of my carbon footprint expanding and expanding...) However, beyond the pollution problem, I feel that somehow it must upset one's internal balance. Chaos! Or perhaps we get used to it.

Without further ado, then, an appropriately chaotic recounting of my travels, focusing on transit.

September 5^th, I left D'Kar by car at about 4:30 in the morning, driving to Ghanzi to catch the morning bus to Gaborone. Nathaniel drove me through the chill, dark morning, helped load my backpack onto the bus, and then drove back home to sleep. I slept on the bus, on and off till we reached Jwaneng, the centre of Botswana's mining operations. The bus always stops at Jwaneng for 20 minutes or so, and the passengers get off and buy snacks. We reached the Gaborone bus station at about three in the afternoon, where I got in a taxi that took me to my hotel.

The next morning (Sept. 6th), the same taxi came to pick me up. The driver, however, was extremely late – his girlfriend was in the car with him, laughing as they careened around the corner and pulled up in front of my hotel where I'd been pacing angrily in the dark. They drove me to a different bus station, where I boarded the bus for Johannesburg. A few hours to the border, where we all got off and went through immigration – then a few hours more into Jo'burg. I was meeting a friend from Princeton, so I got a taxi to Zoo Lake and then – due to road blocks – walked almost a kilometre with all of my bags to get to the Jo'burg jazz festival. Later, we drove to her house for dinner, and then she drove me to the airport.

Flight: Jo'burg to Amsterdam. Mixup with the ticketing counter because I was spending 24 hours in Amsterdam, which falls in-between a proper layover (in which you spend more than a day between flights and must check in for the second flight separately) and an in-airport layover (in which you are checked in for both flights and only spend a few hours in the airport in between flights)... I had to check my luggage all the way through, but they couldn't/wouldn't give me a boarding pass for the second flight. I think that this was a mistake on behalf of the KLM desk at the Jo'burg airport, but I'm not sure. Anyhow, arrived in Amsterdam mid-morning, checked into a hostel, and wandered around the city in a daze of severe culture shock, like a waking dream. Rented a bike, went to the Van Gogh museum (excellent!) and felt that perhaps his paintings from the mental institution and various states of insanity were a good representation of how I was feeling.

The next morning (Sept. 7th), took the train back to the airport, and almost missed my flight due to problems checking in – the Amsterdam airport couldn't understand what strange alchemy the Jo'burg airport had worked on my booking. First I waited in a very long line for the automated check-in, which couldn't retrieve my booking through any of its 3 methods; the machine directed me to a second long line, which I waited in, only to be told that I needed to wait in a THIRD long line to actually speak to a KLM representative, a haughty and picture-perfect blonde Dutch lady who scolded me for having a messed-up booking and then sent me through to security with the warning that I didn't have a seat assigned yet and I'd better get to the gate on the double to have a seat assigned there. Panicked, I raced through customs where a couple of snotty, pimply twenty-year-olds delayed me and made fun of my accent, and then dashed to the gate – where an endless caterpillar of people were lined up, waiting to go through interrogation by a private security firm contracted by the US government to screen flights going into the States. ARGH.

With their big black suits, garish ties, barrel chests, and snazzy earpieces, these guys were not interested in hearing the pleas of a dishevelled young girl carrying a stuffed monkey. I waited at the back of the line, in order to answer a barrage of pointless questions, generally driving at the point of “has anyone had a chance to smuggle CRAZY DRUGS into your bags?” It was kind of disgusting how obviously they profiled by race or nationality – I explained that I'd spent the day with friends in Jo'burg, and that the bags had been left unsupervised (by me) in their house while I went to the bathroom or had a shower. “Oho,” the man said, suspiciously, glaring at me through his wire-rimmed glasses. “So you had to go to the bathroom, hmm? Friends in Johannesburg, hmm? How exactly do you know these... friends?”

“They are AMERICAN, we went to PRINCETON together, that is how I know them,” I snapped back.

He immediately relaxed. “Oh, Princeton, well, congratulations! What year did you graduate?” What bullshit. I suppose the name comes in handy, but I always feel irritated when it does.

Nevertheless, successfully got on the plane, and blissfully watched movies till we landed in Seattle. More (perceived) racial-profiling adventures there: while waiting to collect my baggage, customs & immigration officers roamed the room doing spot-checks. A naive-seeming young officer had been asking various people questions about their visit, their bags, and so on – he'd asked a wide variety of people, both male and female, old and young, and mostly white. Then he stopped to talk to a tall African man (not African-American, but African – I could tell from his accent and the colour of his passport) who had just descended into the luggage collection area and therefore hadn't witnessed the man talking to the other people. “Excuse me, sir,” the officer began, “can I see your boarding pass and passport, please?”

“No,” replied the man, immediately and boldly, with an aggressive glint in his eye. “What for? I just came through immigration.”

“Well, sir, it's just standard procedure – we're doing double-checks of everyone down here on the floor.”

“No! I refuse, I don't have to show you anything. You have singled me out. I will not.” He put his hand protectively on the breast pocket of his shirt, where his passport and boarding pass were tucked away.

“Sir,” the officer tried again, looking nervous and embarrassed, “really, we've been asking everyone – it's a new policy of the airport. We've got to double-check everyone. Please may I see your passport and boarding pass.” He held out his hand tentatively.

“No! I am not giving you anything until I see you asking other people." The African man drew himself up to his full height with extreme dignity. "Ask some white people. I have done nothing wrong, I'm not showing you anything. This is discrimination! You cannot do this to me!”

At this declaration, the officer looked even more nervous – obviously the race issue had been in play since the beginning of their interaction, but for this guy to drop it so blatantly made him desperately uncomfortable. I was holding my breath, waiting for something to erupt – after all, giving trouble to a customs & officer is generally a really bad idea, whether you're in the right or not. And in this case, though the African man couldn't know it, the customs officer really had been asking a wide range of people, and it really did seem to be a new airport policy. The potential for explosion was there. Thankfully, the young officer backed down, and went back to asking white people. I collected my bags and left before I could see if he approached the African man again - however, on my way out I was accosted by a different officer who gave me the same routine questioning, so it seems to be true that they were trying to double-check everyone.

I re-checked my bags and then went to the gate for my short hop from Seattle to Victoria. Waiting at the gate, I was overcome by a fever of consumerism, a sudden compulsive desire to buy seemingly necessary things. This is how my stream of consciousness went: Oh look! A newspaper. I should buy the newspaper, I'm so out of touch with the news, I miss the New York Times – and maybe a magazine, just to read on the plane – and I've been awake a long time, I should really get a coffee – maybe a snack, probably a muffin or something – and then I guess I'll be thirsty, so I could grab a bottle of water, and then a pack of gum, or maybe some mints, I do like mints more than gum... WAIT, WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING?! A quick mental calculation – though each item seemed reasonable, altogether it was almost $20, a percentage of my monthly budget in Botswana that I didn't even want to think about. I bought one large green tea ($1.79) and sat down with a book I'd brought from Botswana with me ($0.00). I could barely read, though, looking up every thirty seconds to see what time it was, to see how many minutes closer I was to reaching my beloved home. At last the screen above the gate flashed on and the loudspeaker crackled to life - "NorthWest Air is happy to announce boarding for flight 5121 to Victoria. Any passengers travelling with small children are welcome to board now..."

During the flight to Victoria I drank in the scenery with ravenous eyes: the deep waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca fading into turquoise shallows and then grey-gold beaches around the myriad islands off the coast. Thick conifer forests rising and falling with the contours of the land. The scars of logging, exposing the cragginess of mountains not yet eroded by roots and weather. A few quiet houses with threadlike roads peeping in and out of the trees; no cars. Spindly docks with tiny toy boats moored to them. The scaly ripple of sunlight on the water, waves that would swamp a small boat looking as delicate as mosquito netting from the airplane. Cloud-shadows, moving without regard for land or sea. It's as beautiful as flying over the Okavango, in it's own way.

The flight passed quickly. We landed in Victoria and I stepped off onto the familiar tarmac of the small airport, breathed the familiar air, scrutinized the airport windows to see if I could spot my mom. In the baggage claim I was hopping from one foot to the other, pushing the cart back and forth, willing my bags to arrive faster. Then I was rushing through immigration and emerging, practically running, into the airport where my mom was waiting with open arms and a helium balloon.

The Prodigal Returns

2009-10-14T12:04:00.003+02:00

"Tall tree and the eye," Anish Kapoor. At the Royal Academy of Arts, London

I returned to Botswana on Friday, the 9th of October. The stories of my travels are long and convoluted - I think it would be fun to recount the trip purely in terms of ground covered, without any explanation of why, because from that perspective it was an utterly ridiculous journey. Actually, perhaps from any perspective it was an utterly ridiculous journey. Regardless, I had a wonderful time and have returned in the best possible spirits, feeling refreshed from the trip and also happy to be back in D'kar. I feel a renewed sense of confidence - this isn't what I want to do forever, but it is what I want to do right now. I don't want to live in the village forever, but it is where I want to be right now. Visiting old friends reminded me that I'm still the person I've always been - small changes, of course, but essentially the same. That's reassuring. And a large part of that person is an academic. I will be applying for graduate school when I get back from Botswana.

I'd worried that when I stepped off the plane, back into the blistering heat and flatness of Botswana, I wouldn't want to be here - that the afterimages of tall green trees, skyscrapers, mountains, and old friends would fill me with regret. Not so. As I said, I don't want to stay here forever, but I really want to be here right now. I hate to keep restating that, but it's very important to me. I think that the contrast between this arrival and my arrival of a year ago, when I first set foot on Kalahari sand, is also helpful. Everything that was alien then, is familiar now.

Further reflection on that later. As one might expect, I'm busy untangling a giant, messy knot of "things that should have been done by other people while I was away but in fact didn't get done at all," so I haven't had much time to blog. BUT I WILL.

HOME!

2009-09-10T16:37:00.003+02:00

Hello! I'm at home in Victoria, writing this from my kitchen table. The above photo was taken at the Jo'burg jazz festival, with Montty in tow (as usual!)

It's great to be home - I'm still in the throes of vicious culture shock, but on the other hand it's so easy to be in North America. It's so familiar. I'm not constantly questioning myself or trying to make up for my lack of cultural understanding. I hadn't realized how many little safeguards I have running in the background of my mind all the time, when I live in Botswana - trying to interpret others, trying to adjust my own behaviour, trying to be alert to unspoken social cues that I translate as easily as breathing when I'm at home. I am - dare I say - normal here. At least, semi-normal.

I will try to write some kind of Botswana retrospective in the next week, and maybe a reflection on Returning, but for the moment I am going to the dentist. Hurrah!

Itinerary

2009-09-01T21:49:00.003+02:00

Nasturtium flower courtesy of my garden

Okay, I know this is two back-to-back entries, but I thought I'd quickly post my itinerary. Just so that you all can do one of the following:
1. Sigh in envy
2. Shake your head at the foolishness of such a tightly-packed trip, and remind me to pack lightly
3. Plan to SEE ME
4. Not care at all

Itinerary:
Sept.7-8 -- Amsterdam
Sept.8-23 -- Victoria/Vancouver
Sept.23-28 -- Toronto/Guelph
Sept.28-30 -- Detroit/Ann Arbour
Sept.30-Oct.5 -- New York/Princeton/Bridgewater
Oct.6-8 -- London
Oct.9 -- Jo'burg
Oct.10 -- BACK TO BOTS

Tally-ho!

visiting home

2009-09-01T21:12:00.003+02:00

Ok, I caved and posted one picture. Dance Festival.

Just a quickie to say that I'm going to be AWAY from Botswana from Sept. 6 - Oct. 9, making a GLORIOUS visit home. Hopefully I'll manage to post some kind of "wrap up the year" blog before I go (or from the airport); however, I'm really not good at that kind of deeply introspective wrap-up entry, so I probably won't.

I also need to write about the Kuru Dance Festival, which happened 3 weeks ago (argh, I'm so behind!) and was amazing... The basic gist of the Dance Festival, which is one of the "flagship events" of the KFO, is to bring traditional dance groups from all over Southern Africa to one festival. The focus is on San traditional dance, but I hear that there were a few other groups represented at the previous festivals. In the past, the dance festival has been hosted at the Dqae Qare game farm, and involved groups from South Africa and Namibia; however, Kuru decided that it was getting too big and in some sense too commercial. I wasn't there for last year's, but the criticism they received was that the festival was being put on more for the showiness and the publicity, rather than for the sake of the dancers. Also, the growing number of dance groups meant that each one had a very, very limited time to dance. The main aim of the festival is not to put on a show for tourists, but to allow traditional dance groups to meet, mingle, and celebrate their art form together... So Kuru decided to switch up the format: one year, two small dance festivals to allow all the dance groups to have enough time to really showcase their talent, and then the following year, a bigger festival with more publicity, involving only the "best" of the dance groups that performed at the mini-festivals.

The first mini-festival was in West Hanahai, and I attended... The second mini-festival is next weekend, in Qabo, and I very sadly will NOT be attending, because I'm going to be on the bus to Gaborone... and then the bus to Jo'burg... and then the airplane!

I may or may not post photos from the dance festival (oops, I just posted one). Use of photographs of the San is a very touchy issue here; the only reason I didn't have to pay a fee and register my camera was that I was the "official" photographer for Komku. I know that some people here wouldn't be happy about me posting photos on the internet for all to see; on the other hand, I think they're beautiful photographs and the best expression of this vibrant art form. On a philosophical level I find the idea of having control over, or rights to, all images of oneself to be very strange... We cannot own or control the world's perception of us, and woe be to anyone that tries. On a more practical level I understand completely why the community here is angry about having their images used - not only because the photographer may be capitalizing upon their images of San culture for profits that the people here never see, but also because the images often promote unfair representation of the San as primitives or savages - the ubiquitous Noble Savage, in fact. This is a huge issue, but I'm not going to delve any deeper into it right now.

Lots of things to finish up before I go! I have to try and more-or-less finish a disbursement request and quarterly report for the ADF before I leave... But I seem to be spending my time doing much more indulgent things, such as planting some last minute vegetables (tomatoes, squash, peppers, cucumbers, cabbages), and trawling through more fashion blogs (face hunter, sea of shoes, etc...). Incongruous pairing of activities, but such is life in D'Kar.

And finally....

Bad news: Kimchi the cat is LOST, and most probably gone forever. She hasn't been around for a week, and I'm pretty sure at this point that she's been killed.

Farewell, dear lost cat. I miss you.

Adventures in Cooking: Kimchi

2009-08-23T18:06:00.004+02:00

Living in D'Kar, many of the food items I like to eat in Canada are not available. This is unfortunate, because food is one of the great pleasures of my life... But it's also an opportunity to try and make some of those food items from scratch. One of my proudest triumphs, for example, has been tahini - closely followed by hummous and babaganoush.

Most recently, I decided to tackle something I definitely won't be finding in Botswana anytime soon: the Korean staple, kimchi. Kimchi is basically spicy pickled cabbage (with various additions, if you please), and is eaten constantly by Koreans. Admittedly, I don't eat a huge amount of it at home, but I do enjoy it. I've been growing Chinese cabbages in the garden, since I vastly prefer them to normal cabbages, and the first ones are reaching maturity - what better use for them than kimchi?

So, without further ado, Adventures in Cooking: Kimchi, a Photo Story.

The cabbage. It doesn't look quite as compact as the Chinese cabbage you'd buy in a grocery store - I'm not sure why that is, perhaps they tie up the leaves when they're grown commercially? Or it could just be that this is a variant - or the soil/sun/water wasn't the same - who knows, really. The point is, it tastes like a Chinese cabbage.

Cabbage with my foot, to show you how big it is!

Harvested, and sitting on my kitchen counter.

Cabbage root and stem, after I took all of the leaves off. The stem was amazingly woody, especially near the root... Possibly I should have harvested earlier.

First step of kimchi: Salt the cabbage thoroughly, and leave it for several hours (or days, depending on whose recipe you're following...) so that some of the water leaves the cabbage leaves and they pickle.

Next: wring out the cabbage, cut it (if you wish), and prepare the kimchi sauce/marinade (mostly ginger, garlic, and chili)

Ready to mix!

All mixed up. Doesn't it look delicious?

In jars, ready to ferment. This is where I ran into some trouble - you're supposed to seal it up in the jars and then leave it at room temperature for a few days, until you see it bubbling - that means that the fermentation has started, and you can then put it in the fridge. The problem was that we've had a resurgence of winter, and the days following the kimchi-making were basically like being in a refrigerator, so I don't think that the fermentation could get started. Bother!

However, today I decided to open up one jar and just see what was going on, and make sure it wasn't going bad from being left out so long. Here are the results - it hasn't fermented, but it's still quite good. Not as good as the kimchi I get at home, but it's still decent. Definitely better than no kimchi at all! The weather has warmed up a bit, so I'm going to keep the other jar out and see if it will ferment.

meat

2009-08-18T23:08:00.002+02:00

I seem to be making a lot of posts about meat. This is from the Kuru Dance Festival. It was cooked in giant cauldrons over the fire for hours, stirred with tree branches, emerging in battered, fat-bubbly, tough-and-stringy chunks to feed the masses that assembled in West Hanahai for the festival. It was a bit reminiscent of my first weekend in Botswana: Indepdence Day long weekend, which is coming up in just over a month. I've been here almost a year.

More on the dance festival later, hopefully, but I've been quite slack about covering "important events" - dedicated readers, if they exist, may have indignantly observed my lack of follow-up on the Okavango trip. I will try to return to it!

Taxonomy

2009-08-11T15:30:00.002+02:00

Reviving the Lost Art of Naming the World
(author: Carol Kaesuk Yoon)

It's a bit of a clunky title, but a very interesting article about the underestimated importance of what scientists would call taxonomy, but what any person might call "naming the world." Recognizing, organizing, and naming all of the diverse living things we encounter appears to be a human universal with many common features across all cultures. It's something that I've touched on before in my blogs about human evolution - the vital importance of learning to name and identify the myriad plants and animals around us, the knowledge that can spell life or death for a hunter-gatherer. Perhaps the survival imperative to learn plants and animals is gone for most of us, but it's still a built-in drive, and something that can enrich our life enormously - in fact, I would say it is necessary to truly inhabit our natural world.

"No wonder so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always — hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night — we barely seem to notice."

Most people - myself included, though I'm trying to remedy it - walk past the same plants and animals every day and never really see them. The same trees, bushes, flowers, birds, insects, small mammals.... Our eyes graze over them every single day, and yet they slide past like a meaningless artificial backdrop to the supposedly grand drama of our human concerns. The vast network of living organisms means nothing. We don't have to interact with it; we don't depend on it for survival (or so we believe). Thousands of times, someone may walk past cedars, madrona, poplars, firs, and never notice them or think to identify or categorize them. You could take that person somewhere else, stand them in front of one of those trees, and say, "does this grow in your neighborhood?" They wouldn't be able to answer. They'd make a guess - hem and haw - "it looks a bit familiar, maybe" - but nothing approaching certainty. This incredible, living and breathing world that we inhabit is passing us by without notice.

I don't want to quote the whole article, but the author makes a suggestion at the end, and I have to back it up: "Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle — anywhere, and they are everywhere — and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound. [...] meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it. [...] To do so is to change everything, including yourself. Because once you start noticing organisms, once you have a name for particular beasts, birds and flowers, you can’t help seeing life and the order in it, just where it has always been, all around you."

Once you've pinned down one organism - anything - and scrutinized it, thought for a moment about the colour of its leaves or wings, its size and shape, its roots or feet or claws, and then given it a name... You'll start to see it everywhere, with a burst of familiarity and recognition when you spot it again, as though it were a secret friend in the chaos of the world. To see a small brown bird and know what it is, to call it by name when you see it perched on the edge of a garbage can or swaying on a windblown tree branch, is to make a part of the world your own.

bonescape

2009-08-06T11:55:00.001+02:00

These are a bit old, but I felt like posting something.
Elephant bones, from the Okavango.

from beating heart to supper pot

2009-08-03T15:42:00.004+02:00

Last week, N and I went to the community trust to go over their new contract with the African Development Foundation. (Yes, we got funding, it's very exciting, I may write about it later.) In typical form, we arrived to the settlements late, rounded up the board members, drove in the dark to the second settlement, scrounged for firewood, and with great anticipation seasoned the meat we'd bought earlier at Ghanzi Butchery. "I'll get the braai stand," N announced, and hopped into the back of the truck to look for it. A few moments later, after much shuffling and crashing around, he emerged in consternation, without the braai stand. "NO! Those motherf***ers didn't pack it!" he howled. We stood for a moment, staring at the fire, which the cold wind was quickly fanning into braai-worthy coals - at the indigo 9:30 p.m. sky with the Milky Way strewn brightly upon it - at our own complaining bellies.

"Well," I said, "we could use the top of the gas burner..." So we unscrewed the top of the gas cannister, wedged it between a couple of bricks, and haphazardly piled the meat on top of it. The burner is poorly shaped for braaing; it has some metal flaps that point straight up, holes in unusual places, and overall does not make for evenly cooked meat. However, being desperate, we made the best of it, and enjoyed our dinner.

We all slept on the floor of the VDC (Village Development Committee) office, as it was too cold and late to set up tents, and woke up the next morning to collect the rest of the board members and hold our meeting. The purpose of this whole last-minute trip was to go over, in excruciating details, several dozen pages of convulted American legal language... The process took hours, involving the following steps:
1. I read the passage in English
2. After thinking for awhile, I translated the passage into simplified/logical English, as opposed to legalese
3. Nathaniel translated the simplified English into Setswana
4. Questions and clarifications
We finished around three, and went in search of our belated lunch. The kgosi of Grootlaagte had just slaughtered one of her cows, so we drove a few kilometers off into the bush to her cattle post, and found the cow in the process of being loaded onto someone's pickup truck.

It was quite a scene. I'd never actually seen a freshly-killed cow... sides of meat hanging in butcheries or markets, perhaps, but never the whole shebang. Even this time, the animal had already been skinned, but it was still the most visceral (no pun intended!) experience I've had of a dead cow.

We parked just outside their fence and walked in. The first thing I saw was the colour, a huge splash of the brightest red imaginable. It was initially removed from shape, dimension, perspective - just a blot of scarlet, surrounded by the weaving shapes of hungry dogs. As we got closer I realized it was the inside of the skin, laid across some low bushes, with some of the meat still lying on top of it and the organs spread out in one corner. The blood on the light interior of the hide was surprisingly bright, much brighter than the duller crimson of the muscle tissues. Seeing the organs laid out was another book-learning vs. practical-learning moment; though I know all the names, structures, and functions of the organs from my biology class, when they were messily, bloodily jumbled about on the ground I couldn't tell which was which. N knew exactly what they were from having seen countless cows laid out in just such a manner. There was one large, rounded sac that I didn't recognize; I asked N, but he couldn't remember its name in English. "It's, it's..." he struggled, "it's, you know, it had many flaps, and the grass is in it..." One of the women chopping up the carcass neatly sliced open the organ in question, and I realized that it was the rumen.* Indeed - many flaps, and full of grass.

There were three or four women slicing, separating, sorting, and cleaning the organs - with blood splattered on their dresses and dyeing their arms red to the elbow, they neatly wielded their long-bladed knives and quickly sliced the connective tissues, separating intestine from stomach, lungs from heart. One made a long slit in the stomach and they began shovelling great handfuls of half-digested grass out of it - huge amounts, the entirety so heavy that they couldn't just pick up the stomach and empty its contents out onto the ground. When it was empty, they turned the stomach inside out and washed it in a bucket, revealing the frilly convoluted texture of something I like to think of as "delicious tripe" and not "recently in contact with half-digested grass." Three men struggled to lift one of the back legs, and staggered over to the pickup truck to dump it in. The receiving men in the back actually overbalanced and fell down with the weight of the leg, landing and staining their trousers in a puddle of blood.

Quickly, the organs had been sorted (saleable; non-saleable), and all the meat loaded into the back, and we followed the pickup into the village to their own little BMC (Botswana Meat Commission). By slicing a hole between bone and tendon, and hooking a piece of wire through the hole, they hung the huge haunches of meat up on a tree, then laid the hide out on the ground beneath a spring scale, and waited for their customers. Soon there were several dozen people gathered around, pointing at which bit they'd like, and with axes and knives the cow was slowly chopped apart on the carpet of its hide, weighed on the spring scale, paid for, and then stuffed into a plastic bag and taken home for supper. By the time we left, half of it must have been gone...

The whole thing took perhaps three hours, to kill the cow, clean and divide it, transport it and hang it in the impromptu butchery, and then sell it off piece by piece. In the Western removal from our food, we don't like to think about where our meat comes from; these mystic degrees of separation exist for us from a cow in a field (or in a disease-infested metal cage in a sunless warehouse, whichever), and the tidily packaged slice of meat that we buy in the supermarket. There are a few more links in the North American meat chain, but this is essentially it: the animal is killed. Immediately its blood is drawn, its stomach emptied of the food it was eating just an hour ago, its organs separated and sorted, its meat sliced into reasonable portions and then swiftly sold off. Death is not a long process for a meat animal; there is no polite grace period, no period of transition from "cow" to "beef." It happens literally with the stroke of a knife. One moment living, the next moment meat.

We had part of that cow for lunch. I wanted to savour it, to pay some kind of respect to the animal that provided me with my first real-live look at a rumen. But we cooked it in the traditional style of boiling it to death with an excess of oil, and in fact I didn't enjoy it at all.

* Ok, revision, after writing this I realized I really didn't know a cow's digestive system very well, and looked it up... I think that what I was looking at was actually the omasum, whose job it is to suck up the nutrients and water from the somewhat-digested grass. The cow's "stomach" has four sections: rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. The biggest compartment and what you'd probably think of as the stomach is actually the rumen, but the abomasum is the bit that's closest to the human stomach.

Bookshelf

2009-07-24T22:15:00.005+02:00

Recently Read:

The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

I read this upon urging by an anthropologist friend. It was powerful and thought-provoking (duh)... I don't feel particularly qualified to discuss What It All Means, but I will cop out by quoting something in the translator's notes at the end:
"In his Preface to the first edition of Peau noire, masques blancs, Francis Jeanson tells how one day he wrote to Fanon asking for clarification of a particularly obscure passage in the book. An answer was duly furnished and Fanon added: "This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e., irrationally, almost sensually."
Further on in his letter Fanon goes on to confess how he is drawn to the magic of words and that for him language is the ultimate refuge, once it is freed from conventions, from its voice of reason and the terror of coming face-to-face with oneself. "Words for me have a powerful effect. I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark." He went on to say that, like Cesaire, he wanted to sink beneath the stupefying lava of words that have the color of quivering flesh."
(Richard Philcox, translator)
I love this. Sometimes a thousand critics and academics with a thousand complicated analyses should just simmer down - it's inexplicable, it's for the joy of the language. Fanon was a brilliant theorist and a passionate writer, a true artist... I have a fairly shallow reservoir of patience for reading theories of race, culture, sociology - I'd rather read science - but I was glued to The Wretched of the Earth. Of course, living where I do at the moment, reading about decolonization was fascinating as well - Fanon was so right, and yet so wrong. I'm sure he would love to see how his predictions have been borne out or overturned, situation by situation. Highly recommended.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

After reading it, I'm a bit curious to see the film. I'm sure no glitzy period flick could recreate Thackeray's many-leveled satire... I think I would've hated it if I had only read the first half. Thackeray was almost too clever - too many sly references, his characters too glib and unlikeable, the parody unkind and extreme. But as he stuck with the characters and unravelled them, the arch removal of the earlier chapters seemed like our own deceptions and misunderstandings at first meeting someone in an artificial society, and in the tragi-comic pursual of their lives the satire became reality. It didn't end with a funny, pat, clever ending - neither ironic glory or harsh tragedy, but something real, and therefore sad. It's like the thrilling effervesence of a new relationship, when you kiss mask against mask and everything seems beautiful - and then eventually the glamour fades and reality intrudes, blemishes and faults and indiscretions. Is the sadness in discovering the reality, or in refusing to ever admit it? Thackeray mocks the illusions and leaves an ambiguous conclusion about the realities. Can we ever find them? Are we really happier with the mask, and can we maintain it? It's also quite a funny book, but in a wincing sort of way.

Less recently read:

The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker
PINKER YOU BLEW MY MIND

Currently reading:

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As with everything by Marquez, I never want it to end.

Okavango II

2009-07-14T09:39:00.003+02:00

This is a bit of a cop-out, because I'm still not done... In fact, I've barely begun. But I'm about to leave on a trip and I'm not sure when I'll be able to write more, so I thought I'd post what I've got.

My trip began with the 6:00 a.m. bus to Maun. When you wait on the edge of the road in the dark, cold, early morning, you could be anywhere at all. Any train platform, any bus stop, on any road in all the world. Headlights illuminate the bush in an alien monochrome, but other than that it is just dark, an anonymous temperature that rules out only the most equatorial of locations, the only distinguishing features the dry subtle smell, the sounds of the birds. The bus pulled up – one of the small ones, rickety and wheezing with drafts through a thousand gaps, barely able to push 90km/hr, the front piled high with checker-print plastic bags and tattered duffels. I slept, having seen the pale sunrise over the Kalahari enough times already.

In Maun, a stop at the internet cafe to send off some last-minute emails for work, and then off to the airport to meet my relatives. Their plane was late, and I sat around waiting and chatting with R, our guide. In true closely-linked-small-town fashion, R is both a friend of the Princeton alumnus that set up my position here, and the brother-in-law of C, a prominent Ghanzi landowner that has been helping out with Huiku. R is also friends with many of my other Maun acquaintances... What can I say, it's a small community. He's originally from Kenya, which I would say is the archetypal country for Rugged Safari Guides, and he fills the position to a tee: sun-baked, cigarette-smoking, swearing constantly with the words “bloody” and “damn,” white-streaked wavy grey hair, a compact energetic form, and – incongruously – a pair of Crocs on his feet. I could have suggested someone a bit younger, a bit more modern, but what's a safari without a colourful guide? He's full of casual stories about near-death-in-the-bush; he is disdainful of tourists, researchers, and the modern world; he spouts out politically incorrect opinions about everything under the sun, most definitely including Africa; and he is a bit of a nutter. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the bush, gained through experience and conversation rather than hours bent over a book. I myself have learned almost everything I know from books, and it was interesting to me how he knew everything there was to know about the animals we encountered, yet nothing about phenomena which are textbook standards for Bio 101. Different sets of knowledge, gained in different ways, but with significant overlap... I think he was also a bit surprised by what I knew, since I obviously haven't spent years as a guide in the bush.

Sitting in the airport, however, we talked mostly about my work at Kuru, until the plane landed and interrupted all conversation. My relatives (aunt, uncle, 2 cousins) arrived laden with bags to donate to a local street kids' center,* and ready for their African experience. Faster than I could have imagined possible, we piled into R's Land Cruiser and started barrelling down the highway – canvas flapping, raised safari seats bouncing, no seatbelts, dodging donkeys. Straight from the tarmac to the bush. I imagine they felt a bit shell-shocked.

Soon we left the paved road for the slightly calmer gravel road into Moremi, and within an hour or two we were seeing giraffes and elephants on the side of the road. It's always exciting to see the first one; the crossover point where you leave the drive and enter the adventure. My relatives, needless to say, were very excited.

We drove for 4-5 hours through Moremi, the bush gradually changing from the low, dry bush of Maun to the taller trees along the gravel road – the sunlight low and golden, dust filtering slowly through the branches and autumn-tinted leaves. It's not quite the raging fire of “The Foliage” in Vermont, but there's a definite sunset tinge to the leaves at this time of year. Further into Moremi, the trees get larger and more twisted, the acacias all but disappear, patches of reeds interrupt the grass. As we drove through a large open field dotted with weirdly misshapen dead trees, boughs scattered across the ground like bones, R (the guide) explained that once, decades ago, there was a very high flood and this field was actually a lagoon for several years. The trees drowned and now their bleached shapes stand alone on the plain, used as elephant scratching-posts or roosts for tawny eagles. The area can still flood seasonally, but it was dry when we went through.

*Bana Ba Letsatsi (Children of the Sun)

last night...

2009-07-12T12:35:00.002+02:00

... I ate part of a leopard that had been shot by an old man who once ran for governor of Texas. We later sang songs from The Sound of Music.

cat

2009-07-08T22:13:00.001+02:00

Yes, mom, I really am a crazy cat lady.

extraterrestrial

2009-07-08T09:07:00.003+02:00

Last night the moon was full. I was at a birthday party. I stood outside inventing constellations, tracing turtles and sting rays and acrobats across the sky in the chilly July night. Full moons are so bright you can play with shadow puppets on the sand, black shapes against silver. I looked down, wineglass in hand, and saw the ethereal gleam of moonlight through glass: a spear of light piercing the inkblot shadow at the end of my arm, crystalline and bizarre.

They told me, at Victoria Falls, that on a full moon night there is a lunar rainbow - moonlight refracted in the never-ending spray of the falls. Is it monochrome? I suppose it must appear so to human eyes, the cones disabled and the rods calmly transmitting black-and-white. One hundred trillion prisms violently thrown up by the smoke that thunders, splitting the moonlight into its lunar spectrum.

Were we ever constructed to understand these things? Light years, quantum uncertainty, and the universe beyond our bubble of life? Best to stick to shepherds' wisdom, Scorpio and the Southern Cross, the moon as a gem in the shadow of a wineglass.

Okavango I

2009-07-02T10:30:00.003+02:00

It is difficult to write about the Okavango Delta.

Why?

There's nothing else like it in the world. It is truly one-of-a-kind; a unique natural phenomenon on a huge scale, something for which there is really no comparison. It is also an extremely seasonal event – I've seen it now, at the start of the flood and beginning of the dry season, but it's a completely different landscape at other times of the year, just as much as a forest in North America that goes from barren, snow-covered skeletons to lush greenery as the seasons progress. It seems, in a sense, misleading to write about my little slice of the delta – an inadequate sliver of time, an inadequate sliver of the land itself.

Let me start with a brief summary of the flood. The Okavango River begins in the highlands of Angola, where rainfalls swell the waters of the Okavango and send it rushing south into Botswana. The flood pours across the border and hits the Delta – the flat, dry, sandy northern end of the Kalahari Desert. Confronted by this, the river slows and spreads in a clean sheet of water across the sand, filling shallow channels, submerging termite mounds, and kick-starting an orgy of growth. The animals follow – the birds, winging in from other parts of the continent. Elephants, migrating towards the water they know will be there. Every thirsty creature relaxes and sates themselves in the flood, from zebra to lion to the fish that tumble downstream with the river and wind up swimming in the sinuous loops of hippo trails.

Typical image of the Delta – the green areas in the foreground are completely flooded, just overgrown with reeds. The lines in the water are all animal trails, mostly hippo and elephant as they make their way through the swamp.

The amount of water that is poured out on the Delta is also something to wonder at – 15,000 square kilometres of desert are affected, with 11 cubic kilometres of water pouring over it. For the Americans, that's 264,172,052,360 gallons, or over two hundred and sixty-four BILLION gallons of water. For those of us wisely using the metric system, it's one TRILLION litres. A more visual example – it's enough water to cover the entire island of Manhattan to a depth of 615 feet, or 187m. All of this water is poured out across the desert. At different times of year, islands will disappear and reappear; endless lagoons will dry out and sift with dust; trees will crackle with dryness and then swim in three feet of water. Papyrus rafts grow, float, anchor, and float again. Elephants churn the sand into a slow cloud as they make their way to the river, then joyously bathe themselves in mud and spout streams of water from their trunks.

It's not a rainforest, by any means; there are few tall trees, no curtains of moss nor verdant orchid-filled canopies. After all, even with the water flowing around their roots, these plants are still beaten by the blinding Botswana sunlight, and the water doesn't stay all year.

The wonder is in the waterways, the swamps and lagoons, the endless frayed fields of green that seem solid until you see a hippo wade out from the reeds and realize that it's all the same continuous expanse of water. Gain a little elevation and you start to see the darker twists and trails of hippo paths on the bottoms of the channels – the lines carved as they walk along the bottom, munching weeds and then emerging to trundle through the papyrus towards solid ground and better grazing. From an airplane the endless network and pattern of animal trails is stunningly clear, branching like spiderwebs away from the nodes of solid islands. The shapes of elephants are obvious, like giant boulders clustered around trees, and the light darting herds of impala gleam red against the grasses. You can see everything.

Get even a few hundred meters away from the water, though, and it will be this again:

Dry, low acacia bushes, sand and rocks and thorns. It's a fragile miracle, a precious sheet of moisture in the parched Kalahari. But for many kilometres around the water you'll find the animals – as long as they can get back to the river to drink.

Maun is at the southern end of the Delta, and the river there is beautiful – hippos and crocodiles sun themselves on the bank next to one of my favourite restaurants, the occasional elephant will trod through the fields, and every once in awhile you can hear a leopard coughing. But it isn't the Delta, the real Delta, the wild infinity of lagoon and twisted lily-choked channels. I entered the real Delta for the first time on the eleventh of June, 2009.

--- Brevity is a virtue! To be continued. ---

Safari Okavango!

2009-06-11T11:12:00.003+02:00

My uncle, aunt, and two cousins are flying in to Maun in about ONE HOUR and then we are going on a delightful holiday together. Safari in the Okavango, then Victoria Falls! Many photos upon my return, I promise.

Meanwhile, I have planted the following bounty from my recent trip to the nursery in Ghanzi: hibiscus bush, flame tree (Royal Poinciana), little ornamental palm trees, and some tropical climbing vine plants. I've also sowed some foxglove seeds - they are the colour and consistency of dust, and it amazes me that a foxglove will actually emerge, but fingers crossed.

overall

2009-06-04T10:20:00.003+02:00

This is the short piece I wrote for the most recent Princeton in Africa newsletter.

*****

The San are the oldest people on the planet.

Observing a sun-baked, wrinkled and wizened San elder, you might believe them to be literally the oldest person on the planet – hands like twisted clubs on the end of twig-like wrists, eyes so deeply buried in leathery wrinkles that all you see is a tiny gleam of amusement, peeping out over a toothless tobacco-stained grin. However, though these individuals are indeed very old, it is their lineage and culture which is oldest of all.

You may be familiar with the film “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” in which a tribe of Ju/'hoansi hunter gatherers – before “first contact” with modern people – have their lives turned upside down by a Coca-Cola bottle dropped carelessly into their village by a passing air plane. Around here, everyone knows of the film, largely because the “stars” of the film are their uncles, aunts, in-laws and cousins. They are bemused that their friends got to be movie stars, and irritated by how the film misrepresented their people. Though the San are some of the world's last indigenous people to leave their traditional lifestyle, it has been many decades since a Coke bottle would have inspired any kind of surprise.

I mention “The Gods Must be Crazy” to illustrate the myth of the primitive Noble Savage that still surrounds the San, as well as other indigenous peoples around the world. Yes, a century ago there were still San living in the bush, hunting and gathering. Now, there is not a single San person who survives from hunting and gathering, and there is not a single San person who would turn down an ice-cold Coke. What remains is the memory of that way of life. For the elders, it is a first-hand memory – some of them grew up with that ancient lifestyle. For others, it is a deeply-rooted yearning. I thought, upon arriving in the dusty outpost of D'Kar, that although people mourned their lost way of life, they would now want the conveniences of modernity. Wrong! Most of the people I ask, when given the rhetorical choice between a nice house in the city and life in the bush, choose the bush. Many elders complain that going to school gets in the way of teaching their children traditional knowledge, and merely fills their heads with irrelevant nonsense in Setswana and English.

Confronted with that point of view, I found myself wondering, “Why did we leave the bush? Why should these kids be forced to go to school?” Of course a thousand answers come to mind, but it's questions like these which have made my experience in D'Kar so valuable. In a way, it seems that everything here is pared down to its essentials, taken back to first principles. Many people have no houses, yet some of them flatly refuse the efforts of the Komku Trust to build a house for them. A house is a complication they do not feel they need. Again, I question what I'd never questioned before: “Why do we want houses? Do we really need them?”

Rather than experience a gradual change over thousands of years, the San are being asked to transition immediately, from a hunter-gatherer life to modern Botswana. Reasonably, they are asking “why,” and in listening to their questions I find myself re-examining my own life and the entire development of modern civilization. I realize that this sounds ridiculous, but we accept that living in another culture causes us to question our own culture; living with the San brings up those same questions as well as more fundamental ones about all sedentary/agriculture-based cultures.

At times it seems that the two missions of the Kuru Family of Organizations (of which the Komku Trust is a member) contradict each other: (1) Preserve the cultural heritage and way of life of the San, and (2) Bring them into modern Botswanan life as equals. Both of these tasks are difficult, and neither have simple solutions. However, the joy found in an elder teaching a child about traditional medicines, or a community member touching a computer for the first time, make it well worth the effort. It is these joys, and the unique challenges of working with indigenous people, that have kept me here and indeed convinced me to stay beyond my Princeton in Africa fellowship for another year.

photos

2009-06-01T09:41:00.002+02:00

I know that long posts with many words and no pictures are boring, and they are also time-consuming for me to produce... So without further ado, pictures!

Wearing a wreath, emerging from a little cement bunker along the Grootlaagte - Qabo pipeline.

Birthday party for a friend's daughter, with this random guy in perfect adult-at-a-kid's-birthday-party attire: dreadlocks, fedora, enthusiastically striped shirt, and bow tie! Revelation about children's birthday parties here: they seem to be, more than anything else, an excuse for the parent(s) to have a drunken braai with their buddies.

How can I resist posting a picture of the garden? The irises finally flowered! The empty bed on the right has been planted with onions, leeks, carrots, and chinese cabbage. Carrots are coming up well, and I think the onions are too - I've never planted onions before, so I'm not too sure what to expect. The cabbage sprouted but since sprouting, half has been either eaten by bugs or demolished by my overly-playful cat. I bought a hibiscus and a flame tree sapling this weekend - very excited. My tomatoes are suffering from blossom rot, which mystifies me because I water them very regularly... But the Kalahari hath power to defeat all watering, I suppose.

Washing

2009-05-29T10:06:00.000+02:00

Warning! This entry contains nudity! (Though not in picture form.)

Last week, as I approached my neighbours' house (the same neighbours mentioned last entry) I heard the familiar sounds of washing and laughter. With a full household and no machines of convenience – such as the washers, dryers, dishwashers and showers we use at home – there is a nearly-continuous stream of washing going on. There are the tubs: plastic basins, in many colours and sizes; buckets, both metal and plastic, again in many sizes; and the big metal bathtubs, used for heavy-duty laundry and the bathing of adults. In due course, any number of household items are thrown into the tubs, covered with water, and scrubbed diligently with Sunlight soap until they are clean. Shirts, pants, underwear, socks, blankets, sheets, carpets, towels and dishcloths – cups, plates, spoons, frying pans, cast-iron metal pots that sit over the fire and get crusted with mealie-meal – small basins inside of larger ones – hands, faces, babies – everything.

Last week, however, as I rounded the corner, I saw something new: G being washed by her older sister. G is my favourite of the daughters, my garden assistant and quiet observer, who helps me sweep the floor and eats popcorn while watching movies she doesn't quite understand. She's a bright girl, and we get along well – most of my weekends are spent with G, working together in the garden. She is about twelve. Her sister, N, is maybe sixteen.

I thought, when first I noticed them, that N was just sitting on the step and holding the soap for her. After all, a twelve-year-old is perfectly capable of washing herself. But no - N was holding a bar of tough-looking soap in one hand, G's slippery, ticklish leg in the other, and vigorously scrubbing away as G shrieked with laughter. I laughed with them, and chatted a bit about their baby sister. It's not an odd thing to see my neighbours in various states of undress, and neither of us feel uncomfortable about it – but it was a surprise to me to see G being so decidedly washed by her sister.

Being washed by another person is something, in Western culture, that comes to an abrupt halt as soon as you are old enough to wash yourself. In general, we are so self-conscious of our bodies – our precious skin and fat and hair and flesh – that we rush our bathing, spending as little time as possible scrubbing and prodding and touching our embarrassing physical selves. In the past, having someone else bathe you was considered a pleasure, a luxury. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, all had servants or slaves to bathe them, to clean each crevice of flesh and then anoint the body with oils and perfumes. Sisters and mothers bathed with each other, chatting and scrubbing backs, washing hair. Public bath houses were common, or communal family baths. In many parts of the world, this still exists.

When I was in India, I went for an Ayurvedic massage in Kerala. The massage itself was a strange experience – I was laid out on an ancient wooden table in a low-ceilinged, oppressively hot room, the accumulated oil of thousands of previous massages having seeped into the wood and turned it a deep, lustrous mahogany brown. My masseuse was an old woman both shaped and coloured like a walnut, who spoke only Malayalam and gestured for me to undress and lie down on the table. She gave me a tiny g-string to wear, like the disposable underwear you get to try on swimsuits: a thin strip of fragile, paper-like cloth, tied around the waist with cheap string. She poured copious amounts of oil over me and performed her massage. Afterwards, she gestured me into a wash-room off to the side, and indicated that I should sit down on a small plastic stool. I perched on the stool, apprehensive – the whole experience had been so decidedly odd that I wasn't very relaxed at all – and without further ceremony, she began to wash me. Buckets of water splashed over my head were followed by energetic scrubbing with the ubiquitous green Medimix soap, then more water, then more scrubbing. She washed my hair with shampoo from an unmarked plastic bottle and then carefully oiled and combed it.

What did I feel? What was I thinking? I don't know. I hadn't expected to be washed. When she showed me into the room, I assumed that I would wash myself – for a moment I had the uneasy suspicion that she was going to stay and watch while I did – but I didn't realize what was really going on until the first bucket of water broke over my head. The masseuse performed the task with such impersonal efficiency that I couldn't possibly object, and she had clearly carried out this wholly unremarkable part of her job so often that there was no embarrassment, just the simple shock of a completely unfamiliar physical sensation. I hadn't been washed like that – businesslike, scrub, rinse, repeat – since I was a toddler.

Washing another person is a physical intimacy rarely allowed back at home. Why? Like cleaning ticks off of a fellow primate, it is a helpful favour, and like a massage or an embrace, it is a pleasant expression of intimacy or love. But nudity, and familiarity with our bodies entirely, is not generally accepted. It's something paradoxical to me – public breast-feeding, or having a bath in your front yard, are no problem here. Back in North America, they would be horrifying. Imagine walking back to your house and finding your neighbour in metal washtub in her front yard, splashing around with a bar of soap – with her sister scrubbing under her arm! Or being in a board meeting with a local NGO and having the chairlady whip out a breast and start feeding her child – while still addressing the rest of the board? Inconceivable. And yet, many of my friends here have been shocked and appalled by their first visit to a Western-style beach in South Africa, where men proudly strut around in Speedos and women barely cover their bits and pieces with neon string bikinis.

For further strangeness, let's consider the act of greatest physical intimacy that two adult humans engage in – sex. Surely, after the extreme intimacy of having sex, bathing each other should be a pleasant and comfortable activity? But I would venture to guess, based on study, anecdote, and first-hand experience, that most couples do not bathe each other, and would even consider it weird or awkward to do so. I mean, many people won't even have sex with the lights on. Why not? To add my voice to the chorus of complaint: we shouldn't be ashamed of our bodies, or our physical, animal selves. We don't all have to make love like porn stars, celluloid and perfect. We don't all have to be mothers like Victoria Beckham, with scheduled Caesareans and bottled formula from day one. We are the human animal, the “third chimpanzee,” dirty and flawed and mammalian – bathing and breastfeeding and hard-wired for the joy of touch. Celebrate!