The battle with the 'beest continues

After my last encounter with my evil nemesis, the snorting wildebeest, I asked the wildlife volunteer if wildebeest have been known to attack humans. She claimed this was ridiculous and even if their snorting sounded fierce, they would eventually run away.

Feeling fortified with a renewed confidence in my personal safety, I took my traditional walk along the river bed as the sun was setting. Parts of the track are sandy and don’t make the loud crunching sound that you hear when walking on the gravel trail. I was wandering along, listening to the birds, contemplating the meaning of life, when right behind me, at a range of less than 20 feet, I heard a loud snort. My heart leapt to my throat. My mind frantically searching for my “yo mamma is so ugly . . . “ wildebeest insult as I swung around to face the imminent peril . . . . . .

Running up behind me in her sneakers on the sand was the wildlife volunteer – snorting . . . . and laughing hysterically as I swung around in panic.

Okay, so maybe the wildebeest isn’t my greatest nemesis anymore. I was taking a hike through the mountains this morning and I heard a yell that sounded vaguely like “stop”. It was loud. It sounded human and it sure stopped me in my tracks as I looked around to find out who was out there. The yell came again, sounding very agitated. I scanned the hill opposite and a big, hairy baboon had climbed a tree and was staring me down.

There had been some talk the night before at dinner that they had found baboon in the enclosure of the three-

legged cheetah. The boss was extremely concerned. Baboons kill cheetah. Baboon would sure make easy pickings of a cheetah with only three legs and with nowhere to run because it can’t climb over the fence like the baboon can. There are a lot of baboons around since we saw the big mob of them cross the riverbed last week. There had also been a discussion about whether baboons were territorial. The general wisdom is that baboons are not territorial over their home range, but male baboons are territorial about their females. So I tried to explain to the yelling baboon that I wasn’t interested in his women. He kept yelling at me. Since I was all alone in the middle of the African bush and I know baboons are mean enough to kill cheetah, I thought I had better err on the side of caution. I backed off and retraced my steps back to the house.

Apologies to George Orwell

I came across my old nemesis the snorting wildebeest yesterday as I was taking a walk along the river on the road to the farm gate. This time there was no scrambling effort to run. Out of the silence of the bush came a loud, threatening snort. It was followed 10 seconds later with another louder snort, and then another. I looked up. The ‘beest was about 50 feet away staring me down. He caught me unawares. The tone of the snort seemed to suggest “those pants sure make your bum look big.

” I was taken aback by the suddenness of the insult and the steadfast way he stood his ground. Shaken, I turned on my heels and walked back towards the house. You may have foiled me this time, you snorting, foul-breathed wildebeest. But as Pepe La Pew (the great rogue romantic and philosopher) would say “those who fight and run away, they live to fight another day.” Next time I’ll be more prepared. Maybe something that starts with “yo Momma’s so ugly . . . . etc etc”. This morning over breakfast a huge troop of baboons crossed the river bed to the stand of trees just opposite the terrace. As I drank my morning coffee, I watched them comes in waves. Whole families, some of the baboons mere babes, running in from the bush to congregate in a huddle near the farmhouse. Two of the largest baboons climbed to the top of the largest tree and sat staring at us. Studying us. Marking our every movement through the house. If I didn’t know better, I would think they were plotting something. As I walked back towards my stone hut, the cheetah looked at me from his enclosure. He seemed to be pacing around the gate in an irritated fashion. He opened his jaws and beneath the low meowing I swear I heard him mutter “four legs good, two legs bad”. With three legs, no wonder he was looking nervous and confused. Or maybe I’ve just been in the bush too long.

Oryx for dinner

I was sitting in the kitchen having lunch with the other volunteers this afternoon when the owner walked in with Bully (his great big hunting dog). Bully was filthy and the boss was looking very sweaty and had blood on his clothes.

They had just come back from hunting an oryx for dinner. The owner had shot a “young female” oryx. When asked why he didn’t shoot one of the bucks he grinned and said “I don’t like young females” trying to get a rise out of the three young females at the table. But really the animal in question had just been standing at the right angle to get a good shot. He says he shot too low and Bully went racing after the wounded oryx the run it down and corner it. A second shot brought the animal down.

There is no sport hunting on the farm anymore. Most of the animals have been restocked after they stopped cattle farming in the 1960s and opened the property up as a guest house (the first in Namibia). There are some sport hunting farms that ship animals in just so Rambo types can chase them down and shoot them. A neighboring farm offers sport hunting of leopards and the boss is appalled and trying to get it stopped. The guest house proudly boasts “Three Flowers” which is an ecological rating for resorts. However, there is minimal, sustainable hunting for supplying the kitchen.

Since we’ve been eating nothing but beef for the last two weeks, it will be nice to have oryx for dinner. Hmmmmmm, oryx. It tastes just like beef, but it has a much cooler name so I can now bore people at dinner parties in California with the subtle differences. “Yes, indeed, this steak tastes somewhat like that freshly killed oryx I had once in Namibia. We sliced a bloody chunk of roast right off its haunches. I bit into the bullet and it nearly broke my teeth!

” My future plans include become an insufferable bore!

Snorting and clicking

I took a walk around the Khomas mountains yesterday before dinner. When the wind is completely still, the silence of the bush is unworldly. Birds seem to have already gone to roost at that time of the evening. The only sound is the crunching of shoes in the quartz gravel and the faint sloshing sound of my water bottle. It almost feels like you are in a sensory deprivation chamber with only two distinct sounds being fed to you.

Half way through my walk I startled some wildebeest. They made a quick, scrambling noise and then trotted ahead of me. I was just as startled as them. Then one of them decided to stand his ground. He stared at me and snorted. I waved my arms and shouted back. There was a standoff. Wildebeest won’t attack, but they are much bigger than me. He snorted. I waved and yelled some made-

up wildebeest insult about what yummy steak he would make. He didn’t seem to like that and I won the day and continued on my merry way back down the mountain. I made the mistake of inviting too many guests to the kindergarten today. They turned up all at once in a big bunch of six – two families with teenage children. The poor kiddies where outnumbered and immediately looked intimidated. The kids all have huge, forceful personalities, but they completely clammed up. These six big people who were feeling so good about themselves for visiting a kindergarten in Africa were basically saying “hey, kid, play with me”. “Hey kid, do you want some pencils.” “Hey kid, pose over here away from the window for a photo.” I looked up amongst the scrum of photographers at one point and a very overbearing German woman standing five feet away from me had her camera pointed right at me for a “candid shot of the teacher”. BLOODY EXCUSE ME!!!! If you want to take a photo of me, you have only to ask. I am not a static display of local color and that is just plain rude. I have to give the kids credit. They mostly kept their cool and were respectful, but they absolutely refused to perform a cute act. Good for them! They were having none of it and the guests didn’t seem to realize at all how miserable they were making the kids with such overwhelming fawning. At one point I had the kids sitting at a table playing with play-dough and a circle of guests totally surrounding us. I reached out for something and Patrick smacked my hand. Now, Patrick knows that hitting anyone in the class will get him physically thrown out of the room. Hitting the teacher will bring down the wrath of God! I looked into his eyes and I could see the clear message “please get rid of these people.” So I did. Patrick was a perfect gentleman the rest of the day. One of the employees had a baby yesterday (a new sister for one of the girls in my class). We first heard it was a boy and they were going to name it !ontas (or some such thing). The ! is the symbol for the clicking noise they make in the Damara language. I thought it was a bit limiting for a child in the modern world to have a name beginning with a click. I’m doing the genealogy of the families at the lodge and none of them have clicks in their names. Their names are overwhelmingly European. A couple of hours later we found out it was actually a girl and they are going to name her Geraldine. I only have two weeks left at the guest house. It makes me feel sad just thinking about leaving – although a nice spicy meal of non-German food would be very welcome right about now.

Strange tribal tatoos

The kiddies in my class like to test the sharpness of the colored pencils by poking them into cheeks. Sometimes they use they own cheeks. Sometimes they use the cheeks of their classmates who participate with gusto. If the child cries out “ouch” then the pencil is sharp enough for the coloring task at hand. If they don’t cry out, then it’s back to the sharpener. They seem to enjoy the process, so I don’t try to stop them.

My younger sister managed to tattoo her own forehead with a colored pencil when she was 7 years old. She somehow managed to jam a light blue colored pencil into her forehead with such force that the color got under the skin and even today, 30 years later, if you look hard enough you can see the blue spot.

Now, logically, it is possible that all this cheek poking with sharp pencils will occasionally break the skin. I wonder if they will end up with permanently tattooed brightly colored freckles. Maybe some anthropologist will come by in years to come and marvel at the strange tribal tattooing.

Black Mamba and a sunset the color of cotton candy

I learned something new yesterday. Poisonous refers to a toxin that is ingested. Venomous refers to a toxin that is injected. Therefore, there is no such thing as a “poisonous snake” unless you fancy eating one for dinner.

The black mamba snake just outside the guest house gate went down a treat on the game drive yesterday. It seems they are rare in these parts, so having one so close to the house is rather exciting. While it is the world’s more aggressive and venomous (not poisonous) snake, the guests seemed to be thrilled. I just happened to be on the game drive yesterday and we followed it in the safari truck for about 10 minutes snapping pictures. Over dinner last night the owner refused to believe that it was a black mamba until we all pulled out our cameras and proved it to him.

A whole family group of giraffes have wandered into the riverbed in front of the house. I was going to take a wander down there to gawk at them this evening. But, considering that’s exactly where we saw the black mamba, I think I’ll give it a miss.

I got talking to one of the guest last night who is a volunteer for the VSO (Volunteer Service Organization) at the University of Namibia where her job is to facilitate the studies of disabled students. She has been doing it for 10 months and it has been an assignment from hell. She has two quadriplegic students that she is supposed to be helping. Both of them really need 24 hour care. She has no help and doesn’t have the body strength to shift them in their seats if they complain of being uncomfortable in their wheelchairs. Plus she is taking care of other visually and hearing impaired students all of whom need constant attention. The faculty is unresponsive and doesn’t want her there. When she complains, they just ignore her. She is living in Windhoek where invariably all of her volunteer friends have been mugged at knife point during their time in the city. She had come to the guest house just to get away from it for a day.

When we got back from the game drive, I cleaned myself up and went to tend the little bar in the lapa. There was a magnificent blue and pink sunset and I was early, so I poured myself a glass of wine and wandered to the lapa lounge area that looks over the dry river bed. The eland were chomping at the grass about 15 feet away and the sky was starting to fill with the stars that on moonless nights are blinding. The air was hot and still and you could hear the scurry of other animals wandering down the river bed. The new horse volunteer came by for a chat. She just arrived from Minnesota two days ago and is all young and bright eyed and excited to be in Africa. We grabbed our flash lights and spot lighted the riverbank to see what we could see out there. The kitchen was cooking up a feast of beef stew with green beans and pasta with apple fritters for dessert and a new and more-

interesting-than-usual group of English speaking guests were starting to gather for dinner. We all sat up to 11pm in the warm Namibian night solving the world’s problems over wine and Amarula. I’m so glad I didn’t volunteer with the VSO.

Baboons don't like cameras either

It seems the baboons don’t like the wildlife surveillance cameras either. The camera near the dam was found scattered and smashed. The last photo on the memory card was a big baboon face. We’re going to have to find a new secure casing for the camera equipment.

One of the mothers of the children in my class seems to have contracted the measles. It’s either that, or some other type of allergic reaction. I’m happy to say that my mother was very diligent when it came to getting us vaccinated, so I’m in no danger. But people still die from measles here in Africa.

The boss has it in his head to have a big, Michael Jackson moonwalking competition here at the guest house on Saturday afternoon. The kiddies in my class have been bursting out with the chorus of “Beat it” the whole time I’ve been here. They take their Michael Jackson very seriously here. I have to say the Damara aren’t very exuberant people. You might say they are shy. I think getting any of them up on stage is going to be hard. They don’t want to embarrass themselves. Whatever happens, I will be right there with my trusty video camera.

Gore splattered on my camera

Since yesterday was my day off, I thought I might as well go and get some video of the cheetah and leopard feeding. Once again the guide let me sit in the passenger’s seat of the battered old safari vehicle with no doors. However, this time he parked the passenger side on the side of the cheetahs! The cheetah’s were literally 2 feet away. If I had been so inclined I could have reached out and poked them in the eye. Yan (the guide who feeds the cheetah) sat next to me on the passenger seat and fed the cheetah from there so he could give the tourists in my truck some better photo angles. I had my video camera rolling the whole time. I was so close I couldn’t pan back far enough to get a good shot.

Yan was throwing the meat into the air and the cheetahs were catching it about three feet away. I don’t know whether it was the backsplash from a meat toss, or whether it flew from the cheetah’s gnashing jaws, but a small chunk of meat flew up in the air and landed squarely on my video camera.

So, technically, my camera was splattered with gore during a cheetah feeding frenzy. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’ll be old and grey and sitting in a nursing home and the people around me will be saying “oh no, not that gore-

on-the-camera story again.” Of course by then I’ll have embellished the story to last just over an hour and it will start something like “Now listen, you young whippersnapper! You think your cat is ferocious! Let me tell you the story of when I was young and working on a safari farm in Namibia. Now we didn’t have those puny house cats you have today. Noooooo. We kept wild cheetah to play with. Some had three legs. Some had four legs. But if they had their mind set, they would rip you limb from limb like nobody’s business. One day as I was feeding the cheetah . . . . . . .” I chose not to spoil a good story with the truth like “the cheetahs on the farm are almost tame”, “I was never in any danger”, “cheetah aren’t particularly dangerous and would never attack a human.” (This last paragraph is for the sake of my Mum – just in case she is reading this and gets needlessly worried that I’m taking risks.)

The dreaded travel writers

The dreaded travel writers showed up last night. I presume they are travel writers. They are the first young, good-

looking men I have seen here in three weeks. They turned up at the bar last night looking grumpy, carrying a big camera, taking pictures of everything and not engaging in conversation no matter how hard we tried. Perhaps they were annoyed they were sent to deepest darkest Africa and not the assignment they wanted in the South of France! I found their complete grumpiness so amusing that I could hardly stop myself from laughing. They listened intently to the conversation over dinner, but not once joined in. This morning I saw them taking a photo of the food on the breakfast table. I asked them if they had taken lots of photos during their trip and one grunted “yes, 600 photos on the first day. That is our job.” Oh the intrigue. Also last night at the dinner table I found the first people who didn’t have a good time in Namibia. Everyone up until now has been waxing lyrical about the country and laughing off the various misadventures (luggage lost after it fell out the back of a safari truck, flat tires, bogging their cars in sand, etc). However the German couple last night were whining “Namibia is so expensive – for the price we are paying to stay here tonight, we could have stayed at the Ritz in Paris”. Or “it’s so hot and dry, one minute after you get out of the swimming pool you are completely dry, hot and sweaty again”, “the dry air makes my skin go horrible and my hair like straw”. Yes, all these things are true, but THIS IS AFRICA!!!! What on earth did they expect? Today is my “day off”. It is Sunday so there is no school. I missed my opportunity to take a morning hike. You have to plan to be back inside by 11am at the very latest, otherwise it is just too hot and unpleasant. Maybe I’ll take a walk to the dam for sunset instead and see if I can spot the rhino. Rhino tracks for the big male were spotted on the game drive yesterday, so he’s somewhere nearby.

A day in the life of the Guest House

I seem to have settled into the daily routine here at the guest house.

At 7:

30am we have breakfast on the terrace overlooking the dry river bed. If there are too many guests, the volunteers eat in the kitchen. The cooks at the guest house make their own german brown bread and it has enough fiber to unblock a drain! I tend to slather it with gobs of butter to make it palatable. I’m sure the bread is good for me, but I seem to be eating my own body weight in butter. They serve breakfast continental style with cold meat and granola and yoghurt. Sometimes the eland or wildebeest will wander past during breakfast. At 9:30 I head towards the school. The employee housing is just 100 meters from my room. I bought a couple of Preschool teaching books when I was in Windhoek last week. Since I only have four students, I just trace the lessons through the paper four times. At 10am the kiddies turn up. They give me a big grin and a big hug and look like they are ever-so pleased to be in school. That sentiment doesn’t necessarily last very long. Trying to explain the lessons to them is difficult. I’m not sure if they are getting it at all. I plough along regardless. We got to the letter “O” today, but it probably was just an excuse for them to color in an Ostrich. By 1pm the school is finished. I head to the kitchen for lunch of more brown bread with gobs of butter and cold meat. I like eating in the kitchen away from the guests. The wildlife volunteer is usually there and we have a chat and I read the “African Geographic Magazine”. By 2pm it feels like an oven outside. The air is extremely dry and the sun extremely bright. All the staff go home for a few hours. Only the crazy pale German tourists without any common sense decide to sit by the pool and get a tan. I took a dip in the pool once the first week I was here. It was surprising cold. For a few hours I stay in my stone hut reading a book, taking a nap, working on my projects and my blog. I try to make a habit of taking a walk at 6 o’clock as the sun goes down. Today it’s raining, so I’m just going to sit tight. Strangely the rain screws up my internet broadband reception. Until the clouds clear, I can’t get a signal. At 7:30pm I go and tend bar. There are only a maximum of 20 guests per night, and there are three of us to help at the bar, so it isn’t very strenuous. Usually I just pour myself a glass of wine and chat to the guests, make a couple of gin and tonics, pour a few beers. It’s the same conversations every night “did you go to the cheetah feeding? How was that? Did you go on the game drive? What animals did you see? Have you been to Etosha yet?” (Etosha is the big game park in Namibia and the main tourist draw. I have yet to find a tourist who hasn’t been to Etosha or isn’t planning on going to Etosha.) At 8pm is dinner. All the guests sit around a big table in the dry-grass roofed lapa area. It’s always red meat – usually game like kudu, wildebeest or oryx. The table is lit with hurricane lanterns and the walls are decorated with a big zebra skin and animal skulls and various “African themed” ornaments. Sometimes the guests are quite pleasant (when you can find one that doesn’t mind speaking English). Other nights are painful where the guests just don’t want to talk or seem to have nothing to say to each other. The owner has been doing the same dinner service every night for 20 years. He knows how to coax a conversation out of just about anyone. It helps that he speaks five languages. With any luck the guest are finished by about 10pm. I help clear up and take the dishes to the kitchen, then I stagger back to my room and go to sleep.

Where is my Indiana Jones hat when I need it

I missed the baboons! It seems baboons came to frollick outside the school yesterday. The kiddies tried to tell me and, because I don’t understand a word they say, I told them to sit down and do their work.

Poor Bully (the great big dog) got attacked by elands last night. Elands have long horns and Bully decided to pick a fight with one of them as it came walking through the yard. It seems being a bully really doesn’t pay off!

Really there is nothing around here that will hurt you unless you pick a fight with it. Most of the animals will defend themselves. When I go walking I wear by clodhopping boots so that any creatures will hear me a mile away and they won’t think I’ve snuck up on them.

The owner told me of a lost archaeological site somewhere on the farm. There is a game that is played all around Africa that is usually made out of wood with cups carved into it. There are two lines of 8 cups running parallel. You take pebbles and move the pebbles from one cup to the next. I’m not sure of the rules, but it is very strategic. Each country has a different name for the game.

Somewhere along the riverbed these game cups have been carved into the stone. Someone found then about 20 years ago and said there were so many that they called the site “little Las Vegas”. They could never find the site again. Maybe the sands had shifted along the river bed to cover it up. It might be fun to go and look for it.

The owner also gave me a document on “human development” that was written by a past volunteer which shows how the development of the farm, the new (relative) prosperity and the use of technology by the farm workers has effected their culture. One point was that the introduction of television has made it so the younger generation is no longer taught the traditional Damara games. I seem to have a captive audience with the kiddies. Maybe I’ll see if I can get one of the older folks to help me reintroduce these games.

The little storyteller

Denzel’s mother came to class yesterday. She has a little baby called Valentina who is about 3 months ago. A real cutie. It seems that Denzel is a little storyteller. A bit like my nephew, Oliver. He is always telling long stories with a big grin on his face. Obviously I didn’t understand Denzel. I thought it was just baby babbling. It was great fun to have his mother translate for me. She said he came home from the afternoon tracking cheetah by the river and told her what fun he had had and how he had fallen in the water. I’m happy to hear the kiddies had as much fun as I did.

Stoffle (the assistant manager) got stung by a wasp this afternoon. We rummage through three different first aid kits that are kept on the farm trying desperately to find an antihistamine. No such luck. His whole neck has swollen up in lumps. Since we are 20kms from the road and 50kms from the nearest medical help, we can only hope that whatever reaction he is having is self-

limiting. If it does get worse, there are plenty of farm vehicles to take him into town. He seems to be okay now. I found out what the enormous scars on the owner’s dog are from. The dog is huge – about the size of a St. Bernard. I guess it’s a hunting dog and is a mixed breed of some sort. Apparently he got in a fight with a warthog. The warthog was probably half his size, but the tusks did quite a bit of damage. But they are old scars and “Bully” is actually a total sweety. That’s a good thing considering he’s probably bigger than me. I was worried that all these late dinners of wildebeest steak and oryx ragu were going to make me fat. Not so. I seem to be disappearing with the old Africa diet. It works every time.

Photo opportunity caring

I’m not sure I approve of “photo opportunity caring”. Over dinner last night a German couple asked if they could come and visit the kindergarten. So this morning I took them to the school just before class started and introduced them to the kids as they arrived. The owner has a donation jar for the kindergarten in the office near where people pay their bill. From what I’ve heard there is more than $1,

000 in the fund but the school has nothing but one functional, small table and another small table that is so rickety it falls over whenever a kid leans on it the wrong way. The chairs are children’s safari fold-up chairs that are ripped and falling apart. There is a filthy bed mattress in the corner of the room where the children can take a nap. I think my mission is going to be to wrestle some of that donation money away from the owner and force him to buy some proper furniture. Anyway, the German couple came by, acted concerned, hugged the children, took some photos and then went away with the promise to contribute to the kindergarten fund. It felt strangely like I was pimping out the kids for donation money. “Give these folks a hug and we’ll get new furniture.” But am I any better? I wander into the kids lives on my big Namibian adventure, make a small effort to teach them something, and then disappear from their lives. There is something very wrong with Patrick. I have been told he has tested HIV negative even though both his parents are HIV positive. However, he has strange episodes in class where he will grab his chest, get very glassy-eyed and look like he’s going to pass out. He also has a chronic cough. The first time this happened I thought he was going to keel over dead right in front of me and I sent him home to his mother. His mother sent him right back to school. Today it happened again and I got him to lay down for half an hour and it seemed to pass. Then he didn’t eat any lunch. Poor kid. I’m going to have to make sure this isn’t being ignored by his mother.

School Photo

Cheetah tracking

I went cheetah tracking with the kiddies as the sun went down last night. I was sitting outside my door writing a couple of e-

mails and updating my blog around 6 o’clock. I don’t get any broadband connection inside my stone hut so I have to sit outside. During the day the sun is so strong I can’t see the screen, so the only chance I get to work on the internet is late in the afternoon. All seven children from my class came running up to me as I sat outside my hut saying what I thought was “teacher, teacher, teacher”, but I soon realized they were really saying “cheetah, cheetah, cheetah”. I looked up and saw a cheetah sitting about 15 meters away from my door, right amongst the guest rooms and outside the visitors center. We all knew it was likely to be the tame three-legged cheetah out for a walk with Stoffle (the assistant manager at the guest house), but it seemed like a fun idea to track the cheetah. So I grabbed my video camera and got the children to follow the cheetah’s tracks down towards the riverbed. There had been a couple of days of rain, so there was quite a bit of water in the river. The children took off their shoes and followed the “rhino tracks” wading up the river to the big pond that lies at the bottom of the small rock plateau where the main guest house sits. The kids had a metal fish trap and were puddling around trying to catch me a fish. It was so much fun. I got some great video of the ragamuffin bunch of Herero kids playing in the water and climbing on the rocks. It’s beautiful down on the river bed. There was a full moon rising and a bunch of animals swaggering by for a drink. Then poor little Denzel, the smallest of the group, tripped and fell into the water. He was shivering badly, and looked so sad. I didn’t really think he was in danger of hypothermia (considering it was 27 degrees C), but I thought I had better get him home. I took the poor chap by the hand and we all wandered back down the river bed, past the three-legged cheetah enclosure (just so we could say we found him) and home in time for supper. At dinner I heard the owner tell the same story for the 5th time. The wildlife volunteer had thought she heard lions one night, but it turns out that the male ostrich can make a sound very similar to the roar of a lion. The story gets longer and more involved each time it’s told – all about the hapless wildlife volunteer who couldn’t tell a bird from a lion. I did my laundry today. The air is so dry that my clothes were bone dry in three hours while hanging in my closet in a dark room. It’s a good thing I didn’t bother to bring a hair dryer. Ten minutes in the sun does the trick.

Saturday school

It appears the rhino tracking cameras are not rhino proof. The wildlife volunteer went to change the batteries in the camera at the far end of the farm and found that it had been broken off its post and stomped into the ground. There were rhino tracks all around and leading up to the camera, but the camera didn’t capture anything before it got stomped. The batteries were probably already dead. These rhinos sure are camera shy!

I held a Saturday class at the school today. I honestly didn’t think anyone would turn up, but instead I got three recent graduates as well as my four little students. The three older kids go to school in Windhoek and come back to the farm for weekends. Their photos and work (with their names written on them) is still hanging on the walls of the kindergarten. I found (typical for Africa) that they could recite their ABCs with great confidence but when you put a letter in front of them, they couldn’t tell you what it was. Or when you asked them to write a letter, they were lost. So that’s something I can teach them.

I need to get working on the genealogy for the local Damara people who work on the farm. A former volunteer has it all in an excel spreadsheet, but I need to transfer it into a “Family Tree Maker” program that is only in German. Justina (who works in the kitchen) will be helping me with adding the details of education and what they died of. Unfortunately, I was with the owner when he asked Justina to help me with it. She was rolling her eyes. Obviously she has been through this process before - every time a new volunteer shows up or the boss gets some idea in his head. I’m going to have to find a way to get the information in a less formal way. But Justina is very friendly. She told me she prefers to be known by her hip hop name – Justified!

However, Justina might be pissed off with me today. She came to the school this morning to enroll the terrorizing toddler who breaks things. He is far too young. I would guess around 12 – 14 months. The owner made it perfectly clear that I am not to act as a babysitter and shouldn’t accept anything that would stop me from actually teaching the kids something. So I turned her away.

I was very annoyed yesterday when Vivian (a student who has the same mother as the terrorizing toddler) told me that her mother had instructed her to wait at the school until she came to pick her up (or I guessed that’s what she told me – it’s hard when you have to communicate with a couple of shared words “Vivian mummy here” and a lot of hand signals). I waited for an hour and a half before I sent her home with another student. The community is very very small – maybe 30 people. I know she would be looked after.

Other than that, life goes on at the guest house. The last couple of days there has been zero English spoken around the dinner table. I suppose my German is improving, but I was very happy to find a couple of young Dutch people at the bar to chat with after dinner.

The guesthouse is near Windhoek, so it is usually the first or last stop for people going to or from the airport. The “just arrived” people are usually very excited but jetlagged. The “just leaving” people are usually waxing lyrical about Namibia. I haven’t heard anyone yet complain about having a miserable time in Namibia and that’s saying something considering how much Germans like to complain.

Rhino Tracking

I made my first attempt at rhino tracking yesterday. The rhinos were let loose about two years ago and are rarely seen, but they have set up motion-

activated cameras near the dam where they do occasionally see rhino tracks. I went with the wildlife volunteer to change the batteries in the camera and poke around the water’s edge for tracks. In all honesty, that will probably be the full extent of my “rhino tracking” during my time here. She gave me an impromptu lesson on wildlife tracks and poo identification. The guides she is teaching aren’t taking much interest, so she is happy to have someone who listens to her. I’ll be an expert before too long! We’re still having luminous thunder storms in the afternoons, so the air was lovely and cool at the dam. We saw a herd of wildebeest drinking at the water’s edge but they ran away as soon as they saw us. If you want to see the wildlife wandering in for a drink in the late afternoon, you really have to walk in, stake yourself a spot under a tree and don’t move. The lovely thing about being on a private guest farm is that you are very likely to be alone by the waterhole until 6:30pm. At 6:30 the “evening game drive” safari truck comes by with a load of tourists and a cooler full of beer for a sundowner. But that’s a good thing! The guides are my friends now and will happily provide me with a beer and a ride home. I went on the 7am “mountain game drive” yesterday. Wow! It was beautiful but STEEP!!! It felt like being on a bumpy roller coaster and you had to hang on for dear life on top of the totally exposed, rickety safari truck. I love the total disregard for safety in Africa. It’s such a change from the American nanny-state. There is a very odd species of mountain zebra up there somewhere, but we weren’t lucky enough to see them that day. I’ll have to try again. I went for a ride into Windhoek yesterday with the owner so I could pick up a broadband internet modem. There is no other (cheap) way for me to get off the farm other than catching a ride with the weekly shopping trip. It was so funny. A little more than a week ago I was a downtown San Francisco dweller – all sophisticated and urbane. This week I caught a lift in a dusty old Landrover into Windhoek and was walking around the mall wearing my farm clothes and my big hat, looking (and feeling) like a hick that had just blown in from the bush. There are so many Germans here, I can pass for a local and my accent comes across as “English South African”. I was talking to the guesthouse owner about the children at the kindergarten. For the first few days they were a bit difficult to handle, but now we have an understanding and I actually got them to complete TWO written tasks today. The trick is to hide the written task inside a coloring-in exercise. Patrick and Patricia are twins. They were born early and I think Patrick has some learning difficulties. Patricia is a sweet, very smart girl whose teeth are rotting out of her mouth at age 5. Their mother is HIV positive and doesn’t take much care of them and their father died of AIDS earlier this year. Patrick and Patricia were tested for HIV and they both are negative. The father was a loyal employee for many years, but now that he is gone, the mother and the two kids need to vacate the employee housing. The owner has given them six months to find a new situation and to get settled by the beginning of the new school term in January. Poor Patrick and Patricia. I wonder if it’s really possible to dig themselves out of such a crappy start in life. I hope so. I intend to arm them with their ABCs! I’m sure that will come in handy. Anyway, I finally got my internet connection set up today. It’s slow (literally it is 265kps – that’s kilobits!!). I’m finally up and running (well, maybe not “running”, maybe up and crawling), so I will try and post to this blog every couple of days. It took me three hours of frustration before I realized that my stone hut walls are blocking the signal, so I have to go outside to get online.