#11 Elephant Adventures

Howdy! Welcome all, it is good be be back writing and thinking about all of you again. Before you read on, I need to write a general disclaimer:

All events described below that would send a hypothetical Peace Corps volunteer home for breaking “rules” are strictly fictional and have no factual basis. Please do not send the person (not me) who partook in the below events back home to the States. Family and friends, please disregard.

As usual, I will start with my work update. The big news, for me, is that after realizing I have spent an entire year weighing babies and not doing much else, I have mostly given up on working at the clinic. Talking with my Peace Corps supervisors at the Mid-Service Training we had a few weeks ago, they finally told me as long as I am working for the community that is alright with them. That comment opened the doors for me to really broaden my horizons in the community. I now am splitting my time between the Social Workers’ office, the pharmacy, the school, and the craft shop. I still go to the clinic, but only twice a week. After trying and trying I finally gave up on working with clinic staff to do any projects. I’ve found other people here in the village that are passionate about their work and want to be busy, so I’ve latched on to them instead.

Exciting things are afoot even in the few weeks since I have gotten back from the training. A small amount of funding arrived to help us start a Woodworking Club at the junior secondary school (7^th-10^th grade). If students fail their exams at the end of 10^th grade they don’t go on to 11^th. There is already a massive unemployment problem in Botswana (23%), so you can imagine what life is like as a 17y/o who just failed out of school; living at home, no money or job, no plans or hope on the horizon. Sit there for a second and really imagine it: you wake up in your parent’s house with no hope for a job, nothing to do, and little to no resources for further education or support. Our training aims to show the youth some other opportunities that are available, specifically woodworking related, and some life skills that come with being a woodworker. We hope to start this week, and cycle through different kids every two months or so.

The training is through the craft shop; Kenny and I will teach the woodworking, and the Craft Shop’s name will be all over it. We hope to host a big exhibition for student woodworking and artwork in a few months time. Otherwise work at the craft shop has been great. We are gearing up for a few Christmas markets in the big city that take place in December. Recently our orders have gone through the roof, so we are incredibly behind on making everything.

On a side note, it is hilarious to me that I am learning so much about small business and how to run a small business. Last week another Peace Corps volunteer came to my village to give a training on small business development, and had a rapt audience for well over two hours. While I don’t see myself going into ‘business’ as a career, it was incredible to watch how empowered people felt after being taught some ways to get their ideas off the ground. Back home I barely know anyone close to me who has had their own business or been in the business world, so learning about it is pretty interesting. Anywho, back to the craft shop. My parenting skills are continuing to evolve as we struggle to make intricate small crafts and do office work with a rampaging 2.5 year old destroying the place. He doesn’t really take naps anymore, which is so, so terrific for everyone involved. Parenting is a much different game when you don’t have the resources that we are all used to back home. Cribs are not a thing here, daycare is for 3.5y/o and up, sugar is free flowing to most kids, etc. Most days I come home looking like I just spent the day with a 2.5y/o in the blazing heat in a wood shop: sweaty, covered in wooddust, marker, pen, trudging gait, you name it.

Just after I posted my last update a few volunteers from close by came to my village to attend the Nkashi Classic and celebrate the 4^th of July. For the 4^th we made cheeseburgers and fries. We even found some marshmallow like objects and “graham crackers” to make s’mores afterwards! We had a fun day hanging out and relaxing together, as opposed to the usual hanging out and relaxing alone. The Nkashi Classic is an annual canoe race that is hosted by the Nkashi Wild Bird Trust, a South African organization that has recently established a center near here in Beetsha village. There are several rounds of prelims all around the Delta, and then this year the finals were hosted here. The event was huge—I think I saw almost everyone that I know here in Seronga there—and was much different than most Botswana activities I have seen so far. It was almost like River City Days, the Anderson Center’s Book Fair, or something of that nature. There were tons of free things for kids to do, stalls selling things, stalls advertising things, plenty of food, etc. It was super fun to watch the races, which were set up as time trials, wander around the event, and talk to people I only know in a work context.

I spent two weeks traveling down to the aforementioned Mid-Service Training and then with my friends after. All in all it was very nice to see the other volunteers, catch up with everyone, and spend time away from home. I ate a ton of good food, saw a movie in a movie theater (!), went lap swimming (!!), had some drinks, went on a game drive, crushed my friends in hearts, and collected a ton of new books. I have plenty of funny little stories from this time, but I’ll save them to tell you over a drink when I’m back home.

Alright on to the main event: funny oddball stories! This is my favorite part of these posts, so please excuse me if this gets a little long.

First off: it is currently Elephant Season here. I have had a slew of elephant interactions, both friendly and unfriendly. During the dry winter (~May to September) all animals come to the river to drink. At other times of the year there is enough water out in the bush, but now the elephants come in the evening, drink and bathe at night, and go back early in the morning. It is common to see them if you are driving in the early morning or at night, which is unavoidable due to the transportation situation here. I’ve seen, both close up and far away, a lot of elephants in the last few weeks. How cool! Here are a couple of the fun stories:

A few weeks ago I was on my way back from the shopping village, riding in the back of a Dyna type vehicle. We don’t have many trucks like this back in the US, but if you look up “Toyota Dyna truck” images will come up for you. I was stranded in the shopping village, and this was my only option to get back home. 19 of us loaded into the truck: two people up front with the driver and 17 of us in the back along with a mountain of luggage. We were so packed in that no one could move. I was surrounded on all sides by bodies, luggage, plastic bags full of groceries, and little kids. I absolutely could not move; no one could, which slightly helped to keep us from banging around but mostly just hurt every part of my body. The trip home really varies in time depending on the vehicle. Getting to the shopping village a few days earlier took just over one hour, but this trip in the back of the truck ended up being a little more than four hours. About halfway though, we stopped for a general bathroom break. It was just after dusk, and only possible to see about 100 yards away. We were all stretching and going to the bathroom when one of the older women riding with us said “Bona! Ditlou.” (Look! Elephants.) They were still pretty far away, but it was definitely possible to see some large dark shapes that were headed roughly in our direction. Keep in mind, this is after two hours of sitting in such an uncomfortable position that five full days later I still had a sore ass and bruises covering my back. All of a sudden, I’m aware of the driver revving the engine and some of the passengers pushing the back of the truck. Lightbulb moment, we were stuck! Luckily, before I could get up, we had gotten out of the deep sand and moved forward to hard gravel. People piled into the back and the driver took off. It happened so quickly I didn’t even have time to be scared. A few hours later we finally rolled in the village, and I walked home. What a journey.

Second fun story is about my friend Phoebe, who is the closest volunteer to me. We are both in the Eastern Okavango, and quite a ways away from other volunteers. She lives in an even smaller village than I do, and her house is only a few dozen yards from the water. She sent me a picture the other day of some elephants...from her bedroom window! She even heard later that her host mother had woken up in the middle of the night and discovered elephants trying to break down the gate to get into their plot. We are really living rurally up here. These animal interactions are pretty common!

Last time I wrote a bit about the type of wood we use for the crafts and how Kenny goes to the bush to collect it. I was lucky enough to go with him last time, and it turned out to be a bit of an adventure. We left in the middle of the afternoon with three other guys in a small pickup truck: two people in the cab, three of us sitting in the bed in the back. We drove a few minutes down the road, and then turned into the bush. The track leading through the bush quickly shrank, leaving the three of us in the back of the truck dodging thorny acacia branches that threatened to sweep us clear out of the back. We drove through several different types of vegetation that I don’t see in the village; I really wanted to look around but those darned Acacia branches were not going anywhere, so looking forward (so I could dodge) was really my only option. The driver, Debois (no relation to W.E.B.), was having fun behind the wheel, so we were really movin’ down this track (anything resembling a road was left behind far earlier).

A few kilometers later, Botutu, who is sitting in the back with Kenny and I, points and yells “Ditlou! A re!” (Elephants! Let’s go, drive!). There was a mama elephant and her calf, running away from us as we sputtered through the bush. I only got to see the back of them, as they were running away, and it was a quick glimpse at that. But man! Seeing elephants from the inside of a safari vehicle with a trained guide is a whole world different than seeing them from the bed of a small Toyota Hi-lux with a group of hollering fellas on a Friday afternoon in the bush. There was no danger at that point, as they were headed away from us.

One of the guys with us, OB, lives deep in the bush where he operates a large farm and raises cattle. We took a short break at his house, which was on the way to our destination. OB pointed out into his plowing field and told us he had killed an elephant a few days ago; that big mound we could see was the partially burnt carcass. We tromped out to see it, and he told us the rest of the story: he woke up in the middle of the night to a juvenile elephant harassing his horses and trying to break through the fence into his house. He had a rifle, and in defense of himself and his horses he shot the elephant. Elephants are amazing animals, but they can cause incredible damage to fields and houses, and commonly maim and kill people. There are multiple NGOs that work to mitigate the elephant-human-conflict here, but when an elephant is threatening you or your things, all thoughts of conservation fly out the window. OB took the tusks to the Wildlife Office after the elephant was dead, to prevent any claims of poaching. We spent a while looking at the carcass, seeing how big it was (a juvenile, but would have been twice my height!), taking the tail hair to make bracelets, and tentatively poking everything with our feet. We continued on, collected two massive logs from a dead tree a few kilometers farther out in the bush, and loaded everything up. I won’t go into too many details, I’ll just let you imagine us harvesting a big Mukwa tree 10 kilometers out in the middle of nowhere. After we loaded up the logs, found some firewood for Debois’ mother, and strapped everything down, the truck’s suspension was fully bottomed out. Still, we didn’t have a choice, so we all piled in, with three of us sitting on top of the logs in the bed. We had to stop multiple times before the three of us found a safe place to sit, as we were still bumping and swerving and ducking along through the bush.

A few minutes after getting settled we noticed that there were elephant tracks on top of our tire marks from earlier. Huh. Less than a minute later, we saw ‘em: a group of 10-15 elephants, with several calves, pretty much directly in front of us. Reversing was out of the question (no reverse gear in the truck anyway), and trying to drive off of the track was not tenable. The guys with me in the back started yelling, all in Setswana, “Let’s go!” and “Hurry up...faster, faster!” to Debois, the driver. The elephants being just a couple dozen meters from the track, it seemed, to us and the them, that we were driving straight at them.

This is when all hell broke loose. The elephants turned towards us, started trumpeting, ushered their babies away from us. Debois has now absolutely floored it to try to get past them, so we are flying. Just about as we started to pass them—they were at three a’clock now—they started to charge towards us. To be completely honest, I only saw bits and pieces of this because we DUCK were still DUCK dodging branches in the back DUCK!, and holding on for dear life so we weren’t thrown from the truck. Torn between trying to look out for branches and wanting to look at the elephants to make sure we were’t going to, you know, get trampled and die, I settled for attempting to do both. After a few minutes, it seemed we were safely past the herd; we couldn’t see or hear them anymore. Silence settled over us as we all took in what had just happened. The quiet didn’t last long before we all started talking, about how certain members of the group (Kenny) had almost wet themselves, how close it was, etc. We slowed down a bit, to the point where it was much more manageable to dodge and weave around the branches that had yet to give up their decapitation attempts.

We made it all the way back home, although not without seeing more elephants that had just crossed the main road on the way to the river. It was quite the crazy experience, and even though it all happened in the evening I was so amped up I couldn’t sleep until late that night.

My 10y/o host brother Tony has come up with an exciting new board game that we play almost every night. If you can remember the game Chutes and Ladders, it is in that realm, but instead of a board we have a piece of paper, and instead of using a die to determine how far you go, the metric is flicking your pen as far as you can without drawing outside of the lines. Hard to describe honestly, as it is clearly invented by a 10y/o. Rules are optional, and games can be 10 minutes or 30 minutes. More experience for my parenting resume.

We had the first rain of the season last week! Very very exciting. The temperature dropped, we had to sit inside, and it was amazing. Since then it has been Hot, Hot, and Hotter for a week, but still! It was something.

Off the boring topics, and back into the real exciting stuff: books! I read what I am cautiously proclaiming to be my favorite book ever in July: The Brothers K by David James Duncan. It is a modern rewrite of The Brothers Karamazov, set in the Pacific Northwest. It combines baseball, philosophy, travel...all matter of things. I really enjoyed it, and would highly recommend. I followed this up with A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. A singularly brutal, emotionally draining book, with what may be the best writing I have ever read. I couldn’t put it down to the point of reading from 8am-1pm without moving one day. A strong content warning is needed however, as from beginning to end it is an exploration of how childhood abuse manifests in adults.

Movie wise, I have have been off to the races recently (I’ve watched 72 since the last blog post, to be exact. Wowza). Topping the list we have Anora, Conclave, and In Bruges. I’m slowly working my way through the recommendation list I have from other people, but goodness it is hard to find some of these movies now without paying for several different services.

It has, most unfortunately, gotten hot again. I was really enjoying the winter here, which was almost like a late October day back home. Now however, is more like a hot July day...every day. I really miss the cold, and winter in particular. I’m not sure why anyone would ever live in the Southern US so that they didn’t have to deal with the seasons...being cold and wearing warm clothes is one of the things that I miss the most while being here. Snow! My goodness. I’ll be whole again after I’ve thrown a snowball.

That being said, it is back to sitting-in-my-undies-under-the-fan time. Good for reading and napping, bad for basically everything else.

Thanks for reading everyone! Hope you had some fun hearing about my life here. I’m just about to put a bunch of pictures over in the picture tab, so be sure to check out some of those. A few will match the adventures you just read about. As usual, sending all my love to all of you across the world. Have a fantastic November!

Nick