Monday, July 28, 2008

216: Lucy’s Annual Elephant Fix

Every year I feel a desperate craving to head north and look for elephants. Usually that means going to Etosha National Park, Namibia’s largest (the size of Belgium), for the weekend. It is best to go between June and October after the rains have ended but before the summer heat sets in, as this means you can sit comfortably in your car by the watering holes where the animals gather to drink. It’s still hit or miss in terms of what you will see, but chances are that in two days, you’ll see a lot.

Bernd wanted to see giraffe, hyenas, and owls (his favorite bird), and Keitometsi, our Zimbabwean “second daughter” who has been living with us for the past few months, was hankering for lions and vultures. The latter comes from last year when Keito and Elsita lived together to do vulture-research at Namibia’s Rare and Endangered Species Trust (which is how Keito came to join the family). We decided to camp just outside the park to save money, and took off from work on Friday and Monday in order to make the most of the weekend. Bernd was in charge of the camping gear, I took responsibility for the food, and we told Keito that she was responsible for everything else.


When we left Windhoek on Friday morning, we were already feeling great. Sergio had flown into Namibia earlier in the week for a three day visit – he is now a full-fledged Marine, private first-class -- and looks great. As much as military life scares us, Boot Camp made Sergio into a man, brimming with knowledge and self-confidence. Every minute with him was precious, and we are swelling with parental pride. Sergio has two more bouts of training before he gets shipped overseas, so we are determined not to start worrying yet. We shall keep you posted as soon as we get his new address, as well as other information. (Above is a photo of Sergio - taken by Elsita, who was able to attend his graduation from Boot Camp.)

Driving from Windhoek to Etosha takes 5 to 6 hours, depending on which entrance you use. We arrived mid-afternoon, still in time for our first self-drive visit into the park. Our highlights were about 30 giraffe, seven species of antelope, lots of zebra and wildebeest, and a field of 200 banded mongoose -- but no elephants. The next morning it was the same and Keito started getting nervous. We teased her that, being responsible for everything else meant that she had to produce elephants or else we wouldn’t guarantee dinner. Finally, by mid-afternoon two lone bulls came forward and Keito breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that she wouldn’t have to starve. We counted two more elephant bulls by the late afternoon but had stopped counting giraffe by then – we had surpassed sixty. Then came some bonus animals: two hyenas, a close encounter with a lilac-breasted roller, and a white-headed vulture that is quite rare in Namibia and never before seen by Keito. Unlike most vultures, this one is beautiful, with a slim red and blue bill and pink face and legs.


Shortly after our outdoor dinner Keito went to sleep, but Bernd and I checked out the lamp-lit water-hole at the far side of our camp. My eyes caught a large fluttering in a distant tree. I hoped it would be an owl, and sure enough – suddenly it lifted off in our direction and landed just to the right of the watering hole. Eleven species of owls occur in Namibia, and this was the biggest (almost two feet in height): the giant eagle owl, B. Lateus, a large gray bird with distinctive pink eyelids and dark brown eyes and ear tufts, not always raised. The male voice consists of a series of grunts while the females and young make a long, drawn out whistle that sometimes can be heard all night. Their favorite prey is hedgehog, which is eaten after peeling off and discarding the skin. Much as we hoped to witness the excitement of an owl-kill, we thought that something a little less gruesome would be preferable. But anyway, we sat and waited.

In the wildlife films you see on TV, the cameramen make you think that high-drama occurs every few minutes or so. In real life, we can attest that this is not so. After an hour, I became convinced we were watching a still life. Nothing moved – not the owl, not us, and not anything else. Then suddenly, in complete silence, the owl swooped down to the grass and started picking at something by its feet. Had it caught a mouse? A giant frog? We couldn’t tell, but in 30 seconds the meal was clearly over, and the still life returned.
We went to bed satisfied, only to be woken at 3 a.m. by a cacophony of deep-throated roars. If the owners of the campsite hadn’t told us that a protective fence surrounded us, I would have been convinced that the lions’ roars were just outside our tent. Sleep became illusive, so we just lay in our sleeping bags and enjoyed the concert. By sunrise the quiet returned, and we set off once again for the watering holes in Etosha Park. What would we find on this day?


Last week I wrote you about the rock-dassies in our backyard. Although these are the elephants’ closest living relatives, it is a distant relationship – as the evolution of both went separate ways about 6 million years ago. What ties the two animals together is that both animals do not ruminate (chew the curd). The organ they use to digest the huge amount of plant material they eat is not a true stomach, but part of the large intestine, namely the caecum (in humans, the appendix). One consequence of this system is that they are very inefficient eaters and must feed up to 16 hours a day to extract sufficient nutrients. This places a tremendous burden or their teeth, but in the case of elephants each molar-tooth is only expected to last a few years. As the teeth wear out and flake off, they are replaced from behind by a next set. The new teeth are always larger, so tooth size keeps pace with the expanding jaw. (I don’t know if this works the same way with dassies, but they don’t live as long, either.)

The evolution of elephants goes back more than 70 million years ago. It belongs to the order Proboscidea, of which just one family – the Elephantidae – is extant today. Etosha’s elephants are among the largest in Africa, the tallest measuring up to 4 meters (12 and a half feet) at the shoulder. Adult bulls have a mass of between 5500 and 6000 kg (12,100 – 13,200 pounds), while the cows measure about two-thirds that weight. Their tusks, on the other hand, are smaller than those of elephants elsewhere in Africa. This is probably due to breakages resulting from mineral deficiencies in their diet and genetic defects. The fact that Etosha’s elephants have smaller tusks is a distinct advantage, insofar as they are less likely to fall prey to ivory poachers.

Where a supply of clean, sweet water is normally an essential habitat requirement for elephants, in Etosha they have adapted to the water with its high salt content, the salinity of which sometimes exceeds that of seawater. Elephants are both browsers and grazers. During the rainy season, Etosha’s elephants will vacate the park and head into other areas of the country, causing much damage to fences and crops. Namibia’s wildlife service has developed a policy of compensating local farmers to the north and east of the park for damage these roaming pachyderms leave in their wake, which is how the government keeps the local farmers from killing these national treasures. By contrast, the elephants that head west for the desert during the rainy season earn back this money for the government in tourist dollars, as Namibia is the only place in the world where you can see elephants amidst sand dunes.*

So, off we went: The first water-hole we visited was dead as a doornail.
The second water-hole was the same, save for a Marshal Eagle and an assortment of wildebeest, springbok and black-faced impala in the distance. The third water-hole, once again, was empty. Just as we started back to the campsite, however, a beautiful oryx crossed our path, and then we hit a zebra crossing – literally: forty of these animals walking single file across the road, with babies in between, heading for the watering hole behind us. I looked back to watch them go. Omigod: A large gray hump was moving, as well. And then another and another: Elephants! Lots of them!

As if by magic, now the water-hole suddenly boasted about a hundred animals. They came from all sides: a herd of thirty female elephants with babies, about forty antelope of various kinds and finally, all the zebra whose fortuitous encounter caused us to hang a U-turn to see this teeming display of African wildlife. We stayed about an hour and a half, soaking it all in. Later in the day we came across another twenty elephants bathing in a deep pool of water and having a glorious time.

Our lives have been blessed in so many ways. Thirty years ago, this week, Bernd and I met each other while on a camping trip to Iceland. This weekend felt like a most fitting celebration.


* Reference: Notes on Nature by Amy SchoemanMacmillan (Windhoek Namibia, Gamsberg Macmillan, 2002)

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

215: Survival in African Context


Here are three tales of survival – techno-logical, human and animal. The first is frustrating, the second is complex, and the third one will make you smile.

I. Survival in the age of Technology: Please forgive my lack of communication over the last few weeks. In late June my laptop crashed in Kenya, along with all the data I needed for that trip. Awful as that was, I wasn’t too worried about losing all my other data because I had dutifully backed up most of my hard-drive on the so-called “Master Server” at work. Unfortunately, just as I returned to Namibia my very-pregnant colleague placed the first draft of a manual we had been writing onto this same “Master Server” --- and the day afterwards a huge power-outage caused that computer system to crash, as well.

Now what are the odds of THAT happening? (As luck would have it, Bernd was out-of-town that week at a Great Teachers’ workshop.) The overall stress was so great that my colleague went into premature labor, though fortunately her doctors could stabilize her condition. (She’s now on total bed-rest.) Needless to say, we’ve been in “recovery mode” ever since -- but slowly things are falling back into place, first draft included.




II. Survival over adversity in Kenya: Last month (for the Stephen Lewis Foundation) I discovered a most amazing project in Kenya’s rural southwest-province. It is an all-volunteer women’s group that began in 1990 when several grannies realized that they had lost opportunities in their lifetime because they never learned to read – and they decided to ensure that their daughters and granddaughters would not have to suffer a similar fate. As a result, they banded together to raise money to send their girl-children to school. To begin, they established a “food bank,” whereby they pool their meager earnings to buy bags of grain immediately after the harvest when they are cheap – and then store them in the “bank” (a secure, dry building) for sale later in the year when the prices go up. They share a portion of the food with the poorest households in the community, and over the years they have further invested their profits to buy a hand-operated sunflower press (to produce oil), bee-hives (to produce honey), a chip-maker (to cut potatoes into strips for French-Fries), and a nut-grinder (to make and sell peanut butter). Now, eighteen years later, this community has educated so many girls that whenever the Ministry of Education seeks to recruit new teachers, they always come to this village first. Additional spin-offs over the years have included two local “self-help savings clubs,” a home-based-care project, and an after-school club for orphans and other vulnerable children. These women absolutely blew me away!

During this same trip to Kenya, I also spent time in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest and most notorious slum. Here nearly 2 million people live crammed together in tiny tin shacks amidst open sewage, rotting carcasses and overpowering filth. The first project I visited trains former Commercial Sex Workers in Home-Based Care and HIV-prevention, and provides micro-enterprise loans for HIV-positive women who want to run (or improve) their own small-scale business. I’m amazed by the degree to which this project instills hope, despite the desperate surroundings.


The first time I assessed this project was with Elsita in 2004 and we met a woman named Joyce – bedridden, thin, and seemingly with just a few days to live. Even back then, however, Joyce whispered to us that she still had dreams: she wanted to open a small shop and sell exotic dress-material, and possibly go back to school for a course in fashion design. Soon after we left Joyce, I heard that she began taking ARVs (the anti-retroviral medications to treat HIV/AIDS), and when I visited the project again in 2006 I saw that Joyce had improved greatly. She was still thin and weak, to be sure, but able to care for herself and participate in various community activities. Now two more years have passed, and once again I saw Joyce. We hugged each other warmly. Wow! Joyce looks great, and she told me about the training she recently received in preparation for a small loan she would get later that week, with which to buy cloth to sell. “It isn’t much,” she said, “but it is a start.” The rules of the program are clear: One loan per person. Joyce would have to pay this loan back over six months, and then she could get a second, larger loan to grow her business even more.

Ten days later, I returned to Kibera once more to visit another organization’s project. They had also started to give out micro-enterprise loans for economic empowerment and wanted me to meet one of their clients. So once again, we walk through the narrow, sewage-filled alleyways of Kibera, past market stalls and one-room hovels. Eventually we entered one small passageway, and then another, and finally we stepped down a few steps. Upon entering the one room shack where the client lived, my jaw dropped. Here was Joyce, once again – now a client from this second project -- obviously breaking the rules and benefiting from at least two different organizations simultaneously.

Out of nearly two million people in Kibera, what are the chances that a visitor like me from the outside would have discovered her deception? I asked Joyce some questions and eventually she explained: “One loan is not enough,” she said, “not for the dreams I have waited so long to fulfil.”

At first I felt angry: with all the needy people in this community, why should one person benefit twice and others not at all? And then I thought to myself: Who am I to judge Joyce under such circumstances? Mightn’t I be doing the same? In this dog-eat-dog world you have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Perhaps this is how survival works: Joyce is certainly not the first to invent this kind of manipulation, nor will she be the last…

III. Survival in our Back Yard:
Southern Africa boasts three species of dassies or hyraxes: two live in rocky areas (such as the back yard of our house) and one in trees. Dassies are sometimes called rock rabbits because of their size, but they are not even distantly related to rabbits and can easily be distinguished from them by their short, rounded ears. In fact, their closest relatives are the elephants (!!!), but obviously this relationship is very distant. A territorial male controls a colony of 3-17 females and their young, but males without territories are solitary. Gestation lasts 230 days, which is very long for an animal this size. Dassies eat a wide variety of vegetation, even consuming plants that are poisonous to domestic stock.


Until this year, we mostly had just a solitary male living in our back yard, but now we have acquired a large harem. Their piped squeaks can be heard all day long. This drives our dogs crazy, but dassies can hide where dogs can’t reach, so they have gradually learned to co-exist. On the other hand, the plants on our veranda have suffered immensely. In the dry season (like now) the little dassies gravitate to anything green and have discovered the treasure-trove of our carefully tended succulents. One by one, our plants are being stripped of their leaves – but these animals are so cute, we let them have their fill. The photos below show how “survival of the fittest” truly works. And if we can’t have elephants in our back yard, their long-lost cousins will have to do!

Kind regards, Lucy

P.S. Speaking of survival, we’re proud to tell you that this Friday (July 18) Sergio graduates Boot Camp to become a full-fledged Marine! He wrote that the cards and
letters he received from well-wishers really helped him get through the rough-spots. (Thanks so much!) His training will continue over the next few months. We still have a little breathing time before he gets shipped overseas…