Welcome to Africa my friend

Thought I would take the opportunity of being around fast internet to post a couple fo times.

The last couple of weeks have been rather hectic. We are in the middle of building all of the exclosures that I will be using for my research for the next couple of years. To build all of these animal exclosures (120, 7 meter diameter fences) we have hired a local work crew of guys about 20-25 years old. They are amazingly hard workers and just blast through building the cages in 40 degree C heat (that's 104 degrees F to us metrically-challenged Americans). One of the hardest things for me is that we pay them about $15 a day to work. While this is a good wage for this work in South Africa, its hard to pay them so little when I could easily pay them more. I was asking one of the crew what he does for a job when he doesn’t work for us and he said he didn’t have one. When our building was over, he said he would just be sitting at home but that he desperately wants a job as a game tracker, but can’t afford to get more training or a drivers license. He’s a bright, young guy that really knows the bush and would be excellent as a tracker so it really hurts to see him without the opportunity to follow his dreams that you and I take for granted. It makes me want to drag out the exclosure building for much longer so that they will have jobs, but I won’t because I have to do my job and get the research done.

The work has definitely been frustrating at times. The worst is working at Scientific Services in Skukuza (the main rest camp in Kruger). We’ve had a bugger of a time getting money to pay our work crew to build exclosures, get access to our webmail websites (they actually blocked my Yale email after I had been using it for three weeks), and in general organizing anything. Everything is twice as complicated and half as efficient as I am used to, and it seems that the bureaucracy is denser here than in the US. I spent several minutes complaining to one of my friends in Satara who does game viewing drives for the park about the inefficiency, etc. and his reply was “Welcome to Africa my friend”. So I’ve been trying to cultivate a more detached attitude. Everything will happen in its own time (certainly not on my schedule), all the exclosures will get built (even if our fencing supplier brings us crappy materials), and the data will be collected, but its damn frustrating working here at times. Well, doing the actual work is fun, challenging, and rewarding, but actually getting ourselves in the position to do the work is the frustrating part.

With that rant behind me, we had a brilliant couple of days last week. Made one trip down to Skukuza for supplies and saw lions, elephants, rhinos, buffalo, and leopard all in one drive. On Sunday, we went for sundowners (drinks at the end of the day) on a rocky hill near one of our research sights. As we were climbing the rocks, we noticed a herd of elephant on the other side of the outcrop. We were only about 10 meters away from several of them before they noticed us and loped off. There were in total 40 members of the herd, with lots of young and three big bulls following the mostly female herd. Fantastic. We were lucky we were actually on the outcrop when we saw them as elephants don’t climb rocks well. Otherwise it would have been a rather tense situation being that close to elephants on foot. One of the sayings around here is that no one gets injured by an elephant (meaning if an elephant gets to you it kills you, usually by kneeling on you and crushing you). On our drive back from the outcrop we saw three white rhinos at close range and a leopard up a tree. A magnificent day.