To Have and Have Not – Part 2

I guess this is kind of a follow up post on the one I wrote earlier on the gap in wealth that we see in South Africa.

We hire a group of guys in their mid 20’s to come help us with some of the manual labor on the project as well as some data collection during the field season. Most of them have kids and support their extended families of 6-7 people. They don’t have regular work and our periodic employment is often their only income as the unemployment rate in communities outside the park boundaries often reaches 50% and upwards.

I just returned from taking our work crew back to their houses outside the park in Welverdiend. Welverdiend is a township just outside of the Kruger Park boundary. It is, I imagine, what most of us think of when we think of rural Africa. Cinderblock and stick houses. Log fences for animals. Cattle with their ribs showing. But they do have a school, clinic, soccer field, and some small shops. Wisani, our crew leader who is quite well spoken and intelligent despite what I can imagine is little schooling, was quizzing me on the price of plane tickets to and from America, the cost of renting our truck for our field work, the price of basic staples in America, etc. There was general amazement amongst the crew as to how much money much of the things I take for granted actually cost. For example, a round trip plane ticket from America to South Africa costs approximately $2000 or 14000 South Africa Rand. Wisani can feed his whole family of 6 for about $45 or 300 South African Rand a month. So for the price of my plane ticket to South Africa to chase zebra around the savanna, I could feed three families of 6 in South Africa for a year. Makes you realize that we have the monetary means to end hunger in pretty much every corner of the globe if we only had the motivation.

Lovin’ the Mud

There is definitely a love-hate relationship with rain. I love the rain because it makes temperatures down right bearable, makes the plants grow, and generally makes me happy. There is nothing like a good storm to cleanse the soul and make you feel like part of the earth. The hate part of the relationship comes with the lack of work that gets done after a good rain. Mud is the enemy here because few of the roads are paved and after a good rain many of the roads are impassable, at least in critical places. As I’ve written about previously, rain and mud lead to adventuresome field work http://underwater-superhero.blogspot.com/2007/04/muddin-south-african-style-when-you-are.html. Being a wetter year so far this year, it seems that we will lose our fair share of field work to rain and the muck it leaves behind. So its no surprise the first mud-vehicle interaction this year was a doozie. Last week we were out for a night survey on some of our plots farthest from camp. We do night surveys so that we can compare the distribution of herbivores on our experimental plots during the day and night – we see quiet a few elephants during the night and few during the day. Plus, we see all sorts of cool creatures like porcupines, civets, genets, and African wild cats.

Anyway, we were down on the Marheya string of plots and I decide try to make it through a section of the fire break that usually gives us problems after the rain. I don’t know why I tried to go through because I almost always avoid it even if it hasn’t rained for weeks. But I did, and predictably, we got stuck. Not just throw-it-in-4-wheel-drive-and-power-out stuck, I mean STUCK. So there we are at night, out of cell phone range, no where near a paved road, and horribly stuck in the mud – without a rifle to guard against the night time critters. My first thought after looking at the tires was “We are sleeping in the bush tonight.” But, determined not to sleep in the bush, three of us pushed while the fourth rocked the truck back and forth. We put down logs, stones, grass, anything to get some traction for the tires. For the first few minutes, it was more like a little bit of pushing and lots of looking around for that leopard that was going to appear out of nowhere. After 15 minutes of no progress in getting unstuck, it was all pushing and no looking. We lost sandals in the mud, got pummeled by thorns, and generally looked like tar babies…but after about 30 minutes the truck spun free (I fell face first into the mud) and we celebrated with a gin and tonic and by using all the drinking water we had to wash Kruger off our bodies. We spent the rest of the night driving around looking for lions, having fun, and staying on paved roads.

This is the South Africa that I am used to. The temperature is slowly creeping towards 40 today – that’s Celsius or 104 F. Luckily field work wasn’t of the essence today so I have spent the day reading in the shade, sitting in the pool, and now working on my computer in our little office which now has a portable AC unit. Grated that it is still 85 in here with the AC cranking full blast, but at least its not 104. It makes writing possible because my brain just doesn’t function when it gets this hot. And it pretty much has to function now as I’m churning through job application after application. Yes, it is the academic job season now. All the universities are teasing us with descriptions of fantastic biology and ecology jobs with our names on them. Just like the Christmas season except the academic job season leaves you feeling hollow and disappointed. Well, maybe Christmas leaves you feeling like that too, but that’s a different post. So I’ve spent the last several weeks either in the field repairing damage to our fences from that damnable rhino or writing about the many wonderful experiments I would do at University X if they would only give me the chance and hire me. So far its been a hard process as I’m not the best at selling myself. But it has made me slow down and think about what I want to accomplish in science and how I want to accomplish it.

Field work has been rather routine lately. That is except for the day that my fellow post-doc on the project chased after a rhino. No I don’t have that backwards the rhino didn’t chase him, he chased after the rhino. We were walking out to one of our sites which is a 3km walk into the bush off the fire break road when we cross paths with a male white rhino. Now the set of experiments that we were walking to has been terrorized by a rhino of late with the rhino practically flattening some of our fences. I have been close to throwing in the towel on this site as it is a pain to get to and maintenance has been far greater there than at other places, but we have persisted so far. Anyway, the post-doc sees the rhino, chambers a round into his rifle, and proceeds to run at the rhino screaming and clapping his hands. I think the rhino was even more surprised by this than I was and he tucked tail and ran away from this crazy two-legged creature running at him. I stayed behind wondering what I was going to say to this guy’s girlfriend when the rhino decided that he didn’t like being chased by this puny person. Luckily the rhino went his separate way and my friend returned from the chase and concluded that “Maybe that will scare him off.” I think it probably just pissed him off and he went and took it out on our fences. Oh well.