Re"novice"ing myself

Sometime from mid-June....

I have been in Botswana for just over two weeks and I would say that there are constant surprises. Yesterday, Amanda took Patricia and myself to meet the village chiefs, or dikgosi, of three neighboring villages to our camp. We found one at the kgotla, or chefferie, we found another second-in-command kgosi at the kgotla (the chief himself was on annual leave), and we found that the third kgosi was on lunch break. We went partly as protocol, to introduce Patricia and myself as new Ecoexist students, and also to invite them to a weeklong workshop that is being run in conjunction with A&M’s Conflict and Development Center, MIT, University of Botswana, and Ecoexist. The workshop is focused on technical skills capacity building and the co-production of technical solutions to everyday problems- in our case, it is generally focused on finding locally-appropriate solutions to assist farmers against hungry crop-raiding elephants.

Today, three dikgosi came, very eagerly, to learn about the technologies and skills that some of the community members are gaining from the workshop. One of the everyday problems a very vocal farmer raised is a need to keep porcupines out of farms. This isn’t totally related to human-elephant conflict, but is a hugely valid concern for farmers who lose high value crops to silent rodents who nibble on a little bit of everything. Fortunately, Texans from A&M have a lot of transferable experience keeping feral hogs out of farms, and a proposed solution was to dig a trench around the outside of the farm fence and to bury  “L” molded chicken wire to prevent deep or forward digging by rodents. I was very excited to help dig the trench- I think there’s nothing a PhD student loves more than the occasional manual labor. As we were digging, all three dikgosi came over to see the project, and while wearing nice suits and shoes they got in the trench with us to help dig and to lay the chicken wire! I could be wrong, but I don’t think many village chiefs in Cameroon would have done the same.

One of the things I sought out in my decision to leave Cameroon and to start my PhD with Ecoexist was a totally new environment. I had become so disillusioned with the world of conservation in Cameroon, it all felt so contrived and donor-driven. I had the overwhelming feeling that I had reached saturation with my own capacity within the system, and I could only truly ever approach my work with a sense of cynicism towards achieving the project goal. Partly, this was a sense of discouragement after so many years of frustratingly working outside of the system, only to be pulled into the “business as usual” operations. I found myself, after 6 years, a part of the system that I had so disdained and it felt deeply unsatisfying.

Beginning my PhD has held it’s own challenges, in particular learning how to think in new ways, tying together my experiences with a huge theoretical body of literature, and re-adjusting to the now unfamiliar culture of academia. And now that I’ve finally made it to Botswana, I’m finally realizing that I’ve chosen to make myself a novice again. These past few weeks have been truly challenging and often frustrating- culturally, linguistically, and logistically. I keep having to mentally block out much of what I know from Cameroon in order to keep myself open to the delight of surprise, the element of the unknown. Amanda wisely reminded me today that there’s a delight in removing yourself from your role as expert and voluntarily becoming a novice all over again. A tree grows really well and in new directions when it’s been pruned and allowed to regrow. With time, I, too, will begin to see conservation in a new light as everything I know gets ripped to shreds and reassembled into a better-constructed cloth.

Sometimes I think about where I would be had I decided to focus my PhD in Cameroon. I would have been able to dive right in to my research, knowing so well already the problem and having thought through many times the challenges and approaches to solving the problem. But there’s a lot I would have missed out on, too. Coming to Botswana has allowed me to examine conservation from a totally new perspective. As a novice, I have to learn a new language, new culture, new mode of living and breathing. I have to problem-solve in an entirely new context. All of this is so totally frustrating, and I have to keep reminding myself that there is pleasure in an intellectual rebirth and the creation of new expectations. During the day I try to meet as many people as I can and ask as many questions as possible, and at night I try to peer out into the Delta waters and the woodlands that surround the camp to practice my elephant spotting skills. I have yet to see one, but I hear elephants all around me at night as I sleep. It comforts me, knowing that these huge giants are watching in the night. It comforts me, too, hearing the expert drumming of seasoned night guards, the traditional knowledge that has kept elephants out of fields and homesteads for centuries. I hope one day to come to understand this rhythm of life and maybe even take it for granted.