Taking flight

The flight from Gaborone to Maun took just under an hour and a half in a small prop-engine plane with 14 rows of 4 seats. I sat down in my window seat, 2 rows back from the front, and I watched the propellers spin faster and faster until we were high in the sky. The propellers slowed down as we turned back in the opposite direction, leading me to question whether there was a problem with the plane. Once we picked up speed again going the opposite direction, I knew we were headed for the gateway to the Okavango Delta.

Much of Botswana between the populated south and the frontier town of Maun is a vast wilderness. When I started my PhD work, I had imagined a place where busy villages dot the roadside, selling you nothing you need but everything you want, where people are difficult, but welcoming and immediately make you a part of the story, whether you want it or not. But my first two months in Botswana in the winter of 2016 looked and felt much more like the vast scrub and harsh desert that spread out for hundreds of miles before me on this plane ride, and my travel to my field site this time around feels more lonely than overwhelming.

From above in the plane, all you can see are vast stretches of sand held together with scrub, undulating sand dunes spotted with brown, low lying shrubs- a brown sea as far as the eye can see. Occasionally, the seemingly endless Kalahari was split by a sand road- a perfectly straight line that somehow made either side of the line seem different enough in color and texture. When I focused hard, I could occasionally make out a tree with dark green leaves, and I wondered how it was that anything green could survive in the summertime heat without water.  

Before I knew it, the pilot announced that we were approaching Maun. The sparse green turned more frequent and lined the mostly dry waterways. But it was the plots of cleared land signaling fertility that gave away the approaching city. All plots fenced in with wooden posts take a variety of haphazard shapes, including hexagons and rectangles, but never the typical circle associated with the mechanized farming of the industrialized West.

The increasing concentration of houses was the last telltale sign of our arrival, and only a few minutes later we were gliding down onto the runway. It was a little shaky on touchdown, and I learned later from a pilot friend that there’s an increased turbulence due to the extreme heat of the summer that makes flying between 10am and the late afternoon tricky. I was glad to take an early flight.

First post in 2017

I’m back online and this is my first blog in over a year! So much has happened since last August when I was last in Botswana, but the biggest news is that I’m here in Botswana as a Fulbright Student Researcher for the next 9 months! It means that I’m loosely affiliated with the Department of State and I’m essentially an ambassador between the US and Botswana. It most importantly means I get to do my research without any strings attached- every researcher’s dream.

I’ve been in Botswana for a week as of tomorrow, though I have been staying with a Fulbright Scholar couple. Julie, a librarian from the University of Montana, and her husband Steve have been in Botswana since July, and they’ve been generous enough to let me stay in their very comfortable two-bedroom apartment for the week that I programmed in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. While my main objective spending time in Gaborone was to receive my security clearance from the US Embassy as a Fulbright Student, I also needed to speak with the various ministries that are relevant to my research and try to pick up policy documents that I’ve struggled to find online. It’s also been a great excuse to get to know the whole Fulbright team, which includes Julie and Steve, and Sarah, a post-bac student researching system updates on HIV/AIDS improvements. Even though I’ll be on the opposite end of the country, it’s been great to get to know everyone and learn more about what they are doing here.

Gaborone is a different world from where I’ll be staying. The city is organized around different shopping malls, and these are, by far, the habitat I feel most out of place in. I am forced to spend time at the malls because they’re natural meeting places and they’re where the best grocery stores are found. The good news is that they have also the best Wi-Fi in town, so I’ve been making the most of my talent of sitting in coffee shops, spending as little as possible, and using all of the connection I can.

My time here has definitely not been all work and no play. On Saturday, the Fulbright crew went out to Mokolodi, a game park on the outskirts of town. It’s a far cry from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and even further from my field site where elephants, zebra, ostrich, kudu, lions, hippos, and all kinds of wildlife inhabit the same place as people. However, I can imagine that it’s the closest best park for urban residents who need an escape from the hustle and bustle of town. We were able to see three giraffes, some zebra, two hippos, some fish eagles, and loads of kudu, so it was a fun mini-adventure. After our drive, we had a delicious dinner and returned home to find that there was a graduation party across the street, which meant that I slept for maybe 3 hours and I was reminded of all the “fetes de jeunesses” of Cameroon. The next morning, Julie stayed home to catch up on sleep, but Steve and I mustered the energy to climb Kgale Hill, a big hill outside of town. Climbing/hiking up required the most technical rick climbing I will ever do in my life, but I was rewarded with beautiful views of the city and outskirts of town. I was too afraid to climb back down, but we hop the fence to the cell tower maintenance road, so I didn’t need to confront my fears of heights. At the parking lot, we saw loads of city baboons, including one mischievous one sitting on top of a fancy SUV.

I head to Maun tomorrow, where I’ll pick up my car and scramble to gather all of the supplies I need. If all goes well I should be up at the research camp by the end of the week. I’m excited to get up there and start to get my hands in my work. And in case you’re wondering what I’ll be doing, here’s an excerpt from my Fulbright proposal, which generally describes my work and research interests:

The Eastern Panhandle is one of the most remote areas of Botswana where 16,000 people in subsistence-based communities coexist with 18,000 elephants outside of protected areas. Elephants experience HEC when people destroy critical habitat, block important resources, or harass and kill elephants. Yet the size, strength, and national conservation status of elephants ensures their protection during charged conflict situations. Conversely, HEC impacts people when elephants enter fields and eat crops, destroy property, or charge and kill people. Studies that focus on human costs through crop raiding disregard how rural residents and elephants experience coexistence and conflict through overlapping use of limited natural resources. For example, elephants forage on the soft bark of trees. In the process of stripping trees, branches pulled down by elephants are used by rural communities as dry firewood. Collecting firewood in an elephant-dominated landscape, however, is very risky and potentially riskier in areas with lower human population density and more exposure to elephants. As such, trees provide an arena to understand how both conflict and coexistence guide management decisions. 

I intend to use my Fellowship to examine the role of perceived risk in guiding firewood collection and rural migration decisions by rural residents. Risk perception is the way that people judge potential threats to themselves or their livelihoods, and risk perception frameworks evaluate how potential threats and possible rewards guide decision-making. I will examine how perceived risk of rural residents to HEC guides firewood collection, migration decisions, and government support for local communities. My working hypotheses are 1) If women collect firewood more frequently than men, rural residents will perceive women to have higher risk from HEC and women will be more likely to employ collective, group-based HEC risk mitigation strategies; 2) If people living in unincorporated settlements encounter more elephants during firewood collection and perceive this as negative, they will be more likely to permanently migrate from unincorporated settlements to the village; and 3) If government officials and rural residents perceive HEC risk to residents differently then this will have negative consequences to rural livelihoods.
Understanding rural residents’ perceived risk of elephants will show how resource management and migration decisions are made in the wildlife-rich landscape of the Okavango Delta. In using risk perception as my main framework, I will contribute to HEC research with insights from natural hazard theories and methods that recognize people as active participants in finding solutions to HEC. Results from this study will contribute to a better understanding of migration dynamics of rural communities and will support policy development in both rural planning and sustainable natural resource use.
I developed this study during preliminary fieldwork from June through August, 2016. I identified objectives from interviews with Ecoexist team members, government employees, and community leaders and members. I will return to Botswana from August 2017 through August 2018 and use a mixed-methods, ethnographic approach in order to capture a yearly cycle of risk perception, firewood collection decisions, and human rural migration patterns. My work will focus on the village of Mogkacha and its five associated unincorporated settlements. Mogkacha is a small community of 524 ethnically diverse people who experience high levels of HEC because they are located near a historically important elephant migratory route. Mogkacha has recently transitioned from a temporary settlement to a permanent village, gaining government recognition and development support, and it demonstrates dynamic seasonal and long-term human rural migration between areas of low and high population density. I will gather data on firewood collection through mapping, direct observation, and resource measurement. In addition, I will collect risk perception and migration data through participant observation and longitudinal interviews with community members and government employees, as well as analysis of policy documents and white papers.