Evening walks along the Delta's edge

One of the things I’ve come to enjoy most about my time in rural Africa are my evening walks on days when I’m too lazy to run. Sometimes you spend all day in front of a computer, something you could do from literally anywhere else, and a walk after the heat of the day is the best reminder of place. 

In Cameroon, I’d take Owondo on walks down to the Sanaga River. I’d throw him sticks into the slow-moving waters and let him sprint in the sand like a mad dog, frightening many people with his boldness unseen in most African dogs. Here in Botswana my walks don’t take me very far, but they transport me to my backyard, the Okavango Delta, a beating heart in the otherwise dry Kgalagadi sands. The Delta is comprised of permanent and seasonal floodplains, and having only been here for a few weeks, I don’t know which waters I can expect to disappear over the course of the year. The Delta is also located on top of several fault lines whose tremors are softened by the deep sands, changing the surface water geography all the time. In this environment, water is important, and I’ve come to take the waters directly behind the research camp as the place where my walk starts and ends. It’s with delight that I watch the hippos, monitoring their proximity to the camp and always hoping that they come camp-side so I can get a good look at them when they pop their heads out from underwater.

My favorite termite mound near camp

There’s a road that wraps around behind the research camp and joins to the main Ecoexist office, and on my walks I follow that road for a few minutes before veering off to explore the nearby islands. Islands aren’t necessarily surrounded by water, but they are little oases from the harsh shrub and grassland. These islands vary greatly in size, but are always teeming with diverse trees, including the very weird (and appropriately named) sausage tree and others that drop sweet fruits, prized both by people and wildlife. The island nearest to me has one of the tallest termite mounds I’ve ever seen. It’s around 20 feet tall, and it's shape is a reminder for how the tree used to stretch up to the sky in this mini-forest before it was completely taken over by termites. Now the termites have transformed it into hardened soil, a nutrient-rich and cement-like resource. It’s on this island that I once came up two old women cutting at the root bark of one of the trees. My lack of Setswana leaves me gesturing like a deaf mute, so I’m not entirely sure what the use of the root bark is, but I do know that it is ingested, perhaps as a medicine or as a flavoring to food. After letting me try my hand at chipping away at the bark with their small yet sharp hoe, the women covered back up the roots and went on their way back home to the nearby cattlepost: they are my neighbors.

Bark harvested from the roots of a tree

Cowboys bringing in the cattle for the evening

When I continue to the next island 50 feet from the first, I always see cattle. Cattle are an important part of the culture here, providing emergency sources of money during hard times. Cattle also support draught power for ploughing fields and are a main source of protein for the area. Beef is cheap in this part of the country because cattle owners can’t easily access the international beef markets that the rest of the country has access to: veterinary fences erected to prevent zoonotic disease transmission prevent the transport of beef across lines. This keeps the price of beef low in this area, but even still, there are families who can’t afford the meat and rely on sour milk for protein. Unlike in other parts of Africa, cattle are left to graze on their own. I’ve seen people accompanying their cattle just a handful of times, though it seems the wealthier cattle ranchers (ie. those with many cattle) rely on cowboys to keep their herds together and bring them back in for the night.

From there, I continue out past the island, but not much farther as the Delta is currently inundated with water and I’m terrified of being on the wrong side of a hippo. I meander my way back to camp, sometimes heading for the main road, a road infrequently traveled but dusty just the same, or I circle around the way I came out. This gives me the chance for incredible sunsets over the water, and I’ve taken to carrying my camera with me to capture the beauty of the red sun sinking behind the trees.

An elephant swimming to reach her friends on the island

As I took my walk yesterday, I was rewarded with a special treat: a small herd of 4 or 5 elephants! They were close enough where I could see them clearly in the late afternoon sun, but safely far away, across a few bodies of water. I watched them jump into water, swim out to an island just across from me, and delicately strip leaves from the trees. I watched them for an hour, though at times they watched me. When it grew dark and I could no longer stand the mosquitos, I headed back to camp. My spirits were at a new high, having been reminded that I’m in Botswana, living in these ancient swamps that are the raison d’être for human-wildlife interaction in this otherwise dry desert.

Food, culture, and rural women

Much of my time in Cameroon was spent exploring the market. I would find some new fried insect to try, some weird bush fruit, or an indistinguishable blackened bushmeat, dried over fire, held open by sticks at the ribs and buzzing with flies. I kept a blog about the kinds of strange food I ate, and included both my favorite (definitely white palm grubs, fat and juicy, spiced with hot pepper and maggi cube and eaten off of a stick) as well as the ones I’d rather not eat again (definitely monkey, every time). There’s no market in Botswana, no street vendors rushing to sell you food at the pit stop (well, there is no “pit” stop… ah, Makanene), and I’ve been missing my experience of Botswana by taste. I am working my way through my grocery store supplies- familiar foods imported from South Africa- and I can’t help but feel that I’m missing a huge part of the culture by not eating local food.

Freshly pounded millet flour being sifted.

I spend these days assisting Ecoexist with a survey of farmers, farming techniques, market access, and food security. This gives me insights into what people eat, which is further developed simply by seeing their homes and what they keep around their concessions. So much of food here is millet. In fact, families measure food security not by nutrition but by starch. As long as there is “pap” you’re stomach is full. Pap is local grain flour (millet, sorghum, or maize) made by women, who’ve for the most part also planted and harvested the grain. The grain is cleaned away from the stalk with the use of a large, flat-headed wooden pestle and pounding the stalks in a multi-day process involving many women. Then the grain itself is pounded using a large mortar and pestle, and the large particles are sifted out and pounded again into the fine pap flour. Making a batch of flour takes several hours of work, and is repeated every few days in order to keep the house fed. Like in other parts of the world, women are largely responsible for growing food (although here it’s in infertile sand), maintaining home structures with reeds harvested at the Delta’s edge, and keeping their families fed. They are truly resilient.

Running in sand

June 22, 2016

Since my first days as a runner, a mere 8 years ago, I’ve never been one to stick to the main road. If I see an interesting path, a trail, a sidewalk that goes off into the unknown, that’s the track I want to take. Taking the main road for an entire run, never discovering where I could have gone, would always nag at me; make me wonder what new exploration I could have done.

Sometimes this works out great. I have seen much of Niece, France, by foot and found old pine parks set high up in the hills. Sometimes this leads me to trouble, running past bars of drunk Cameroonian police officers in uniform. Often, when I’m running in the bush I’m most happy and calm until I get comments from running mates like, “You should be careful of snakes when running through these grasses.” Then I spend the next few months avoiding the grasses, which are, of course, everywhere until my mind feels like it will explode from the stress of one main route traveled twice a day, everyday. I always inevitably concede to what my brain and feet want, which is the exploration of what feels wild and new.

Running in Botswana is a totally new challenge for me. The sand is unbelievably deep and for every step forward I take two steps back. The sand penetrates running shoes almost immediately and after a good run, you inevitably have blisters at the tops of your toes from where the sand was trapped. Perhaps the most interesting running challenge at the cattle post, Xachirachira, where Ecoexist has built camp, is running through a thousand elephant footprints as soon as you step off the main road. It reminds me that earth is not men’s alone. Humans may feel equally at home deep at sea as in outer space, and though I love hearing the elephants when I’m tucked safely in my warm bed, surrounded by the jolting presence of an electric fence, I prefer to avoid stepping foot into a huge, wrinkly footprint left by a thirsty elephant on his way to drink at the Delta’s edge. Sadly all of the trails that look interesting for exploration are in elephant country, and surrounded by their tracks, you can’t help but feel incredibly insignificant. I prefer to admire their tracks like stars in a night sky, and I’ll have to settle for runs that are less than exciting, because any run that is more than exciting might be my last.

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.

On the virtues of diversity

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of diversity lately, in particular because of our presumptive GOP candidate, Sir Donald Trumps-a-lot. In the current climate of anti-migration rhetoric, and in my current situation of living in a large college town in suburban Texas, I’ve never felt more uncertain about the conversations I have with people. This is partly because now, more than ever, people are quick to assume that I’m of the “other” side. They lump me in with the secretly bigoted, force me to partake in indirect and unclear conversation guised in silent but knowing head nods and winks.  The young anthropologist in me doesn’t want to break the trust, feeling that if only I could get a glance at “the other” I could make a breakthrough for all of humanity on the anthropology of bigotry and xenophobia. Knowing that people with these dark/not-so-dark secrets exist everywhere and they’re a sign of societal times, I’m inevitably most upset by the fact that my white skin and blue eyes gains me access to a world I’d prefer disappear forever in our growing globalized homogenization.

Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, one of the greatest strengths of America is our immigrant population. Immigrants bring with them new ideas and different perspectives. Their experiences in times of adversity have allowed them to not only survive, but to grow to new capacities, to see the world from new angles, and to push the accepted norms. I like to think that the Peace Corps provides Americans with similar adversity and growth, but two years of this experience can’t replace an entire worldview. When different worldviews come together, ideas are exchanged, compromises made, and humanity flourishes from pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of civilization just a tiny bit further. The ugly lie of Donald Trump is that limiting American immigration will hinder our nation’s growth potential: businesses will falter, ideas will die, the same parts of our brain that benefit from learning new skills and languages will wither away. We’ll become obsolete in a world where innovation and creativity depend directly upon the meeting of minds. Limiting migration and encouraging deportation will not, in fact, make America great again.

What I loved most about Cameroon was meeting all kinds of Africans. In a small village in rural, forested East Cameroon, a family from Niger settled. They were surrounded by Christian Bantus, most of whom were born and raised deep in the forest. They were all talented bushmeat hunters who generally died of starvation with money in their pockets. The family from Niger saw a commerce opportunity, and they invested in a bakery and cafeteria, raised goats and chickens, and traded goods on their small lot. The community welcomed the family with open arms (and probably some jealousy and maybe even a little sorcery), and the family single-handedly cooked for and fed the government employees sent to live in the bush to teach the village children, treat the village sick, and monitor the forest. Following this family’s development and success, other businesses opened and led to a (relatively) thriving market economy in a village that was often cut off from town supplies by a bad road. Totally ignoring the tribal diversity of Cameroon, in Yaoundé, Senegalese and Nigerians drive commerce, and Cameroonians often model their success in attempts to make it as well. Commerce is, truly, the lifeblood of Cameroon and I think this has much to do with their large population and their open immigration policy with other West and Central African nations. In the development world, exchange visits are often organized to provide a meeting of the minds, an opportunity for rural people to see what activities are carried out in other parts of the country, or even in different countries. The ability to see problems firsthand, and to see how other people have thought through solutions is an incredibly useful tool for development.

This post has been inspired by some of Ecoexist’s activities, in particular an exchange visit that Ecoexist had in Ghana to learn more about conservation agriculture in practice in a very different climate, culture, and environment. In the face of growing population, climate change, etc., there is more demand than ever to feed the population of Botswana (2.1 million), which is currently a net importer of food. While more land is currently in production than ever, productivity has actually declined, perhaps in response to heavily subsidized agricultural inputs. One of the challenges to wildlife conservation relates to the question of “land sparing or land sharing”: is it more useful to make agriculture more intensive on smaller parcels of land (ie. clearly distinct land use), or is it more useful to make agriculture a less-intensive, though integrated part of the landscape (ie. slash-and-burn agriculture). Conservation agriculture is one important approach that can help in the development of an agricultural sector, and in particular one that must develop alongside a sustained wildlife economy. Elephants, like people, require a lot of space, and in order to best establish and protect fields, a concerted and communal effort is a necessary approach. These are practices that Botswana farmers can benefit from learning. If immigrants aren’t bringing new and innovative practices into the community, then exchange visits are the next best thing.

Biodiverse ecosystems have been proven time and again to be the most resilient to perturbations. All niches are full, and disease inevitably kills some, but not all. With time, all niches become functionally full again. Likewise, diverse communities present their own challenges, but the ability to pull from the many resources that are inevitably associated with diversity is an advantage in the long run for the sustained development of a community. A town full of doctors will die of starvation. A town full of Donald Trumps will self-implode in the most beautiful of fireworks display, a shower of shining hair extensions.