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Students
Kendri Cesar '08
Clara Chew '09
Juliet Coffey '09
Sally Elliott '08
Jake Feintzeig '09
Colin Gentry '09
Erin Gu '09
Dylan Higgins '09
Brenna Hughes '09
Diana Jih '09
Marissa Knodel '09
Kyle Lad '09
Lindsay Leone '08
David Nutt '09
Emma Palley '09
Sarah Parkinson '09
Caitlin Pierce '09
Jenna Smith '09
Emma Virginia '09
Faculty
Professor Bill Roebuck
Professor Jack Shepherd
Assistant Professor Michael Dorsey
Research Assistant Professor David Mbora
First Letter from Africa
12 September 2007
Kathleen and I arrived safely in South Africa. It is very hot (85+) here,
dry, and everyone is grumpy waiting for the spring rains. The overnight flight
from London (Heathrow) seemed faster than usual, and I awoke at sunrise to see
a dusty, waterless Zambia passing seven miles below us. Africa this far south
of the equator is semi-arid, and those of you who have joined us in these
ventures know the taste and smell of Africa on the ground shortly before the
rains come: the sound of mopane bees in the bush, the feel of grit in the mouth
and on the neck, the still air that penetrates deep within you. Here, too, is
that persistence of life: below us, gliding toward Johannesburg, the emerald
green circles of irrigated commercial farms. The sudden appearance of the
mighty Zambezi River, above Victoria Falls, full and flowing. A rectangle of
green trees in the grey dust around a farmhouse. Small gardens behind circular
straw-roofed huts nurtured by determined (and often desperate) small-holder
farmers, usually women. As we descend, old, rural Africa gives way to new,
modern Africa, with its paved roads, larger irrigated farms, water storage
ponds (some the size of small lakes), dual motorways, tree- lined suburbs,
commercial centers. Water is the prism through which life is monitored. We all
have one thing in common: we wait for the rains. There is a certain irritation
among us at the heat, the dry air, the dust. Working with our colleagues
preparing the coming term, they remind me that "Dartmouth always brings the
rain". And indeed, in the past the arrival of our students has often been
quickly followed by the first spring rains, a blessing to us all. We eagerly
await these young harbingers on Monday.
Cheers, Jack and Kathleen
Second Letter from Africa
23 September 2007
Dear Friends, Parents, Family:
We have completed our orientation week and the students are now at their
homestay families. This is a long weekend in South Africa -- Monday is Heritage
Day -- and Tuesday morning at 0800 we depart by bus for the lowveld and eight
days in the field.
After the students' arrivals, spread throughout the day
last Monday, we started Tuesday with a group meeting, a review of the coming
academic term, and then a tough briefing from a very large member of the
University's campus police. This is a no-nonsense chap, and the students were
appropriately quiet and attentive. We then began the process of introducing
them to the university, their classrooms, the commercial shopping area here
(called Hatfield), and other amenities. This included, happily, three nice
restaurants where we all dined together Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday
evenings. It was a slow and reverse epicurean slide from calamari on Tuesday to
pizza on Thursday. Kathleen and I, along with Prof. David Mbora (who joined us
a week ago), are now dining this weekend on fresh fruits.
Two field trips highlighted the week. The first, to the
De Wildt Cheetah and Wild Dog Centre, gave the students their first
introduction to wildlife management issues that face southern Africa (and other
game-rich areas of this continent). Cheetah and wild dog breeding programs are
controversial (preservation vs. conservation; farmers vs. wildlife managers).
Our students will be able to track this issue in Namibia in November, where
they camp for two nights at the Cheetah Conservation Foundation, north of the
capital, Windhoek.
At de Wildt we visited various cheetahs, including the
unusual and rare King Cheetah, in large holding pens, and then on a vehicle
rode around their extensive grounds watching them and, in separate areas, wild
dogs being fed or in held in breeding compounds.
The cheetah (and, of course the wild dog) is rare in
the wild, although we did see two cheetahs at a water hole in Kruger National
Park last year. And, several years ago, another AFSP group saw a pack of wild
dogs sauntering down the main paved road, also at Kruger. You never know.
So, studying the cheetah now becomes one of the core
animals we will look at repeatedly this term, along with elephants. (We are
starting that study on Tuesday, so more on them soon!) But the cheetah also
lets us begin examination of human-wildlife collisions, loss of habitat, and
efforts to identify and preserve a key element of the ecosystem.
On Friday, we went out to Sterkfontein and Swartkranz,
to look at pre-historic archeological sites where there is profound and, as you
will hear in a moment, obvious evidence of early hominids. The cave system at
Swartkranz is a favorite of mine: the mystery of early hominids and their
relationships to rather large and nasty predators, and the site (thought to be
the first) where early people captured and controlled fire for cooking and
other purposes. It's exciting to stand on that ground and think about the very
early people living there, "the cradle of humankind", from which we all are
said to have emerged. As one of our lecturers told us: "This is where the
world's people originated. Welcome home."
Welcome indeed: Our lecturer, from the University of
Witswatersrand, is the only woman with a "dig" at this World Heritage Site.
After rummaging about in the caves at Swartkranz, we went across the valley to
her site. (Remember, she said, our ancestors were the ones who made it across
that narrow valley successfully.) There, at Copper's Cave, she explained her
own field research and then turned us all loose to look for bones, claws, teeth
etc., which were abundant in the rocks and soil around us. Right off, we found
the three front claws of a large predator protruding from a rock.
But the most exciting moment came when several of the
students found a small tooth jutting from a rock. Prof. Mbora confirmed that it
was not a primate -- his field of expertise -- and our lecturer got truly
excited when she agreed that it was indeed a tooth of a very early hominid. She
telephoned her advisor back at Wits, and they are bringing out high-speed
dental equipment -- no, no, no, not to fill a cavity -- to excavate around the
tooth. There will be more on this soon.
It continues hot here -- 90-95 F-- and very dry with a
wind out of the north (from which heat comes in this hemisphere). The lowveld
is already nearing 100, we hear, which if the rains do not come before Tuesday
will mean a sweltering week in the bush doing our fieldwork. If Dartmouth
brings the rains, may they come now!
All the best,
Jack and Kathleen
Third Letter from Africa
9 October 2007
Dear Friends, Parents and Family:
We are back safely from our first major field trip. And as the green grocer
said to Kathleen yesterday: Dartmouth indeed brought the rains. For the last
three days we have had lightning, window-rattling thunder, and torrents that
filled the roads and streams. Everyone is delighted and spirited by this
important seasonal change.
But on 25 September we left a hot and dry Pretoria with
the jacarandas showing only bare branches under the African sky. But we noticed
a bloom here and there on them—a harbinger that the rains (and Dartmouth!) were
coming. We drove out along the high veldt and then down the northern escarpment
of the Drakensberg Mountains into the low veldt and JC Strauss' camp along the
almost-dry Olifants River, at Phalaborwa.
This year, JC settled us into a South African Defense
Force Special Forces camp, a fenced encampment on a bluff above the Olifants.
Four of the students got the five-star room: high in the trees looking down on
a row of hippos sunning themselves along a patch of flowing river. The rest of
us scattered around the camp in rooms; the five young men of our group—David,
Jake, Kyle, Colin and Dylan—and the two Shepherds bunked in two large rooms at
a bush camp about 100 yards away. We were in Big Five country (lions, leopards,
elephants, rhinos and cape buffalo) and we lived in a reverse zoo: We were
fenced in, and the animals wandered about in freedom.
Thus our first lessons were tracking and observation,
and our classroom was the open African bushveldt. JC got us all up at 0530—yes,
Mom, that's five-thirty a.m.—and everyone showed up every day of this trip for
tea, coffee and rusks (a hard and delicious Boer biscuit edible only by dipping
it into a beverage) by 0600.
JC used what the environment gave him. First, he taught
us to walk quietly in the African bush, single file, listening and looking at
this new environment. Our first evening, he also had us separate from one
another by 4-5 yards, and sit in silence listening to the African day become
the African night. On this first evening, we heard frogs, the Mozambique
nightjar (a bird), the grunting of hippos in the river, the alarms and calls of
elephants.
Next, we discovered two elephants on a hill, and seven
more feeding across a farther hillside. JC maneuvered us so that the wind came
into our faces, rather than having the wind give us away, and taught us to read
ground signs regarding these animals: prints, feces, urine, small branches
stripped for food.
These observations proved valuable: millipedes eaten by
a civet cat (not really a "cat" at all), python eggs, a fish eagle, and
leopard, rhino, crocodile and hippo tracks along the sandbank of the river. We
learned how different animals move, when, and how they communicate. The
elephant, for example, steps on its own track, hind foot overlapping the print
of the front foot. In dust and sand, the details of the elephant's padded feet
are clear and one comes to understand how they can move almost silently through
the bush; they can also pick up communications from other elephants through
these footpads for up to 5 kilometers or more.
After almost 36 hours of field training, we took JC’s
"live" tracking test in the bush. It turns out that some of our students picked
up this skill quickly; Colin even declared that he was going to become an
African guide! At JC’s we also gathered for our first group plenary meeting in
the field, around a welcomed campfire (the temperature dropped just before the
rains came). Sally, Erin, Kyle and Caitlin led the group in a discussion about
what we had seen and worked on, and how we were adjusting to being in the field
in such a large and diverse group.
After this initial exposure to the bush, we next camped
at Timbavati, inside the fences on the western edge of Kruger National Park
(KNP). Timbavati is the central focus of this first field trip. Having learned
something about our new environment, its signs and characteristics, we now
began to put this to work.
Timbavati curves for about 50 yards on the embankment
along a dry riverbed inside the KNP boundary. It is Big Five country and not
fenced. Wild animals can, and do, wander into the camp (or through it) day and
night. The students were briefed on this, and alerted to be especially careful
at night. (It is my personal belief that along with the academic program there
should be an experiential component, which includes confidence-building
activities in the field.)
At Timbavati, we were joined by two field biologists,
Michele and Steve Henley. The Henleys are halfway through a five-year grant to
study elephants and their impact on vegetation and water in this savannah
region. In some parts of Africa, the elephant is endangered; across the
continent, its numbers dropped in less than 10 years from about 600,000 to
below 300,000. In Kruger/Timbavati, there are some 15,000 elephants. But some
field biologists (not the Henleys) think there may be too many elephants in
this region and that Kruger's carrying capacity should be around 7,000. To
reach that number, there is a continuing discussion of “culling” (killing)
elephants in the park. So the Henley's work is very important. They are
analyzing elephant breeding herds and looking at impacts on them (weather,
vegetation, water, migratory patterns, etc) Among other questions, they are
asking: How can we identify elephants and what amount of destruction are the
Timbavati elephants really doing to their environment?
We divided into three teams. Kathleen joined Group C
(Kendri, Sally, Marissa, Kyle Lindsey and Caitlin). I was part of Group B
(Clara, Dylan, Diana, Colin, Sarah, Jenna), while Dr. David Mbora, a professor
in Dartmouth’s Biology Department, was a member of Group A (Juliet, Jake, Erin,
Brenna, David Nutt, and our two Emmas, E. Palley and E. Virginia). After rising
at 0530 and consuming coffee, tea and rusks, the three Groups went off into the
bush. (We rotated activities over three days, so everyone got a chance to do
all three.)
On the first day, for example, Group A spent the first
morning with a very knowledgeable professional field instructor (Brendon)
walking about 4 kilometers and analyzing the vegetation of the savannah,
observing impala and other ruminant activities, and putting their new tracking
skills to use.
Group B rode out to an isolated section of the riverbed
for optional rifle craft training. This continues a five-year-old segment of
the AFSP in which students may learn about the AK-47 and fire eight rounds at
balloons and targets. Why the AK-47? This rifle, more than any other, has
changed the face of Africa. In the early 1990s, tens of thousands were dumped
on the global weapons market by the former Soviet Union (and later by China),
where they became the weapon of choice of game poachers and, more recently,
child soldiers. Some rangers and guides now also carry the AK-47. To know this
weapon is to know more about the struggle between wildlife conservation, and
the daily confrontation over wildlife preservation, especially endangered
species like the rhino and elephant. (This segment of the AFSP is optional for
students.)
Group C, with Kathleen, went out with the Henleys that
first morning for elephant research and observation. On 29 September, Group B,
my gang, did its elephant observation segment. We all rode together on an open,
tiered Land Rover with no cover. The Henleys explained their fieldwork:
observation, identification (usually by notches in the elephant’s ears), the
use of GPS and collaring to find elephants, and then the analysis of their herd
behavior. Elephant herds are matriarchal, usually controlled by an elderly
female (60+ years), with a scattering of younger aunties and then breeding
females, adolescents and very young ones; males are generally driven out of the
herd around age 12-15 (if I remember the Henleys correctly). Those lone bulls
may move in an area up to 3,000 square kilometers; one bull was tracked by
another research team as he walked almost 50 miles to and from water and a
cabbage patch he was raiding.
On this overcast day after an hour search we come upon
a breeding herd of some 40 elephants. The elephants pull small branches from
the mopane bushes, or uproot the bushes and eat the roots. Food before the
rains is scarce, and an adult elephant may consume up to 200 pounds of
vegetation daily. Some of the elephants pull up grass by the roots, shake it to
get the loose sand off before eating—the sand will wear down their molars, and
the average elephant grows only six sets of molars in his/her lifetime. Several
very young ones are nursing; one we watch nuzzles alongside its Mom to find her
right breast. Mom moves her right leg slightly one, and the youngster suckles
(through her mouth, not her trunk). To shift the little one to her other
breast, Mom moves her right leg back, covering that breast and easing the
youngster off it. The youngster scampers quickly around Mom to the left side,
where the leg goes forward and the little one continues nursing. I am awed by
the ease of this movement and its delicate choreography, along with the utter
safety of the small elephant under its huge Mom (three tons or more).
Just as it starts sprinkling, a second herd strolls in.
These elephants are well known to “our” herd, and the two matriarchs, both with
wrinkled skin, move quickly and sniff and greet one another. The two herds
blend together in greeting; even the youngsters, some only 1-2 years old, touch
the nostrils of their trunks to those of the other little ones, and then rub
foreheads together and gently push each other. Adolescents wrestle with their
trunks. The herds make a rumbling sound in their bodies as a way of greeting
one another.
As the rain increases—we are getting a thorough
soaking, but the elephants love it!—the merged herds, now about 70 elephants,
move slowly to our right and into a large, muddy area. Here they toss mud on
their backs; some of the adults actually lie down and roll in the mud. The
little ones copy the adults and flop into it, or fling mud about with their
trunks. A two-year-old (the Henleys tell us) tries a couple of mock charges:
ears out wide, trunk up, trumpeting (the pitch is too high). Older elephants
enjoy some butt and back scratching on old trees, and after many stomach
rumbles the herds separate, one ambling down a path to the south and the other
off to the west.
The rain stops and the sun, surprisingly hot, emerges
once again. We are now soaked, and climb out and hang our rain gear on the Land
Rover. The Henleys review with the students the elephants we have seen; they
have a set of identification books. Notes are compared and Dylan has a series
of photographs that are also very helpful in this task. That done, the students
(encouraged by Steve Henley) practice “bok drol spoeg,” the field art of seeing
who can spit impala dung the farthest. Impalas drop a convenient, small, round
ball of dung perfect for the task. Sarah, Clara, Diana and Jenna are
surprisingly good at this, although Colin gets a running start and appears to
“win” the contest. The winner remains in dispute!
That afternoon we have a lesson in anatomy. One of the
field instructors, LD from the Institute of Wildlife Management at the
University of Pretoria, shoots a male impala. We gather in the sandy riverbed
with the dead animal, cleanly shot once through the brain. (Impala are not
endangered, but widely prolific to the point of causing destruction to some
habitats used by other species.) LD teaches anatomy and this is a thorough (and
respectful) class. First, Lindsey and Marissa lift the animal into a hoist and
then, with LD’s help, into a support frame from a tree limb at the sandy edge
of the dry stream. Under LD’s instruction, the students take turns removing the
impala’s skin: Brenna and Marissa skin the left side; Erin, Sally, Kendri and
David do the right; Colin finishes with the legs.
One by one, LD removes and discusses the impala’s
internal organs: the gallbladder, liver, spleen, kidneys, heart and the lungs.
He blows into the severed windpipe, which inflates the dark lungs, thus showing
us how they work and making them a beautiful, lighter red at the same
time.
As this is going on, we notice a dark-green/grey snake,
perhaps four-feet long, sliding silently across the tops of the bushes behind
the impala demonstration. We all move closer to look at it, and an instructor
explains that this is a boomslang, one of the most poisonous in Africa. But not
to worry: it’s back-fanged and would have to chew vigorously on an appendage
(finger, toe) to inject any poison.
Back to the impala. LD explains that the impala is a
ruminant with four stomachs. He removes them all as a single unit, and dissects
each stomach starting from the one closest to the mouth to the fourth near the
colon. We begin to understand the process of eating, digestion, rumination and
excretion in these animals as we study the texture and condition of the
material in each stomach. We even work our way down the colon to find those
little, round pellets that are so easy to spit. Only now, we see that they are
carrying out only what the animal could not use, which isn’t much.
Timbavati is packed with other instruction. Prof. Mbora
continues his series of lectures on ungulates, vegetation and the African
savannah. We discuss their impacts on the fragile savannah ecosystem. How do
browsers and grazers influence woodland and savannah vegetation? Another day,
the Henleys, Prof. Mbora and all of us examine an artificial borehole and
discuss the “piosphere” (fat circles) of destruction by animals that graze
outward from that water source.
One of the central confidence-building exercises at
Timbavati is orienteering. On two occasions, the students go out into the field
in their small groups with a compass and topographical map. For these afternoon
exercises, we swap groups. I go out with Group A; they will have to take me and
an armed instructor through three legs of a grid point and then back to camp.
Our first task is to find “a green frog” (rubber) at each leg. After discussion
among themselves and some map-and-compass readings in the riverbed, Jake and
David take the first leg (Grid 222/260 meters), Emma Virginia counts the meters
(with Juliet as backup), and the others sight the markers. We nail the first
green frog hanging on a string from a low tree. Erin and Brenna take the second
leg (Grid 152/ 100 m), Emma Palley measures the meters, the rest do the
sightings. We find the second rubber frog on a dead branch. The team works
together on the third leg (Grid 99/ 360 m), switching assignments, and after a
longer walk we re-enter the dry riverbed. No frog. Ah, but less than 50 feet
down stream we find the third frog dangling from its string on a stick in the
sand. Much cheering and congratulations. Group A reconfigures for the next
task, and taking turns navigates with compass and map an almost direct line
through the African bush back to camp.
The second, and tougher test of orienteering came on 30
September. I went out with my usual morning group from Group B. We all climbed
into a Land Rover, blindfolded our own eyes, and rode out into the bush with an
armed instructor. Blindfolds off. Where are we? Group B first has to locate
themselves using landmarks, and then find its way back to camp (and to my
afternoon tea!). They are superb! First, they stand still, discuss where we
might be, get a bearing. Then, they find a landmark. After some minor
hesitation and interspersed with discussions, we all walk for 47 minutes to
discover an abandoned dirt airstrip we had seen earlier. Next they take a
compass reading, and plot their way to camp (which was marked on their map).
Every 100 feet or so, they repeat the process: Reading, landmark, walk. Sharing
the work and sightings, they reach camp in under two hours of walking.
Excellent work! (And the tea tasted especially delicious!)
Timbavati is well known among our students for wildlife
sightings. In day training and evening game drives, we spotted giraffes
(including a very young female), three rhinos (a mother, her calf, and her next
suitor, a huge bull), zebra, Cape buffalo, various hawks, owls and vultures,
plus the usual brilliant assortment of birds. One morning we come upon a small
pride of lions: four two-year-old cubs, two lionesses, and a handsome male, all
(as they say) “in good nick,” in excellent condition. We roll up close (10
feet), turn off the engine on our Land Rover, and watch them—well—sleep. It is
mid-morning. I had heard them at dawn roaring. To be honest, lions in daytime
are boring; they move about as much (and in the same ways) as your domestic
house cat. These ignore us (as long as we stay seated in the vehicle we are
perfectly safe).
However, then we notice an old female stretched out on
the track in the dust, sleeping. She is grey-muzzled, her fur darker than the
younger lions, her ribs and pelvic bones protruding. When she rolled over, I
could see a slash wound down her right leg. It was open enough to see the
ligaments. When she stretched onto her back, we all gasped: she was mortally
wounded. There, on her upper right chest to the left of her leg was a deep,
penetrating wound perhaps 6 by 8 inches. We speculated that she may have been
attacked by another pride in a territorial dispute, or gored by a wart hog or a
buffalo.
The pride ignored her, and as the morning progressed
they slowly moved away from her deeper into the bush. Our instructor estimated
that she had no more than a few days to live. That night, we tracked by vehicle
the male as he made the rounds of his territory, marking it with urine and on
one occasion a magnificent series of roars. The cubs and females, including the
old grannie, were nowhere to be seen. Lions are in some difficulty across
southern Africa. In our final leg of this field trip we pitched up in the
crowded research and tourist camp called Skukuza, in Kruger National Park
(KNP). Skukuza holds about 2,000 people—all inside a fence—and is the principal
research camp of this large and important national park. (Kruger is the size of
New Jersey.) We had lectures in the field about fire control and management
(much of this section of KNP was accidentally burned during July and August),
alien species of plants intruding into the ecosystem, and water management
issues in this dry savannah. A fourth lecture discussed, among other issues,
the increase in tuberculosis among the lion population, which is being infected
by the Cape buffalo. A drop in the number of lions is of great concern, since
tourists come to the national parks to see the Big Five, of which lions may be
the most dramatic. (Anyone who has seen lions hunt and kill a large prey like
the Cape buffalo will know what I mean.)
The interaction of humans and wildlife come together
over the diseases threatening these species, and over the impacts that human
are having on these conservation areas like Kruger and Timbavati. Another
lecture linked these issues in discussing “social ecology,” the expansion of
national parks, and the protection of challenged ecosystems. Kruger is now
taking down its eastern fence along the Mozambique border. It is translocating
some 6,000 elephants across the line. In the next two years or so, Kruger will
join with the Limpopo parks and a major park in Zimbabwe to form a
Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) roughly the size of western Europe.
Eight such parks are underway across southern Africa, and more are in agreement
or planning stages. With this large-scale effort to conserve ecosystems,
biodiversity, wildlife, etc comes a difficult task to incorporate large numbers
of very poor people who live along the edges (or sometimes inside) these
conservation areas. Without bringing them into the wildlife, tourism and
environmental equation, these expanding TFCAs will not be able to move forward.
Thus, our next field trip, which beginning tomorrow (10 October), will focus on
indigenous communities: the farming community of Kaphunga, Swaziland, then
onward to eastern Kwa-Zulu Natal (South Africa) to visit some of the
communities being brought into the economic and environmental issues of
wildlife management, tourism, expansion of conservation areas.
I should close by adding that we saw wild dogs in
Kruger—a first for me in 40 years of African experience. We returned to
Pretoria ready last Thursday (4 October) ready for laundry, home cooking, rest,
and more lectures preparing us for tomorrow’s trip.
Dartmouth did indeed bring the rains, and some
unseasonably cold weather. But the Africans celebrated with us: the rains have
come, a blessing to Africa and its people. The jacaranda trees are almost in
full bloom now. Their lavender petals scatter across the red clay soil, their
promise fulfilled.
Cheers,
Jack and Kathleen
Fourth Letter from Africa
25 October 2007
Dear families and friends,
Karen and I left Dartmouth and New Hampshire on 6 October, joining the
Africa FSP 2007 in Pretoria on 18 October when the group had returned from
their second field trip. During that time, we were exploring Lesotho for the
2008 Africa FSP program!
Karen and I reviewed with the students what they had
done for the first half of the term, and helped them prepare for their mid-term
exam. Professor Michael Dorsey of the Environmental Studies Program at
Dartmouth joined the FSP at this time, as well. He lectured and gave the
students assignments in preparation for their visit to the Apartheid Museum (23
October), and following the tour we had an extensive discussion about
globalization, economic empowerment, and a more current version of "apartheid"
between the "haves" (us) and the perhaps billon people who "have not" – and are
therefore not benefiting from globalization. Professor Dorsey departed for
Dartmouth this morning.
As you are aware, your students are enrolled in three
courses while here in Africa. One of these, ENVS 84, is a projects course, and
this year the topic is environmental health. I have asked the students to
explore issues where the environment (built environment, wild environments,
home, and workplace) contributes to adverse health effects. The topics that
they will explore range from specific animal diseases (e.g., foot and mouth
disease and cattle movement in Southern Africa exported to the Northern
Hemisphere) and human diseases (diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory
infections, which are the biggest threat to rural children under 5 years of
age), to diseases connected to employment (e.g., asbestos and coal dust
exposure). To augment this course, Dr. Dawn Harland, Assistant Director of
Dartmouth Colleges Student Health Services, arrives in Jo-burg on Friday, 26
October. She will accompany us to Namibia and serve as a technical consultant
to the students, while assisting me with lectures regarding public health and
the environmental impacts on humans, domestic livestock, and wild animals. In
our travels in Namibia we will learn much from lectures at venues that we
visit. We’ll visit the Cheetah Conservation Fund, where there will certainly be
lectures on diseases that threaten the cheetah population as well as other
wildlife. Toward the end of the trip we will visit the Rossing Mine, which is a
huge, open-pit uranium mine. The biggest concern for workers there is not
radiation, but rather dust exposure. Upon our return to Pretoria, the students
will finish their ENVS 84 papers and present the results to the group and to
others at the University of Pretoria.
Finally, e-mail access will be extremely limited in
Namibia, and it is likely that your students will not have access until we take
a break in the town of Swakopmund on 7 and 8 November; following that there
will be an e-mail "blackout" period form Swakopmund until we return to
Pretoria.
Everyone is excited to visit Namibia and in years past
this has been one of the highlights of the entire Africa FSP.
Sincerely,
Bill Roebuck
Fifth Letter from Africa
26 October 2007
Dear Parents, Friends and Family:
We have returned from our second field trip and finished our classes. The
Roebucks (Bill and Karen) have arrived to take over the program, Professors
David Mbora and Michael Dorsey have joined us and given a series of excellent
lectures, and departed. Kathleen and I depart next Saturday. The students have
handed in two small papers, and taken Prof. Mbora’s quiz and my mid-term. They
are also preparing for the Namibia desert-ecology field trip and their ENVS 84
paper, a large research document focusing on health issues in this region. Dr.
Dawn Harland, MD, Director of Dick’s House at Dartmouth, flew in this morning
to join them for the Namibia trip.
We returned to Pretoria ten days ago from the harsh
realities of our second field trip just in time to catch the excitement of the
run-up to the South Africa vs. England championship match at the World Rugby
Cup final in Paris. Last Saturday, South Africa set up more than 70 large,
outdoor screens across the country; some 6,000 fans gathered here in tiny
Hatfield Square. A contingent of our students organized a party and watched the
game at one of their homestay families. I turned on the TV in our flat, but
kept the sound down so I could hear the gathering in Hatfield Square
half-a-mile away. For me, it was like being in the stadium.
And, of course, the Springboks won the World Rugby Cup,
beating England 15-6 and setting off a nationwide celebration. The cheering,
horn honking, dancing in the streets went on most of the night and set off
celebrations that continue today almost a week later. We all are now basking in
the excitement of the ’Boks victory. Everyone seems to be wearing the South
African flag or the green-and-gold of their “Bokkies.”
We have seen a large spectrum of The Rainbow Nation
this term. The roaring celebration of this country and its cries for “national
unity” after the dramatic victory by its inter-racial rugby team serve in
contrast to the more somber and entrenched issues we have encountered and
studied. This last week we visited the Apartheid Museum and held a series of
seminar discussions, lead by Prof. Dorsey, about South Africa’s difficult
history and the fragility of its new nation. And we interrogated some very
troubling questions: Has apartheid really ended? Is there a global economic
apartheid taking its place?
This, of course, was the sub-text of our second field
trip. We needed a close look at the rising regional tensions between
conservation and development, and between wildlife management and national park
expansions and the indigenous communities that border those parks and suffer
the heavy and chronic burden of high unemployment. Put another way: South
Africa’s economy continues to grow at about 5% GDP annually; it is in its
seventh consecutive year of positive economic growth. But despite a expanding
and largely black middle-class, the nation’s unemployment rate remains fixed at
about 25% of its work force; when you add in people who have stopped looking
for work, that number jumps to 45%, many of them in the rural sector. This
forms a stormy backdrop to The Rainbow Nation.
We spent the second field trip examining these issues
and tensions. Specifically, we wanted to see, discuss, engage and analyze the
role of indigenous communities in conservation, wildlife management and,
perhaps most importantly, the rising promise of tourism as one part of “poverty
alleviation.” Remember, South Africa and its neighbors are aggressively engaged
in expanding and connecting their national parks across international borders.
For example, the fence between Kruger National Park and Mozambique is coming
down, and when connected to national parks and reserves in that country and in
Zimbabwe, this huge Trans-Frontier Conservation Area (TFCA) will form a park
larger than western Europe. With the World Soccer Cup being played in South
Africa in 2010, there is already a rising impact of trans-boundary tourism in
the country’s multi-tiered economy.
We visited and camped in four community areas where
local people are increasingly being engaged in eco-tourism, trained for roles
in tourist and wildlife management operations (as lodge staff or
rangers/guides, etc), or sharing in the profits from such activities. These
were in Kaphunga, Swaziland, and then Kosi Bay on the Indian Ocean, Tembe
Elephant Park, and finally in Phinda, a private up-scale tourist operation
re-investing its profits in the surrounding local communities.
We have visited Kaphunga each year since 2001. We stay
in a compound built by Mxolisi Mdluli, whom we call by his nickname Myxos
(pronounced ‘Meeks-sos’) and his close friend Sbali. The students rolled out
their sleeping mats in several bowl-shaped, straw-covered, beehive huts;
Kathleen and I pitched our tent. Our compound looked out across a series of
other small compounds and farmland that stretched over the gently rolling
hillside below us; we could see down several thousand feet to the valley floor
and the sugar cane fields and rivers below. Kaphunga consists of smallholder
farms, two primary schools, a secondary school and a clinic spread across these
mountain tops. The older kids near our compound walk six miles each way every
day to secondary school.
The principal crop is maize, watered only by rainfall,
and when we arrived the farmers Kathleen and I have come to know were making an
annual gamble: the rains had come, and they were plowing and planting maize
seeds. If the rains continue, and if there is a hot spell in January to ripen
the maize, their gamble will pay off in higher yields. The risk is visible: the
World Food Programme has maintained a large dusty-white tent near the secondary
school and runs a child nutritional program that provides one hot meal a day in
the primary schools. It is there because chronic drought since 2002 has caused
unbroken seasonal hunger.
Kaphunga is a very welcoming community, and our
students fan out to work with the farmers (spreading manure, plowing with teams
of six oxen) and to assist the teachers in the primary schools. But it is
unseasonably cold. Kathleen and I put on all of our clothing; the students are
in fleeces, the farmers in heavy coats. A bitter mist clings to these hilltops,
and only lifts momentarily when we all gather at Matjana Community School
nearby. The little primary kids are all lined up, many shivering, to sing
welcoming songs (some in two-part harmony) and the Swazi national anthem,
followed by a recitation of The Lord’s Prayer. The Dartmouth students, with a
solid core of excellent singers, respond with “Lean On Me,” which is so well
done that the principal and her teachers start gently dancing to it. They
conclude with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” done so well that I feel my throat
tighten.
The Swazi kids get in the last word with a roaring
cheer of appreciation and handclaps:
THANK YOU!!
[clap, clap, clap]
VERY MUCH!!
[clap, clap, clap]
KEEP IT. . .!!
[clap, clap, clap]
UUUUUUUPPPPPPPP!!!
[hands waving above their
heads]
We play a soccer game (in the hot sun!) at the
Ekukhanyeni Primary School, a large and more crowded facility than Matjana. The
field is surrounded by kids and we diplomatically tie (0-0), followed by more
cheers. We later bunch together in the community’s clinic to learn more about
the diseases afflicting the people of Kaphunga. HIV/AIDS is certainly one (60%
by one estimate), but we are surprised to hear the head nurse share her worries
about water-borne diseases and upper-respiratory infections (largely from
cooking fires in the huts). It is a disquieting, humbling hour.
As we all depart Kaphunga—Kathleen and I for the last
time—the sun is rising and I watch James the farmer plowing his field, the six
oxen drawing the steel shank along the slight curve of dark earth. Two women
walk down from his compound with a blue bucket containing his breakfast. We
ride into Manzini for our own breakfast at the market and a little bargaining
for Christmas gifts before setting out for Kosi Bay.
We pitch up that afternoon at the Utshwayelo Community
Camp. I can hear the surf of the Indian Ocean about a kilometer away across the
high dunes. We shower for the first time in four days and play a little rugby
before dinner. The evening discussion around the fire is one of the best yet;
we are joined by a young American couple working on an AIDS project; by Wayne
Matthews, conservation officer at Tembe Elephant Reserve, and his new assistant
Mandisa Mgobozi; and by Dr. ‘Scotty’ Kyle, his wife, Diana, and two of their
children. Dr. Kyle will lecture on a dune the next morning about “Gill-netting
in Kosi Mouth,” which is actually a key discussion about resource utilization
and the tensions between indigenous fishing activities and the need to conserve
resources (i.e. fish). Around the fire, we all discuss poverty, illness, and
indigenous communities well into the night. We debate whether or not the
Utshwayelo community can actually make a profit charging only R55 (about $8)
per person per night.
Kosi Bay, a World Heritage Site, give us a chance to
snorkel and swim in the tidal salt-water pools in the river’s mouth. It is
unrivaled: long white beach and sand bars, aqua-blue water, dunes that rise
eight to ten stories crossed only on foot or by four-wheel-drive vehicle.
We get back to work at Tembe Elephant Reserve. Wayne
Matthews and Nick de Goede, the Tembe Reserve’s manager, give us lectures on
the ecosystems and the local communities. The major issues here are how to
include those communities in the Reserve’s operations and profits—a goal for
more than two decades—and how to maintain the Reserve’s biodiversity. We spend
a day visiting various parts of the local community and discussing the Reserve
with its members. Some of these discussions are revealing: the need for better
schools, the place and role of clinics, the religious beliefs of community
members, the job and educational opportunities here and elsewhere, the
introduction of lions into the Reserve, etc.
The biodiversity issues are complex. To keep the
Reserve attractive to tourists, Reserve managers (including Matthews and de
Goede) have undertaken two controversial actions: to introduce four lions to
the Reserve in 2004; and to control the number of elephants in the Reserve. The
lion decision was made without consulting the local communities, who have
rights to use the Reserve to gather reeds and, on occasion, to cull (hunt)
excessive nyala. There are now 15 lions in the reserve, down from 17 after two
escaped and got into one community and had to be shot.
The Reserve’s managers are also concerned that the
elephant herd is exceeding carrying capacity and damaging vegetation and other
animals (most immediately diminishing the suni population). The controversy?
The park managers are actively darting elephants to inject contraceptives and
thus diminish the number of elephants. This is an experimental process
attempted in only a few places. It also re-directed our attention to earlier
work with the Henleys in Timbavati.
Finally we spent a night at Phinda, a very up-scale,
private African reserve. One camp we visited (prices start at $1,000 per person
per night) had floor-to-ceiling glass walls overlooking lighted waterholes, its
own private airstrip, an outdoor pool, etc. We, however, stayed in a tented
camp at greatly reduced costs, but the experience did allow us to discuss with
the reserve’s owners about how private conservation efforts could benefit local
communities. Phinda is run by a foundation and a private entity that cater to
“high-end visitors” in 40 safari lodges and camps globally. Its mission is
wildlife conservation, tourism balanced with benefits to local communities;
i.e. wildlife as a profitable form of land use. At Phinda it directly employs
274 people from the local communities and puts R5.5 million (more than
$800,000) directly into the local communities. Two of the local communities
also own three-quarters of Phinda’s land, rented to the operators in a 72-year
lease carrying a R1,5 million annual rent. We spent a full day in a fast, but
encouraging, round of meetings with local community members and projects funded
by the profits from the entire Phinda operation. The students agree that Phinda
is a good end to our fieldtrip. There is even an omen: As we depart, we come
upon a female cheetah and her four small, fuzzy cubs crossing the dirt
road.
Our field experiences this trip reached from Myxos’
eco-tourism adventure in the Kaphunga compound without electricity or
running water or much profit, to Phinda’s elegant and encapsulated presence in
the African bush, with its profits going to a primary school, clinics and a
development centre with computer training. Overall, it was a positive ending to
our quick investigations, and one that gave hope that at least in Kwa-Zulu
Natal, South Africa, local communities could indeed benefit from
carefully-considered tourism and wildlife management programs.
Pretoria looked lovely after the dust and wind of the
bush. The jacaranda trees now form lavender arches over the streets; their
blossoms cover the walkways outside our classroom. The Springboks have made
everyone proud and upbeat, and so have our excellent students. They now turn
their reading and discussions toward the desert of Namibia, the world’s oldest.
They pause only to call Kathleen and me into the classroom and sing to us in
farewell.
We find this goodbye especially difficult. These are
wonderful young people, among the very best of our AFSP teams: bright,
hard-working, kind to one another, absorbing all that Africa gives them. When
they finish singing; Kathleen and I respond in unison
THANK YOU!!
[clap, clap, clap]
VERY MUCH!!
[clap, clap, clap]
KEEP IT. . .!!
[clap, clap, clap]
UUUUUUUUPPPP!!!
Cheers,
Jack and Kathleen
Sixth Letter from Africa
20 November 2007
Dear families and friends of the Africa FSP students:
On 29 October, we flew the two hours to Windhoek, Namibia to begin our last
big field trip. Windhoek is the capital and largest city (about 300,000 pop.)
in a country the size of California and with a total population of 2 million.
Nearly a million people live in the far north where it is wet and tropical.
This leaves few people in the Namibia that we visited, but likely more that the
desert and dry lands can support at current resource usage. The academic
challenge was to understand as fully as 18 days can offer the ecological,
environmental, economic (agriculture, fishing, mining and tourism), and
political issues facing this largely dry desert country.
We were a group of 19 students; my wife Karen
Baumgartner; Dr. Dawn Harland, Assistant Director of the Dartmouth Student
Health Service; Ms. Aimee Ginsberg, the University of Pretoria coordinator for
the Dartmouth program, and me. Crazy Kudu/Wild Dog Safaris met us with two
vans, each capable of holding 15 passengers. The two guides, Willem Ganeb and
Elias Kahuadi, have guided us the previous four and three trips respectively.
They know our program well, and what we expect of the students.
On the first full day in Namibia we divided into two
groups. Half the group visited the National Botanical Gardens of Namibia, where
they first saw the unusual plants of Namibia, but more importantly learned how
the newly expected pharmacological properties of some plants have driven the
prices up and the plant populations down severely. Two good examples of
valuable plants: hoodia and devil's claw. Additionally, the issue of invasive
plants was discussed, as well as the water utilization and conservation
properties of native plants of the Namib Desert. The other half of the group
visited the water reclamation plant where effluent such as would come from a
standard sewage treatment plant in the United States is further processed into
drinkable water. The facility is state of the art; the primary psychological
issue one faces is drinking water that one bathed in only four days
previously!
From Windhoek, we spent two nights at the Cheetah
Conservation Fund (CCF) where many issues were examined. I will briefly touch
on only two. First, the world’s largest population of cheetah lives on
commercial farmlands, and these animals are tempted by and thus killed when
they hunt the stock. CCF has developed guard dog programs to protect calves,
goats, and sheep from cheetahs. One of CCF’s most ambitious programs is to
harvest the thorn bush and turn it into energy. The organization is just
beginning to turn a profit with fireplace logs sold under a "cheetah friendly"
logo. An even more ambitious project is to help develop an intermediate size
electric power plant fueled from thorn bush wood. The major problem for cheetah
and livestock farming is that most of the historical savanna grasslands have
now been replaced with thorn trees that exclude the habitat for cheetah and
farming as well.
From CCF we quickly toured the Etosha National Park.
This over 100-year-old treasure is similar in age and prominence to Kruger
National Park and Yellowstone National Park in the US. The geological structure
and tree species were the key items of our study at Etosha.
From Etosha we went to the Windpoort Game Farm and
spent the weekend examining game farming, trophy hunting, and ecotourism and
the difficulties of earning a living from this dry land in the shadows of
Etosha National Park and within large, fenced farms.
We left Windpoort on Monday and headed into the Namib
Desert proper to visit Twyfelfontain (a late stone age site of nearly 2000
petroglyphs) and the Brandberg (the highest point in Namibia and site of other
pre-European human activity). These two sites afford views of community
conservation and ways for rural communities to protect their heritage and earn
income by guiding tourists.
On 7 November we headed down the gravel plains of the
desert to Cape Cross to view the Cape fur seals coming ashore to deliver their
pups and breed. This seal has been and continues to be an economic
resource–both from the meat and fur harvested from the seals and from the
revenue earned by the many visiting tourists. This is certainly an
emotional/ethical and economic conflict, but one that is sanctioned by a
constitution that requires Namibian resources to be used sustainably for the
good of all Namibians. We then spent two nights in Swakopmund, an old colonial
town with striking German architecture. Our primary objective was to do
laundry, clean gear, shop for groceries, and allow the group a bigger space
than two busses and a small camp at night to roam in.
On the road again, we visited the Rossing Uranium Mine
of Rio Tinto Group. This one mine contributes nearly 5% of the gross domestic
product and is a major employer. The issues of concern related to the ENVS 84
course; that is, radiation exposure versus silica dust exposure. Turns out that
exposure to radiation is very minor compared to dust exposures that might be a
risk. Extensive engineering measures are used to suppress dust exposure. By
evening we arrived at the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre in the heart of
one of the driest and oldest deserts in the world.
Gobabeb is located on an ephemeral river, the Kuiseb
River (also called a linear oasis, as its water below the dry riverbed supports
a thin line of vegetation of all types running inland nearly 200 km). To the
south of this linear oasis is the sand sea of dunes that runs for hundreds of
kilometers, and to the north are the gravel plains that continue north into
Angola. Three ecosystems in less than 500 yards, and very fragile with variable
rains averaging less than an inch or two per year. The desert poses interesting
conflicts. It contains unique life forms, minerals that are of considerable
economic value to this poor country, and an early warning system that can and
does respond dramatically to climate change. The management issues are complex
and conflicting.
Approaching the end of this field trip, we visited the
heart of the sand sea composed of nearly stable star-shaped dunes and then on
to a Naukluft Mountain Park in the Namib. This, too, is a desert, but
provides considerably different vegetation and habitat. Here I held oral exams
for 40 minutes for each student, and they studied for the final exam that will
be given in Pretoria on Tuesday, 20 November.
Final exams in ENVS 40 and ENVS 42 are underway as I
write (10 a.m. local time on Tuesday, 20 November). I thought you might be
interested in what your student should or could know, so I’ve provided you with
a couple of questions that I’ve asked on the exam.
QUESTION #3 [2 to 3 pages]
The Windpoort Farm was purchased from a bank when the local farmer went
bankrupt attempting to raise goats and cattle. It appears, at least on initial
examination, that the farm is financed and sustained by the retirement funds of
the Osbornes and the current incomes of the Versfelds.
A. How can they turn a profit and sustain
Windpoort?
B. What does Windpoort contribute to Namibia?
C. What are the costs of Windpoort to the Namibian
environment?
D. What would you like to see Windpoort become in say
20 years?
QUESTION #4 [2 to 3 pages]
Namibia is one of only a handful of countries that allows seal harvests, and
one of even fewer countries that allow commercial harvests. For example,
Namibia’s neighbor to the south, South Africa, has banned sealing. Discuss how
Namibia should handle the sealing issue, listing the pros and cons for
individual Namibians and for the country as a whole.
This has been a very rewarding term, and it’s hard to believe that it’s
almost over.
Sincerely,
Bill Roebuck
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