Dear Friends:

The 20 Dartmouth students arrived safely in Pretoria on 20 September. Most of them seemed well-rested, and showed great spirit &endash; which has carried through the first several weeks &endash; when they got up promptly at 0630 (0030, or 12:30 AM EDT) and set out after breakfast for our first orientation. It's been a very fast two-and-a-half weeks, and I write this from Harare as we prepare to take the night train to Bulawayo and then drive into Matopos NP for our rhino research and then on to Hwange for our 24-hour game count (among other work) and to Vic Falls for the glories of that World Heritage Site.

Within hours of their arrival, the students ate lunch surrounded by 8 adolescent Cheetahs. This year we did our orientation around Pretoria, South Africa, and that included the Cheetahs and an extraordinary visit to ancient caves and archaeological sites with a clear and dramatic lecture by a palaeontologist followed by a climb down into one cave to stand before the oldest recorded site for human habitation and, it is thought, the first cooking fire. In a sense, this was where we all began genetically &endash; and this was where our own African voyage started.

Ah, those Cheetahs. Next stop was the De Wildt Cheetah Centre project, where we walked among Cheetahs and had a chance to get chased by and feed Wild Dogs (safely from an open safari vehicle). Both species are endangered and on the CITES Appendix I list. We learned about Cheetah (and Wild Dogs) breeding patterns, distinctive markings, hunting and feeding methods, social and territorial characteristics, diet, etc. For example, Do you know the markings of a "King Cheetah" or why the animal is not doing well in the wild? (Your student knows!) There are only 75 King Cheetahs left in the world, and 9 are at the De Wildt Centre. (We also saw and discussed the Brown Hyena, which our lecturer described as having jaws that produce 300 pounds per square inch "of snap!" We may see these chaps in the wild in the Kalahari!)

Among the most interesting Cheetah facts I learned was that the Cheetah can accelerate from 0-70 kph in 2 seconds, cover 6 meters in one stride, and make a 90-degree turn at that speed!

We next travelled to Kruger National Park, where the students pitched tents (in the dark) before a spectacular night game drive. We loaded into an open vehicle with six tiers of seats, an armed driver and two large student-held spot lights. We drove across the African lowveld at sunset, and when darkness fell (quickly, as it does here), the night was all eyes glowing in the spotlight: Wildebeests, Giraffe, Impala, Kudu, Springbok and at a distance a rhino. Then suddenly a big cat caught in the headlights: We coasted toward it, and as it turned to regard us we saw our first leopard. It was a lovely young male, and he stayed at the edge of the dirt road not more than 10 feet from us for more than a moment as we photographed and watched him before he slipped into the night without a sound. (I add here that one of our students, Caroline Pott, whose family was posted to Johannesburg for several years, has visited Kruger twice before and seen a leopard both times. She brought us good luck. I, for example, have only seen three leopards since 1968; two this year, however.)

At the Southern Africa Wildlife College (SAWC), we continued our study of wildlife, wildlife management issues, and started our work on community-based conservation (CBC), sometimes also called Community Based Natural Resource Management. SAWC trains wildlife managers and rangers and the College, located on a hill just outside Kruger and open to the park, had about 55 full-time students there with us. We slept in modern rondavaals with thatched roofs in which, the students discovered, there were rodents and (tracking the rodents) snakes.

We also took night drives in small groups, but the bulk of our day was filled with lectures and studying. We all had to learn 10 categories of tracks (What print has 4 toes, but shows no nails; what has 4 toes with nails?) We went out tracking at 0500, before sunrise, and found fresh lion tracks, rhino and hippo. One lesson, conducted by a very experienced ranger/tracker, was especially well designed (or lucky): we found a "midden" and from the tracks, scats and fresh urine smell determined it was a rhino. When we started following the tracks, however, we quickly decided that it was a hippo. We tracked the hippo for about two kilometers and came upon two small ponds. We waited, and then five hippos, including a very young one, soon came up for air and made loud blowing noises at us.

SAWC focuses much of its academic work on rural communities that are located next to wildlife areas, such as Kruger. This is a major issue in Africa because it brings into play history (the forced movement of indigenous Africans to lower, less productive land, which is where the national parks were later placed), wildlife management (the intrusion into these communities of dangerous and destructive wildlife, eg lions, hippos, elephants that kill people and eat crops), social ecology (the claims of indigenous peoples to land now in national parks; or to land next to national parks), wildlife problems (the culling of elephants and translocation of rhinos away from people), the trans-frontier conservation area (TFCA) proposals (to link large game parks from South Africa to Tanzania). We are studying these issues in depth and I am proposing to the students that they do their large (200-page) research project on this.

Our study of rural communities, begun at SAWC, continued in Swaziland. We rode by bus across the border &endash; a time-consuming activity &endash; through the capital (Mbabane) and on to Manzini, where we met Myxo (pronounced "Meek-so"; full name Myolisi Mdluli), a charming, kind and brilliant young man who is running a small eco-tourism venture (now called "cultural tourism") in a mountain village. We spent the night with Myxo in his scruffy backpackers hostel outside Manzini &endash; the students loved it: mattresses on the floor, two bathrooms for 28 guests, communal kitchen, loud live music until 3 AM. I fortunately had my own small room and got up at 0500 to watch the sunrise and listen to a symphony of African song birds brighten the dawn.

We spent the morning at the large market in Manzini, where some of the students bought shirts, small carved items and several of the men got their heads shaved while two women also got short hair cuts. (Don't worry, it will grow out by December!) Manzini has a very interesting African market, complete with three traditional healers in small booths. I watched one for a while. He had roots, starfish, leaves and other natural items in his covered stall. Just by the door, he had turned a Coke carton upside down, for a chair, and his "patients" sat on it while speaking to him inside the stall. Then, after listening to symptoms, he selected several items, ground them into a powder, put the powder into an old newspaper, rolled it and handed it to the "patient". The patient paid in cash. Really not much different from what my great grandfather did in Kansas in the late 19th century; we still have his pill-making table.

We went up to Myxo's village, kaPhunga, by bus. The students (and I) all settled into a circular compound that Myxo has built roughly in the center of a community of small farms along a ridge in open mountain country. From the eastern side of our compound, we looked down into a wide valley and out for about 50 miles or so. (We couldn't see that far because this time of year people are burning off the grass, or the sugarcane stalks, in preparation for spring planting.)

The compound consisted of three square thatched-roof huts, a central sloped "beehive" hut, which was new and quite lovely inside with the bent-wood supports, plus a cooking hut, and a small (5-meter in diameter) cooking area with central open fire and enclosed by woven sticks and thatching. The students slept on the ground in these huts. The "privy" was a small thatched-roof, mud hut; straight drop, toilet seat on top, great open door view to the valley floor. Everyone used it.

Our first full day there, the students split into three groups. But first, we all walked to the primary school along a dirt path across open highveld. The school consisted of a long single-story building (east-west), two smaller classrooms (north-south) and another small classroom across an open field. About 20-25 kids were in each class, with desks and textbooks for each child. The school was freshly painted (not for us).

The principal brought all of the children outside to meet us. Our students stood somewhat awkwardly facing the kids, who were all in little blue shirts, brown skirts or short pants, most of the shoeless. The Dartmouth students formed a large circle with the students and Courtney Smalley and Hilke De Smedt in the middle. Together, they taught the school kids: "Put your right foot in, take your right foot out, etc.), acting out the words for them. Next, the principal asked the Dartmouth students to sing the national anthem, which they did carelessly, hats on, some laughing. Myxo stepped up to them and said (so everyone could hear him): "In Swaziland, we take our national anthem seriously. It means a lot to us." Then, while the Dartmouth students looked embarrassed, those little Swazi kids sang their country's lovely national anthem, in full voice, with African rhythms, while standing straight and in a close half-circle.

From that, some of the Dartmouth students stayed at the school and taught in the classes for most of the morning. The others walked back to the compound to help construct a new beehive hut, while a third group rode Myxo's pickup down to help an old man thatch his roof. I should mention that three students got up at sunrise to go to another farm to help the elderly farmer there shovel manure onto an oxen-pulled, wheel-less skidder, to be spread on his fields.

In retrospect, each moment in kaPhunga seemed unique. For some of us, it was the sunrises and sunsets, when the students climbed large rocks and wrote in their journals or had some quiet time. For others, it was riding the pickup down to the well to fetch water in large plastic containers for the group. After claiming that the truck looked just like his own pickup, Darron Carriero got to drive it for one round-trip to the well. (We filtered the water to assure its quality and everyone stayed healthy.) I estimated that we consumed 1000 litres of water in two days.

Or, we recall the gathering at dinner meals, when two village women walked over to our compound and cooked on the open fire. We ate maize meal (as a thick porridge), meat, a bean curry, spinach (which everyone loved). One afternoon, Myxo asked the group if they would like to buy a goat and eat it; only three raised their hands. So we bought a chicken instead, and during the day it pecked its way around the compound until near dinner time, when one of the students asked who was going to kill and pluck the chicken. Myxo: "You."

At this, the students scattered. Most were certain that chicken came wrapped in plastic on a nice cardboard tray, or in a bucket with a smiling old man on the side. But Myxo assured them that if they wanted to eat chicken, they had to kill it. So the Dartmouth kids went about seeking volunteers among their ranks to do in the chicken. After much debate, Vanessa Lee stepped forward.

Next problem: catch the chicken. As soon as it got pursued &endash; by students, village children, the two women cooks &endash; the chicken proved quite adept at evasion: in an out of the compound's marginal fencing, around rocks, through brush, over barbed wire. Finally, one of the bare-footed village kids snagged it, and brought the limp bird back to the compound. Everyone then had an opinion about how to kill the chicken. Some recalled grandfathers and axes, others cited grandmothers and elaborate neck-wringing ceremonies. The six vegetarians weighed in with moral choices and grave consequences.

Venessa bravely stepped forward &endash; and was handed a small knife with serrated edges. A bread knife! Now everyone yelled advice. Finally, one of the village women stretched the chicken's neck as long as it would go, and good ol' Vanessa sawed and sawed with the bread knife until the deed was done. After much screaming and several students loudly threatening stomach inversions, the village woman calmly took the dead chicken and started plucking it in water heated over the fire.

That night we ate maize meal with kidney beans (delicious), spinach (delicious), beef (delicious, to the remaining carnivores), and chicken. Only one student ate one piece of the chicken. For the moment, the vegetarians commanded the high culinary moral ground.

On Sunday 1 October, we flew into Harare to begin this leg of our term. The students' urban homestay families met us and took them to their homes. Each student is staying with a Harare family in the northern suburbs of the city. They are now getting used to taking Commuter Omnibuses (called "ETs" here) to and from classes. David Cohen runs 7 kilometers to classes in the morning; Merrielle Macleod will soon pace him. Most of the students live with middle-class families &endash; school teachers, civil servants, newspaper editors, private sector employees &endash; except Lindsey Moore, who lucked out with a neurosurgeon. Our classes are held in the outdoor Education Centre of the Herbarium and Botanic Gardens, a lovely site surrounded by trees and shrubs native to this region. The jacaranda trees are now in bloom, and Harare's avenues are covered in arches of lavender blossoms; these blossoms are also scattered across the red clay soil along those streets.

Our course of study this week has been focused on the trees and vegetation we will encounter during our field work. (Do you know what a miombo woodland is, or how to identify a mopane tree?) We also had a lecture on medicinal trees and shrubs, which brought about a heated discussion about traditional healers and "western" medicine. (What diseases may be "cured" by the sausage tree [Kigelia africana] ?) The students have completed two small quizzes and Friday 6 October took their first examination, on tree and shrub identification, which is now being graded by the Botanic garden staff. We have also started lectures on the political economy of Southern Africa and soon the urban environment.

Oh, one more thing. One lecture focused on "indicator species" and the young woman instructor, a Research Officer at the Botanic Gardens, discussed and compared the baobab and mopane trees. First we learned how to identify each tree, then why it was an indicator (and of what), and then its various uses including as a shelter and a food source. We got to crack open the balloon-sized baobab fruit (which is hard enough to burn as fuel) and eat the nuts, which are high in vitamin C. Then the instructor brought out mopane caterpillars (called "mopane worms") which are fried and eaten as a snack; this is high in protein.

Most of the student stepped right up for both the baobab and mopane culinary treats; I, on the other hand, selected vitamin C over protein.

All good wishes to you,

Dr. Jack Shepherd

Director