safari

cara, andrew and i rose before the sun on tuesday to head to the border and meet our tour group.  we arrived and stood around awkwardly in the middle of three hundred and twenty semi-trailers waiting to cross the river into botswana. someone recognised our confusion and we were soon asked if we were “hunt x 3”. (hunt is andrew’s surname and was apparently our booking reference). it took us a moment to realise that we were, in fact, hunt x 3, and once that was established that is what we were called for the remainder of the tour. hunt x 3 were whisked across the river to botswana where we enjoyed a three-hour cruise up the chobe river. a beautiful start to our three-day safari.

'hunt x 3' cruising

just when i thought i couldn’t get any more relaxed i was seated in a restaurant for our post-cruise, pre-game-drive lunch. i swiftly ended my month-long flirtation with vegetarianism by ingesting nine different varieties of meat.... life was good. it was time to see some animals.

we were introduced to our six tour companions and our driver/guide. i’m going to call our driver/guide barry white because his voice was three octaves lower than any human voice i’ve ever heard before. our tour buddies came in the form of three pairs.

1. an oldish french couple... the slowest photographers in the history of the universe, armed with the biggest camera i’ve ever seen in my life. i’m going to call them the french twist.

2. a pair of danish friends who were addicted to tanning. i’m going to call them burnt apple danish and burnt peach danish.

3. a middle aged italian woman and what we think was her much younger african lover. they don’t get names because they just confused us and we didn’t really know how to talk to them.

we were off.

we had a wonderful game drive and found all the things you’d expect to find in an african jungle. the french twist got pretty annoying, pointing their bazooka-sized camera at anything that had eyes and then waiting a full ten minutes before taking their picture. barry white was starting to lose his cool a little with them and sometimes just drove away and pretended not to hear the twist yelling out. burnt apple and peach danish just smiled at everything. it was a bit disconcerting at first seeing their sparkling white teeth constantly on display with the back-drop of their overly tanned faces, but they had normal sized cameras and took their photos quickly so we became friends.

barry white quickly developed a habit of shooshing us all... incessantly. i’m not known for my quiet nature so i was on the receiving end of more shooses than anyone else in the jeep. he told us that we were scaring all the animals away, but i’m pretty sure the rocket-launcher sized camera in the hands of the french twist was what was scaring the animals away. it seemed the ‘be quiet’ rule did not apply to barry white himself though. he’d talk and carry on as much as he liked. sometimes the sound of his basey-baritone voice would cause a zebra to throw their underwear at him, but mostly he just yabbered on about migration patterns and coloured breasted this, that and the other, with the occasional “shoosh hunt x 3” thrown in for good measure. we didn’t love barry.

this guy!!

we were camping in the middle of chobe national park for two nights. before we went to sleep we were told that it probably wasn’t a good idea to get out of our tents to use the ‘bathroom’. if we felt we had to get out we were instructed to shine our light out our tent door so we could see the eyes of the predators shining back at us. no shining eyes meant we could probably dash to ‘the pit’ and relieve ourselves. shining eyes meant we would probably get eaten so we should zip back up and cross our legs for the night.

i prepared for the night by having a single mouthful of wine after 1pm.

at 2am that wine was ready to leave my bladder. i was alone and from what i could hear the cast of the lion king were clearly having a reunion dinner out the back of my tent. i was busting and needed to make a plan quickly. i’m not proud of what happened next, but here it is...

i can officially add ‘weeing in a ziplock bag’ to the list of things i’ve done once that i never need to do again. or if i’m being completely honest i’ll add it to the list of things i’ve done three times that i never need to do again. it’s done. let’s not speak of it ever.

barry white, the twist, the burnt danishes, the nameless lovers and hunt x 3 enjoyed two more days of game drives and river cruising. there were shooses galore as hunt x 3 found it increasingly difficult not to make fun of barry white and the bazooka-wielding french twist. there were lions, zebras, hippos, elephants, giraffes, mongoose (fun fact: the collective noun for mongoose is ‘a business’. so formal), jackals, pythons, crocs, 15 000 species of birds, dung beetles, impala, kudu, buffalo, and the moment i had come for... warthogs. it was beyond wonderful and i feel pretty lucky to live just up the road.

this guy at our campsite took camo to a whole new level

i hope your week has been equally full of discovery, awe and thankfulness. happy easter everyone!

falls

my name is nalishebo.

i’ve been attending the orphans and vulnerable children project (“the ovc”) in mwandi village, zambia for a few years now to eat my lunch. i guess you could say that life has tripped me up a few times... the circumstances of my life have often caused me to fall flat on my face. it’s been painful – sometimes humiliating – and relentless these past years. but i am still nalishebo.

 this is my story.

both of my parents have passed away, so i’m what’s referred to as a double orphan. i have an intellectual disability which has made education (and life in general) difficult in the past. but my biggest fall happened when six men in my village began routinely gang raping me some years ago. some mornings i found it hard to walk because of the abuse i had endured the night before. i was pretty sure my body wasn’t made for this. the family member who was supposed to be taking care of me was accepting payment from the men as they used me for this ‘service’. their rationale was that i had to pay my way through life somehow, and this seemed like a good solution.

this experience knocked me to the ground and i wasn’t sure if i’d ever be able to pick myself up again. bad falls are like that. they hurt your body, but they also make you fear the prospect of walking in the world again.

the staff at the ovc helped find an aunty of mine who i loved, but who had moved to namibia to live. she came back to mwandi to take care of me when my caregivers refused to prosecute the village men and the local police didn’t seem to care. i began to receive counselling from the team at the ovc and slowly i learned how to stand tall again. some days i still feel like i want to curl up on the floor and escape the world... but other days i feel like i might even be ready to try and run.

a few months ago i was accepted into a special school in a town not too far away from mwandi. in this place i will be cared for and nurtured by staff who are experts at helping those of us who life has tripped up. i came to my new school a few weeks ago and i think i’m going to like it here a lot.

i’ve heard of someone called victoria who lives just up the road from mwandi. apparently she falls all the time but lots of people say she is one of the most beautiful things they have ever seen. my name is nalishebo. even though life has caused me to fall more times than i can count, i hope you will see me the same way you see victoria. my falls have made me strong and beautiful, and my desire is that my life becomes one that inspires awe and wonder in all who stumble upon it.

victoria falls

learning

so i moved to africa. here’s five things i’ve discovered so far...

1. i’m more likely to get eaten by a hippo than to pick the correct key to open my front door.

i don’t know why there are twenty keys on the key ring for my house, but i’ve been told that’s the way it has to be. i spend a chunk of time each day searching for keys in haystacks for all sorts of other buildings too. over one hundred and fifty keys come to my house every night in a brown bag. i kind of know what eight of them do, but remain fairly convinced that the rest of them are just there to teach me patience.

a small percentage of my key stash pictured here

2. i shouldn’t be allowed to have a pet.

it sounds kind of heartless, but i don’t really like pets... and i’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual. i have to have a dog here for safety reasons, so i arrived and was greeted by my new dog kelly. i referred to kelly as a ‘she’ for a few weeks before someone kindly pointed out that she was a dude. kelly is brown and white and is a breed of some sort who i suspect now has a touch of gender dysphoria. in my fist week here he got locked in a room at our project over night. i didn’t notice he hadn’t followed me home. then just a few days ago i accidentally locked him in a shipping container for an hour on a 57 degree day. he only escaped by way of an accidental intervention from one of my colleagues. i’m not a great pet owner, and it turns out they have a host of good reasons to not like me. in other news, i probably shouldn’t have children.

kelly reluctantly posing for a selfie with me

3. my feet will never be clean again.

i only have to take four or five steps out my front door before my feet are 12 shades darker than they should be. mwandi is built on sand. it’s rainy season here so some days the sand is a bit clumpy and wet. other days it resembles a beach... kind of... but no matter what the weather is doing, the sand gravitates to my feet like i gravitate to donut king - meant to be close together at all times. i scrub about nine layers of skin off my feet every night in the shower to attempt to get them clean. my pumice stone has halved in volume and i think my feet may have gone down a size or two due to the lost skin layers. i see children’s shoes in my future.

the result of a four-minute morning stroll

4. jobs that should take five minutes will always take at least three hours.

i haven’t always had the best of times when dealing with zambian immigration, but i was assured that this time would be smooth sailing... and it almost was. i got served immediately when i entered the building and it seemed like the five minute job was only going to take two minutes. i thought i was about to leave, only to be informed at the last moment by the officer serving me that they didn’t have a photocopier and they needed a copy of my documents before i could get my passport stamped and leave. i was told i had to take my almost-completed documents to a hotel (kind of nearby... but not as nearby as i was initially led to believe) to get them to do a photocopy. once this was done i had to line up all over again to give them my copy and get the magical stamp in my passport. i eventually made it back to the front of the line only to be told that the person who operated the stamp for people with surnames beginning with ‘w’ was not in the office so i’d have to wait a bit longer. five minute job took three hours.

two year visa... if i last that long :-)

5. this place is good for my soul.

i’ve spent the past month working harder than i ever have in my life. i work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week... although it is sunday today (theoretically my day off) and i’ve just worked for eleven hours :-) it’s hard. it’s hot. i don’t know anywhere near enough to get through most of my days. sometimes i’m frustrated. sometimes i cry. sometimes the stories of the children i’m working with rip my heart out of my chest... but other times their stories gather the pieces of my broken heart and put it back together. orphaned and vulnerable children are not voiceless like some are inclined to say. they don’t require me to be their voice. they require you and i to take the time to listen to their voice. i’ve discovered it to be one of the best sounds in my world... one that restores peace and contentment to my soul. you should totally come and hear them for yourself.

one of the amazing kids i get to hang out with every day

vietnam II

so much has been happening since i last wrote... so much laying about drinking cocktails by pools... so much walking through old towns so annie can look at handbags... so much eating of vietnamese foods that are light like clouds, and delicious – delicious like chicken flavoured clouds... so much sitting in bunkers imagining the horrors of war... so much riding of bicycles on terrible roads and marveling at the generosity of people who put up with us interrupting their lives. then we went to some tunnels...

the location: vinh moc tunnels

the scene: a terrified annie and a slightly less terrified kt being ushered into three hundred metres of tunnels that descend to fifteen metres below ground.

i was keen (if a little scared) to go adventuring in the tunnels. ‘keen’ is probably not the word we’d use to describe how annie was feeling about the tunnels, but we were on a tour with about a dozen other people and she didn’t want to be the only one not brave enough to go in. so in we went. *insert joke about camels and needle eyes here*

annie’s face quickly went from this...

to this...

we were underground for about twenty minutes, in which time annie managed to hyperventilate an impressive fifteen times. then it was all over. annie quickly declared that it was the worst experience she had ever had and that she would henceforth be referring to events of her life as either BT (before tunnel) or AT (after tunnel). eight hundred people took turns (three hundred at a time) living in these tunnels for six years during the vietnam war. mind sufficiently blown.

four days AT was the date of our next big adventure... a tour to the perfume pagoda. i had no idea what this was but annie wanted to go so i paid for our tour and gave it to her as a birthday gift (her birthday was 5 days AT).

it all started with another horrific bus ride (the starting point for any vietnamese tourist experience... this was number seven for us). we were then ushered to a fleet of small boats being manned by tiny vietnamese women who would row us up the perfume river for an hour or so. annie and i were ushered to the side by our tour guide while everyone else was stuffed into a boat. we’re not exactly sure why, but along with three people from holland we got put into a bigger boat with seats... i quickly decided our boat was for the bigger boned and will be calling it the bbb (bigger-boned-boat). the bbb was being rowed by what i can only assume was a vietnamese olympic rower. she weighed slightly less than my left thigh, but she moved us up the river like a pro.

bbb in action

we arrived and had lunch where, due to my complete inability to use chopsticks, i ate about 5 grains of rice in the time everyone else polished off their meal. we were informed that we had a gentle 2km ascent ahead of us to get to a cave that looked like a dragon’s mouth. for as long as i can remember i’ve longed to see a cave that looks like a dragon’s mouth... count us in! there was an option to get a cable car to the top which was annie’s initial preference, but i talked her out of it and convinced her to hike up with me.

the gentle ascent swiftly turned into what annie started referring to as a cliff of stairs. turns out vietnamese tour guides are big fat liars. there was nothing ‘gentle’ about what we were doing. it was raining and slippery and there was no end to the staircases that stretched before us each time we turned a corner. annie made it clear that all of the horrors of the world were my fault, and about three quarters of the way up she uttered these words... “i’d rather be back in the tunnels.” safe to say it was the best birthday gift i’ve ever given. you’re welcome annie.

annie refusing to look at the camera because i'm ruining her life

other phrases uttered by annie on the way up the million stairs...

“i forgot to put deodorant on this morning... we really need to get to that perfume pagoda?”

“if this cave doesn’t look EXACTLY like a dragon’s mouth i’m really going to lose it.”

we eventually made it to 'the dragon's mouth' cave. it looked just like a giant cave. someone pointed to a pile of rocks and asked if it was the dragon’s tongue. if i tilted my head and squinted my eyes a bit it looked exactly like a really nice pile of rocks inside a giant cave.

spot the dragon's mouth... and if you find it point it out to me

we were shown several different altars where people knelt to pray for babies, husbands, money etc. lots of people were leaving butter cookies for buddha on the altars which i found lovely, but they also reminded me that i’d just hiked up a mountain with five grains of rice as my only fuel. wanna share those cookies buddha? my tour guide suggested i should stay a while and pray for a husband. i thought a better use of my time would be to pray that i regain feeling in my frozen feet (pluggers: the sensible hiker’s choice).

this way to buddha's cookie stash

 all in all, i loved it. annie hated it. we got the cable car down.