Still Alive and Well In Namibia

So so sorry my blog has been falling behind!  Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have an excuse for it…my laptop has completely broken on me!  We came back from Sossusvlei on Sunday night and when I went to update my blog, my laptop screen was completely gray and I cannot access anything on it!  Thankfully I should have most of my documents backed up and the girls on the trip have been gracious enough to let me use their laptops when I need to!

Now—where to start?!  It has been so long…Two weekends ago, we took our trip up to Northern Namibia for six days.  There, we experienced the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Otjiwarongo, Etosha National Park, an introduction to Desert Dwelling Elephants with Dr. Betsy Fox in Otjiwarongo, the Ondao Mobile Schools, Uanee’s school and farm on the outskirts of Opuwo and so much more!  To make this massive post more manageable, I’ll divide them up in to events! 

The Journey North with Cheetahs and Elephants

We left Windhoek to travel a few hours to Otjiwarongo where we stayed the night at the Out of Africa Bed & Breakfast.  The B&B had these hotel rooms where each room was an individual “hut.”  It was a very beautiful campus with a pool, amazing landscaping and scenery.  However, McKenzie and me’s room had a bit of an ant problem.  That night, I was just thankful we did not have a spider problem!

That night after dinner, we met with Dr. Betsy Fox who works for the Elephant-Human Relations Aid (EHRA) and it was so fascinating to learn about the relationship between the Himba and Herero people and the elephants in Namibia.  Many of the people on farms in Northern Namibia believe it is back luck to come across an elephant so they often end up killing it and that is a major problem here because their numbers are so low already.  Not to mention a Desert Dwelling Elephant’s gestation period is 22 months and then a mama elephant can nurse her calf for up to two years!  Thank God we aren’t elephants!  Many mother elephants also wait about four years between calves and even when they do have a calf, the mortality rate is around 50% because they often times cannot keep up with the rest of the herd when running or they get trampled in a stampede.  After learning all that fascinating knowledge, it was easy to see why Dr. Betsy Fox was so passionate about educating Namibians to conserve the Desert Dwelling Elephant.

Another reason why EHRA is so amazing in educating Himbas and Hereros about elephants is because they show them how to “elephant-proof” their farms.  Many people are scared of elephants because they will come through and completely destroy farms in search of food or water, as it is scarce here.  So, EHRA will help communities and farms build stonewalls around their windmills, watering holes and gardens so the elephants cannot trample through them and destroy a community’s access to food and water.  However, the stonewalls still allow the elephants to access the water from watering holes and EHRA helps the people realize that it is okay if the elephants take some of their water, as they have earned it because they have found it.  As Dr. Betsy Fox said, the water in the watering holes is no more the human’s water than it is the elephant’s water.

Dr. Betsy Fox also showed us some of the characteristics and body language of elephants and what to do if you come across them, which actually came out handy when we went on our game drive through Etosha National Park!  (Now you’ll have to keep reading!)

Fun Elephant Facts:

·         Elephants can be left or right tusked, just as humans are left and right handed.  You can tell this because that one tusk is often more worn.

·         An elephant’s gestation period is 22 months.

·         An elephant calf nurses from its mother for up to two years and can eat solid foods at 5 months.  

·         EHRA has found that when you clap softly and say “hoova, hoova, hoova” the elephant will go away quietly and quickly without disturbing the farms or communities.  This is another strategy they teach the Himba and Herero people.

·         Elephants live 60-70 years.

·         Elephants continue to grow throughout their entire life.

·         Elephants’ tusks continue to grow throughout their entire life as well.

·         They can hold 12-15 liters of water in their trunk.

·         They have six sets of teeth throughout their life but the last set starts to wear out in their 40s or 50s, so sadly, many elephants die of starvation because they cannot chew and digest their food when their teeth wear out. 

·         Elephants digest 40% of their food.  Many other animals live on their dung.

·         When mating, males have temporal lobes that are prominent because they’re filled with liquid and dribble urine down their back legs to look for females.  Female elephants have smaller heads and secrete liquids from their temporal lobes to communicate their moods.

·         Elephants are known to climb hills and rocky places.

·         The older elephants have hourglass shaped heads.

·         An elephant’s footprint is unique just like our fingerprints are unique.

·         Myths of elephants are that they kill you, eat you, are vengeful and if you come across them mating, they will kill you.  These myths contribute to reasons why Hereros are scared of elephants and often end up killing them. 

The next morning, we woke up early to visit the Cheetah Conservation Fund outside of Otjiwarongo where we took safari vehicles through their parks and observed the two different groups of cheetahs.  They were absolutely fascinating and I was amazed at how tall and lean they were.

 

Visiting the Mobile School

After the cheetahs, we continued driving north, through Outjo where we all bought beautifully carved Makalani nuts and ate at a delicious bakery before hopping back in our van.  Hours later we reached Opuwo, where we stayed at the Okahane Lodge and had dinner with Mr. Kapi who was the principal of the Ondao Mobile Schools project.  He told us about how the schools got started and how many of the children who attend these schools live in rural farms and will travel over 20 km, or 12.5 miles, to go to school everyday!  The next morning, we drove down a very gravel, very unpaved, very bumpy, very unreliable road for about an hour and finally reached the Okarukoro Mobile School where there was one tent of lower primary children and one make shift building of upper primary children.  We donated some pencils, books, stickers, chalk, pencil sharpeners, papers, colored pencils, flour and maize to the school because the tent had literally nothing but a few tables and a mobile chalkboard.  After seeing that school, it made St. Barnabas look like it had resources!  The children were so beautiful and so thankful to be at school.  Some children were dressed in traditional Himba clothes and some were dressed in more “western” or modern clothes.  They were so excited to be stocked up with school supplies and they sang us some beautiful traditional songs.  As I’ve found at St. Barnabas and at the mobile school, all the students have their own part in a song and will sing harmonies with the melodies so listening to the children sing an amazing song gave me goose bumps and I found my throat swelling shut and I was fighting back tears—absolutely beautiful!  Unfortunately, our lack of music skills followed while we sang “Blessed Be Your Name” and “The National Anthem” to the children. 

 Our van getting stuck on the "road" to the school.

 The tent mobile school and one of the tables.

Village homestead on the way to the school.

Traditionally dressed Himba children.

The tent school.

Himba children

Passing out supplies

Paula and a little friend donating supplies.

After we spent the first half of the morning at the Okarukoro Mobile School, our guide Uanee took us to the community he grew up in where we saw his farm and the school he went to.  When we arrived, the children were not in school, but as 13 white people piled out of the van, school quickly got in to session and we distributed more school supplies to the children and, yet again, they sang us beautiful songs.  This time, we were more prepared so we were able to sound more musically gifted while singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” “The National Anthem” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in rounds.  After we interacted with the children, we spent a couple hours outside interacting with the adults in the community and it was absolutely amazing!  There were traditionally dressed Himba women with their children as well as traditionally dressed Herero women all hanging out under a large tree, waiting for the Emergency Food bags to be dropped off to the community. 

Himba women

Herero woman in the green and a himba woman in the back

Traditional himba woman

Their hair is and skin is a reddish color because it is covered in red paste and animal fat to protect them from the sun as well as portray their beauty.

Singing Head Shoulders Knees and Toes with the children.

Lions and Rhinos and Elephants, Oh My!

The next day, we entered Etosha National Park through the western gate, which is pretty special because you need a guide to enter in that way and this time of year, it is your best chance of seeing elephants as they have all migrated to the western side of the park.  When we entered Etosha, we drove to Dolomite Camp, where we were staying for the night and it was absolutely breath taking.  It is a lodge/resort that has only been open for two years.  It is located on the side of a mountain in the park, so that meant two things—a lot of hiking to and from our room to the infinity pool and that there could be wild animals around us at any given time.  Sure enough, in the hour we were there, there was an elephant roaming around the outskirts of camp walking to and from the watering hole! 

After we had a few hours to relax, sit in the pool while enjoying the amazing view of the African savanna and watch the elephant, we got in the car for our first game drive in Etosha with our guide, Uanee.  We set out on the adventure (and I was lucky enough to sit shotgun with Uanee) with our hopes sent on seeing elephants and lions.  Uanee informed us that it was not the right time of day for lions to be walking around in the hot sun and the chances of us seeing elephants were slim, as the last two years PLU students have driven in Etosha, they have not seen a single elephant. 

Then, about an hour in to our drive, we came around a turn in the road and immediately to the left of me, was an enormous mama elephant!  I tried to contain my excitement as I motioned to Uanee we had just hit the jackpot!  We stopped briefly and watched her until we realized that further up the road was another family of elephants—five more!  We quietly and slowly inched our van up to the elephants and watched them graze on the trees, watched a baby elephant hide in the shade of her mama and watched them watch us watching them.  The longer we sat there, the more of the herd we saw.  In the silent forty-five minutes we spent completely taking in the elephants, we saw over 20 elephants!  They were anywhere from 10 to 15 feet from our van and it was so exhilarating to watch these massive, majestic and powerful animals stand so close to us.  For anyone who has heard my Minke Whale story from my journey to Antarctica, this experience was very similar.  Once again, I felt so small and insignificant in life.  Often times at home, in the city, at PLU or teaching in the classroom, it is so easy to feel as if you are the authority figure and the world revolves around us at humans, yet this time I spent watching these beautiful animals put me back in my place.  I could not help but think that, if the elephants wanted to, they could easily ram our van and send us tumbling down the opposite side of the road, kicking us like a piece of scrap metal, much like the whales could have done to our small, inflatable zodiac in the middle of the Southern Ocean.  It would have taken one of the 20+ elephants to completely demolish us, yet they trusted us to leave them alone and watched us watch them in complete peace.  For the umpteenth time on this trip, I found myself speechless with goose bumps on my arms and tears beginning to well up in my eyes.  Needless to say, our first game drive was more than successful, so we headed back to Dolomite and had a fabulous dinner with Jan, Paula, Steve, Uanee and the rest of the students in our program.  After dinner, Nataly and I spent time completely soaking in our room—it was something straight off The Bachelor where they go to a random destination in the world with the most beautiful views and rooms.  Nataly and I felt as if we were on our own honeymoon and I can only hope to have my real honeymoon there one day.  A girl can dream, right?!  We sat out on the balcony of our hotel “hut” and star gazed before I took a shower in a bathroom surrounded by windows.  It was as if I was standing in the middle of the savanna with a 270-degree view. 

The next morning we continued driving on to Okaukuejo Camp and spent the day by the pool before we embarked on our second game drive during the afternoon.  This time, we spotted and followed a wild cheetah through the savanna.  When we first saw it, it was walking towards a group of wildebeests and I thought we would definitely see the cheetah attack one of the babies.  However, the male wildebeest stood in front of its herd as big as it could and the cheetah passed through the herd and went to the watering hole.  We intently watched the cheetah drink for 25 minutes before it continued on its journey into the sunset as it walked right next to our van, about 20 feet away from us.  Being this close to such a large, fast and strong animal was so exhilarating because it was wild.  We were so close to the cheetah that the sunset reflected in its eyes and it just looked different than the cheetahs at the conservation fund—it just looked and walked like a wild animal. 

That night after dinner, I sat by the watering hold at Okaukuejo Camp and watched two black rhinos and a giraffe come drink.  This was yet another experience that I completely took in and could not even put it in to words. 

We were on a mission during our last morning game drive in Etosha.  We had already seen hundreds of giraffes, zebras, oryx, kudus, springbok along with dozens of elephants, a couple rhinos and a cheetah.  The only other “stereotypical” African animal we were missing was a lion.  So, we got up before the sunrise to see if we could catch a pride of lions roaming around the savanna before the sun got too hot.  So, we started driving around the National Park and…sure enough!  Shortly after the sun rose, we spotted a lion, two lionesses and two lion cubs in the grass off in the distance.  We watched them roam around for a while before turning around to drive back to Okaukuejo for breakfast but on our way back we spotted another lion with three lionesses!  This time they were way closer to our van and soon enough we watched them cross the road right in front of us.  It was so amazing to watch another massive wild animal so close to us and there was a mutual trust between the animal and us not to hurt each other.  This pride of lions was so amazing because it was clear they had just killed their breakfast, as there was blood all over their faces and front arms.

I felt so blessed to experience the animals we experienced during our three days in Etosha because we were able to come close, observe and soak in everything about beautiful wild African animals.  The PLU groups in the past have not been lucky enough to see animals such as elephants; cheetahs; lions or rhinos and we were lucky enough to see all of them throughout the three days we were there! 

Fun Facts:

·         Oryx are the national Namibian animal and is absolutely amazing!  They have horns that are attached to their skulls with bones in the middle of them and once one of them breaks off, it cannot grow back.  Oryx can retain over 90% of the water they take in and can go up to 7 days without drinking water.  They can also survive off one Nara melon for up to a week.  Needless to say, they are definitely adapted to the Namib Desert. 

·         Black rhinos are gray in color and have a hooked lip.  They also have two horns on their nose where the first one, closest to its face, is much bigger than the second one.  They are grazers where they eat shoots and leaves off plants and bushes in the savanna and live solitarily.  Black rhinos also have very poor eyesight but have great hearing and a great sense of smell.

I know I still have about two weeks of blogging to catch up on—about a week and a half of teaching and a weekend at the sand dunes and I promise that will be updated before next week!

More pictures to come!