Mapungubwe

Mapungubwe

After leaving Hamakuya we traveled to Mapungubwe, which is located near the Northeast border of South Africa and is another of the South African National Parks. The landscape was very different there compared to the other places that we have stayed. It reminded me a lot of the Southwest in the US. There were a lot of large red sandstone rock formations and the soil was also red in color. The area that we stayed at was situated in the middle of a lot of these rocks, so we were basically surrounded on all sides. The views around there were amazing – I would say that it was my favorite place that we have been so far. There were still a lot of wild animals, but we didn’t see them quite as much as when we were in Skukuza. Because of the animals, we couldn’t really go running or even walk around alone, even though we rarely saw any animals near where we stayed.

 It’s also amazing how close we were to the border of the country. Several times we went to watch the sunset at a specific spot where you could see Zimbabwe and Botswana. These two countries, along with South Africa, are separated by two rivers – the Limpopo and the Shashi. From our spot in South Africa, we were only a few kilometers from both of these other countries. If the Limpopo River had been dry (the Shashi  is completely dry at this time of year), we could have walked across into these two other countries, which everyone really wanted to do, just so we could say that we did. Unfortunately there was still water in the river, meaning that there were also crocodiles, so we weren’t able to (illegally) cross the border.

As far as accommodations go, Mapungubwe definitely surpasses some of the other places where we have been. We stayed in beautiful 3-person huts which had lots of extra room, a big porch and an outdoor shower. Each hut also had a kitchen, which meant that we were able to keep food and drinks cold without having to walk all the way to the main kitchen. We were given food to make breakfast, but we also got really creative with our supplies and managed to make a lot of desserts out of our limited ingredients.

During our time there, I had to work on my Faculty Field Project for the semester. I worked with 3 other students on a project dealing with the behavior of a certain species of lizard called a flat lizard (Platysaurus). We worked with a visiting professor from a university in Joberg. He does most of his research on snakes and had a lot of amazing pictures to show us and stories about all the snakes that he has encountered. When we had to sign up for projects at the beginning of the semester, I choose this one because I was interested in the behavioral aspect of it. I really had no passion for studying lizards, but the general topic sounded interesting. We ended up looking at the foraging and predator avoidance behaviors in the lizards and seeing if there were any differences between male and females or adults and juveniles. Males and females have very different coloring, so it would make sense that they would have different behaviors as a result of this. The project ended up being three very long days of fieldwork. Because I was actually part of this project group, I had to work on it every day, and I had to help organize the rest of the class (each person only worked on it for 1 day). Part of the project involved observing lizards that live in the rocks near the pool and recording their behavior for 30 minute intervals. The part of the project that I was more involved with though involved climbing around the rocks surrounding where we are staying and searching for lizards. Whenever we found a lizard, one person acted as a “predator” and approached it slowly. We then had to record how close the predator was to the lizard when the lizard started to move, how far the lizard ran, and how long it took for the lizard to flee to its final location. The work itself wasn’t too difficult, but it was usually pretty hard to actually find lizards to use. If it was cloudy, windy, too hot, or too cold, the lizards would stay in their crevices in the rocks. We ended up going out two times a day for three days and only finding 55 lizards to use as samples. It involved a lot of time out in the sun and heat (it was very very hot), so although it was a very interesting experiment, I’m glad that part of it is done. Now my group is responsible for analyzing the data and writing up a final report for the project. In addition to this project, we also had a stats test and an ecology essay due, so it was definitely one of the busier times so far this semester.

We also had the bad luck of having a day-long power outage due to some problem with a transformer. This caused some problems because we were supposed to have a statistics test, which required us to use laptops, and a full day ecology essay, which also required laptops. On the day of the stats exam we basically sat around all day waiting for the power to come back on so we could start the test. It never ended up coming on, so the test was postponed. There was no way to postpone the essay however, because we don’t have any open free days when we could do it. As a result, we had to write out our essays by hand and complete it without the resources that we needed, which were on our computers. It was frustrating, but there was really nothing that we could do about it. It was also two of the hottest days that I have experienced this semester, so without power, we also didn’t have fans and air conditioning. It was almost too hot to move at some times. We ended up spending a lot of time outside watching a thunderstorm approaching. It was really cool to see the lightening light up the clouds and eventually there was a huge storm which was amazing. I definitely enjoyed my time at Mapungubwe and would say that it is my favorite place that we have been so far.

Photos:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=646866&id=870290077&l=06fe34acfc

 

Hamakuya Homestay

Sorry this blog is so long - I had way to much to talk about.

For three days out of our time at Hamakuya we stayed with families at local villages. We were put into groups of 4 and paired with a translator. The families that we stayed with were of the Venda ethnic group and their primary language was TshiVenda. For the three days we were there, we essentially had no contact with anything outside of the village. Although some villages that students were in did not have electricity, I stayed in a village called Mukoma, which was recently hooked up to electricity. It was overwhelming when we first got there because we really hadn’t been taught anything about the Venda language or culture. We had a sheet of key phrases and our translator, but besides that we were basically thrown into this household. We were first introduced to our host mother, Joyce, but after that there was a constant stream of people who wanted to meet us. I never really understood who lived in our house, and who was related to whom. Because the people we lived with had such limited English, they had trouble pronouncing our names. They had particular trouble with my name, because the letter L is pronounced like an R in their language. Our host mother and some of her friends ended up giving the four of us Venda names that they could pronounce. I was named Thabelo, which means prayer. This added some additional stress because it took forever to actually remember the name well enough to recognize when people were talking to me.

                Overall, I glad I got to experience this homestay, but I did not enjoy a lot of it. My group had issues with our translator so the experience was not too great. Her job was supposed to be to tell us, word-for-word everything that was being said, even if it was something unimportant. She definitely didn’t do this, and sometimes would tell us absolutely nothing so we would be sitting there in silence while all these Venda people had conversations around us. She enjoyed telling us that someone was talking to us, but then wouldn’t tell us what that person said, or what to say in response. She also liked to joke with us, but because we didn’t know anything about the culture, we didn’t understand the humor. On the first day she told us that we needed to finish all the food that was given to us for lunch, or else it would be rude. We almost made ourselves sick trying to finish it before she started laughing and told us that she was kidding.

                My other main complaint about the homestay was the constant swarm of children that were always around. The village rarely gets visitors so it was very exciting for all of the villagers that we were there. The kids in particular loved to be around us and hold our hands and touch our hair and play games with us. I wouldn’t mind this so much, except for the fact that there were always so many of them around. My host family actually didn’t have any kids under the age of about 13, but it seemed like all of the kids in the village would show up daily. It was very overwhelming to be surrounded by so many kids all of whom were yelling loudly in a language I couldn’t understand.

So to try to compress three full days into one longish blog, here is what we did:

·         Made marula beer (actually more of marula juice because it wasn’t given time to ferment properly) by peeling and squeezing the pits. It has a very mild flavor and looks almost like lemonade

·         Played endless games with the kids: Strangely a lot of their games are counting games involving saying an English sentence and having a person be out on a particular word. There is one about a policeman shooting someone over a letter and one about a father smoking cigarettes. I’m pretty sure the kids don’t even know what they are saying. Another popular game is like jacks except it involves throwing a rock up and sweeping a certain number of rocks into/out of a circle before catching the rock. I was horrible at this game and they loved to tease me about it.

·         Visited with the local headman who is basically the chief of the village who works under a main headman for several villages all together. Our host family dressed us up in traditional Venda clothing so that we would be dressed properly to see him. He answered a lot of our questions about improvements he wanted to make and challenges that the village faces. It was also surprising when he told us that he has three wives and 17 children. 

·         Visited a local primary school: The school was severely understaffed. On the day we visited several teachers were away at a conference so a lot of classrooms were unsupervised and we could hear the kids yelling the entire time. Some of the school was really rundown and in the process of being renovated but the newer classrooms weren’t too bad. The principal gave us a tour and answered a lot of questions for us. The school also had their own garden to use for school lunches which I thought was interesting.

·         Visiting a sangoma – a local traditional healer: She had a small hut that was almost completely filled with hundreds of bottles of herbs and powders and liquids. There were also lots of animal skins and elephant fat hanging from the ceiling. She told us a little about how she got started in healing (she was sick and ancestors came to her in a dream). One girl in our group had her prophecy read by the healer throwing bones and looking at the way they landed. I’m kind of skeptical about the whole thing because the predictions seemed kind of scripted (eg. You will get married, you will have a car etc.)

·         Cooking/eating traditional Venda food: The staple to the Venda diet is called pap (pronounced “pup”). It’s made out of white cornmeal and has a mushy texture and very little taste. It is eaten at basically every meal, sometimes with other things, which meant that we had to cook it every day. Most of the cooking is done inside a hut with very little air circulation, making it uncomfortably hot and smoky. We also killed a chicken one day (which was kind of a horrifying experience because the knife was so blunt that the chicken took forever to actually die), which was the only meat we ate the entire time. We also got to eat mopane worms (look up a picture of them online) which wasn’t too great because they were really salty. All of the food is eaten with your hands and most of it has a soft mush consistency. Although it doesn’t taste bad, I was sick of the texture by the end.

·         Entertained most of the village: All of the villagers were excited that we were there, so they would visit throughout the day. We were told several times that just being there made their lives more interesting. A lot of times it felt like we were expected to entertain the children because they constantly asked (through the translator) for us to teach them something American. We tried teaching them simple games like London Bridge and the hokey-pokey, but what they liked best was the macarana. We also drew a large map of the world (that most of them had never seen) in order to show them where we were all from. We also provided entertainment at night when they tried to teach us to dance. A lot of the neighbors would show up in order to dance for us, while other people beat out rhythms on an empty water jug. They loved pretended that they were going to teach us a dance, and then abandoning us so that they could laugh as we struggled with the Venda dances (they involve a lot of fast footwork).

·         Carried water on our heads: They didn’t trust us with the large water jugs (which probably would have been too heavy anyway) but we were given smaller jugs. It was amazing to see all of these little girls balancing huge containers on their heads while we struggled with small containers and never managed to do it without hands

·         Learned a lot about the Venda culture: This society is still pretty unequal in terms of gender. Gender roles still exist, so it’s usually the men who work (although a majority of them are unemployed in which case they sit around a do nothing) while women do the housework and raise children. There was a 19 year old girl in our household who basically did everything for her family, while still attempting to finish school. I was in a group with 4 female students, which meant that we were treated differently than if a guy had been with us. Some of the guys in my program essentially did nothing strenuous for the entire homestay because their translators thought that it would be going against Venda tradition if they learned “female” tasks. Some translators wouldn’t even let the guys pour their own water, and made the girls do it for them. The gender division is also apparent in the way that women are expected to greet visitors. You basically have to lie on the floor with your hands clasped together whenever you greet someone. It got to be really annoying because there were so many visitors so we always had to get on the floor to greet them. Females also aren’t really allowed to sit in chairs or sit crossed-legged, so we spent the whole time being really uncomfortable while sitting with our legs folded to the side. This was also difficult in the long (but beautiful) skirts that they made us wear (it’s not appropriate for girls to show their knees)

·         Attempting to learn the language: After three days without English, I can only say “good morning”, “good afternoon”, “good evening”, “fine”, “name”, “water” and “it was delicious” in TsiVenda, which is less than I expected. It’s definitely good to be back to a place where I can communicate normally.

So overall, I’m glad I was able to take part in this experience. I know that when I look back I’ll be very grateful for the lessons that it taught me, although at the time it was kind of stressful.  

Also - pictures from my time in Hamakuya!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=645965&id=870290077&l=2058a86787

 

Hamakuya (aka basically the middle of nowhere)

                After leaving Skukuza, we spent nine days in Hamakuya, which is located just above the northern edge of Kruger National Park. In order to reach there, we had to spend about 12 hours driving through the park. It took so long because it is a national park and there are strict speed restrictions on all of the roads. We were able to drive in our game drive vehicles (GDV’s) which are open-backed trucks with benches and an overhead covering – basically the stereotypical safari vehicle. The benefit of this was that we got to see a lot of amazing scenery and animals. Not even 15 minutes into the drive, we were stopped while we watched a leopard stalking some oblivious impala. Unfortunately the leopard lost interest, so we didn’t get to see a kill take place. We also saw a herd of about 30 elephants which was incredible, and several herd of buffalo which was exciting because it was first time that we had seen them. Sadly though, we went the entire day without seeing a lion. It’s pretty surprising that we have already had multiple sightings of wild dogs and leopards which are relatively rare, but we still have yet to see a lion, which are a lot more common in these areas. Although it was great to see all of the animals, being in a GDV for such a long time is pretty uncomfortable because you constantly have to deal with wind in your face, which made it a very cold, loud and dusty experience.  It also rained at one point, meaning that we all got soaked.

While we were at Hamakuya we stayed in platform tents that overlooked a river. There wasn’t a lot of free space and we only had electricity for a few hours a day because it ran on a generator, but the views were beautiful. A lot of local villages let their cattle roam free, so there was always a constant clanging of cowbells by the river. There were also a lot of baboons in the area which was annoying at times. They can be very loud and would often wake me up very early in the morning. It was definitely the hottest there than it has been. Although it wasn’t too humid, by the middle of the day it was really hot. Our tents had large decks off of them, so it was nice to be able to sit out there and try to catch a breeze.