By Miles Pulsford (Oberlin College ’13)

Nov 24 – 30th

Hey again!

This past week we finished our game counts and got to do two new exciting things. On the twenty-sixth we visited the school in Bergsig (the nearest town to Wereldsend) and taught to the Environmental Club, and on the twenty-seventh we got to attend Torra Conservancy’s Annual General Meeting, which was a huge honor and a Round River student program first.

I’ll start with the teaching. This was the second time we got to teach, and it was nice to be able to draw on our experience from the first time. We decided to keep the idea of splitting the students into two groups and leading both indoor and outdoor activities. However, this time we structured everything around the theme of birds. Our outdoor leaders still taught the kids how to use our binoculars, compasses, and rangefinders, but this time they were identifying and taking angles and distances to birds around the town.

Meanwhile, we in the classroom were playing an educational game devised by Amanda, designed to give an introduction to the concepts of avian sexual dimorphism and foot and beak specialization. These might seem like advanced concepts for fifteen-year-olds (or would have been for me at that age anyway), but they had no trouble at all. I led the sexual dimorphism section of the game, and by the end of the visit students were giving me college-level summaries of not only dimorphism, but female mate choice and handicap selection! All the other parts of our teaching went just as well, and our final segment, in which the students explained everything they had learned, left us truly touched by their eagerness to learn.

On the very next day we came back to Bergsig for Torra Conservancy’s Annual General Meeting (AGM). I’m not sure if this has been explained on the blog before, but a conservancy is a large section of land that the government has conceded to the people that live there. Conservancy members must practice good conservation and maintain a positive relationship with the land, and in return they receive benefits from wildlife like ecotourism revenue and meat. Torra Conservancy has quite a few meetings every year, but the AGM is the biggest and the one that a majority of conservancy members attend.

The meeting was scheduled for nine a.m. Knowing this, we arrived at ten, but even that turned out to be early. The conservancy had to send out vehicles to retrieve members from all over the area, which turned out to take a while. This was fine, though, because we spent the wait talking to John Kasaona, who is the Director of the Kunene Region for the local organization Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC). He delivered a TED Talk, which you can view here.

Eventually a huge flatbed truck rolled up with the last group of members singing in the back, and things got started. Everyone present (maybe two hundred people?) crammed into a little concrete building packed full of chairs. At first the space was too full for us, so we sat outside and played with kids. After lunchtime, things cleared out a little, and we were able to move inside. The meeting was held in Afrikaans, but we were able to get little summaries from Mano (our Namibian student) and a few other English speakers.

The meeting was led by a chairman who kept things moving along, but everyone was given a chance to speak about every issue. This mean that the meeting moved slowly, but it also meant that nobody went unheard and there was some kind of consensus on every matter, even if the agreement was simply to deal with it later.

After doing the interviews for Torra, it was really nice to see how they went about making their decisions. The discussion definitely got heated at times, but people seemed very capable of cooling off and not taking things personally. All in all, the atmosphere seemed constructive, and they made progress on some issues that had been causing a lot of unhappiness, like use of conservancy vehicles.

It was incredibly generous of Torra to invite us to their AGM (and to feed us a delicious meal), and our time in Bergsig was wonderful. It was nice to get a chance to see the people side of conservancies after spending so long with the wildlife in Torra. Those two days gave me a lot to think about, and the memories won’t be forgotten. Thanks Torra!