In Torra Conservancy

March 1, 2013

By Michael Steele (Colby College)

It’s strange that I’m here now, in Namibia, at Wereldsend (World’s End), writing this blog because I remember when I was a mere prospective student reading the blogs of current students. And now I’m one of them. I can imagine the Facebook notification that Round River will send out once this blog is finished…”The Round River blog has been updated, check out what Mike has been up to in Namibia!” …or something like that, that sounds about right.

So I guess I’ll just talk about what I’ve been doing today – that’s enough to fill one blog entry; to explain the whole week would take too long for me to write and too long for you all to read. So I here I go.

Woke up a little before dawn, ate a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee and a malaria pill, and then hopped in the back of Hardy Sue and drove into the Torra Conservancy to count some animals. Hardy Sue is the name of one of our two Toyota Hilux’s…it’s pretty hardy. In Torra we climbed up to some high vantage point where we sat for a couple hours and counted and classified all the animals we saw (today it was oryx, zebra, springbok, and ostrich – for us at this point, this was nothing out of the ordinary). Oh! And we saw a dead giraffe by the side of the road, pretty disturbing stuff actually.

All four of us, doin’ a little bit of science in Torra Conservancy

So then we came back to our base-camp at World’s End, but only briefly, because we were due at a school in Bergsig at 2 pm. Bergsig is the largest community in the Torra Conservancy. We had prepared a lesson to share with some students there. We talked to these kids in Bergsig about trophic levels and food chains and the consequences of disruptping the balance between these trophic levels. If, for example, all the lions and leopards in Torra Conservancy are poached there would be no one left to eat the herbivores (zebra, oryx, springbok, etc.), and as a result the herbivore population would explode . These large herbivores would over-graze the vegetation in Torra, and the whole system would go awry. This was the sort of thing we talked about in our lesson.

We tried to incorporate some fun activities in our lesson, but after we had finished talking for about an hour things loosened up a bit. First we (the Round River students) sang a song to the students that Katherine had learned at camp, and then the kids sang us a song. Then we left the classroom and taught the kids how to play a game called Ninja, and then they taught us a game that was sort of like duck-duck-goose. I thought I was going to be so good at this game. “I’m older and bigger than these kids, I got this in the bag” was my thinking…but I payed for my hubris; I had taken off my flip-flops so that I could run faster but I ended up falling and cutting up my feet pretty badly. Embarassing, but it was all in fun.

There’s us again, this time playing Ninja with the kids from Bergsig. I didn’t win.

When we left the school in Bergsig we thought our interaction with the local community would be done for the day, but on our way back to Wereldsend we stopped at a liquor store to pick up some essentials. We ran into a couple people there that we had met at Wereldsend last week (Wereldsend is not just our base-camp; there are always other people around). They were all clearly having a good time, so we stayed with them in the liquor store for a bit and sang and danced and met some cool people. It was a worthwhile experience. Then we came back to Wereldsend and I decided now was as good a time to write this blog as any, since we’re leaving camp tomorrow morning for the weekend to do some more field work in Torra.

So that’s it, that’s my blog entry. We’re all four us having a good time out here in the desert. Any of you prospective students out there should apply, and any of you parents should feel comfortable that your children are experiencing some pretty incredible stuff every day.