By Briana Heller of the University of Vermont
Upon our first arrival in Kaziikini, we were happily surprised to discover showers and toilets. While standing in the dry heat of the Botswana bush, brown streaks across our skin from where sweat dripped through our generous layer of dust, nothing was more reassuring than the promise of an evening shower. We set up our camp site midday and then spent three hours discussing the optimal tarp setup for shade. There are many strong opinions on tarp strategies. It was on the first night we met one of the four Sankoyo community escort guides that would be joining us for our transects. His nickname was XK, and we spent an evening getting to know him while sitting around the fire. We had been in the habit of learning peoples’ life stories in the evenings, so ‘Mom’, otherwise known as ‘Coach’, otherwise known as instructor Lauren Sadowski, told us about her life leading up to this moment. Drifting my eyes above the fire to the sky, there was a sea of stars that warmed me like an existential weighted blanket.
That first night, Lexi, Grace, and I went to our tent drunk with fatigue, excitedly awaiting the wildlife we would see on transect in the morning. Sometime between my head hitting the pillow and sleep overcoming me, I heard Grace’s whispered words of “oh my god”. Fluttering my eyes open, I looked through the abyss of darkness into the mopane shrub outside and was startled to see the tusks of a large bull elephant brushing our tents mesh door, his eyes peering in with curiosity. Our breaths were held for the few moments he stood there before we watched him wander off. After a few moments he retreated back into the night and we let out breaths of excited hysteria, laughing in relief and cuddling together. We went back to sleep that night but not without the continued disruption from a hungry honey badger trying to get into our kitchen tent. I would awake to the sounds of something brushing up against our tent only to shine my flashlight outside and see his small black figure scrambling around in the dirt digging for bugs. Coach then began “Home Alone” style security systems for our kitchen tent in an attempt to deter the honey badger.
That next morning, we went on our first transect. The dry nature of the Kaziikini area as compared to Khwai meant we would see some species more frequently than we had before and some other species rarely. To my own displeasure, but to others’ relief, there were not many monkeys around, though I was happy to see more warthogs. That first morning we spotted a black-backed jackal as well as a male lion hidden in the bushes. Normally after transects we would sit in camp and relax, either reading, playing spikeball, or drawing. That day I enjoyed sitting under a large camel thorn acacia tree where I painted my surroundings. It was a happy moment as I sat doing my watercolor of the sunset over camp while my friends were not far off playing spikeball. I sat singing “In the Jungle” from the Lion king. They would giggle at me as I used the dirt on my feet as watercolor paint. Later that evening we went looking for the lion we saw earlier in the day and spotted him lying down at dusk. He was howling to other lions in the area. As I sat in the car with Nick, Coach, Lexi, and Hal we tried to contain our laughter in silence as we compared the howling to that of Chris’s snoring in the most loving way possible as Chris is the angel of our trip. While watching this beautiful feat of nature, we couldn’t help but laugh with hysteria as Coach could think only of getting back to camp and to the toilet.
The next day on our bird transect we saw a bat-eared fox which was pretty cute. Between transect days we take days off before we can repeat the same routes. On one of these days, we visited the Sankoyo Primary school for their academic success awards. We had the honor of presenting the prizes to some of the highest achieving students. We also performed for the students where each of us impersonated an animal and they had to guess what we were. They loved my monkey impression, which, while embarrassing, was accurate. The students found it very funny, and it was heartwarming to watch all the proud parents and grandparents cheering on their kids.
It was around this time when we met our other community guides Kells, Lorenzo, and Hunter. We really bonded over the playing of spikeball together. There was one day we invited them to play spikeball with us and as we played, we listened to music and danced. Children came over to see what we were doing and although we couldn’t talk to the kids because of language barriers, we played soccer together and tossed a frisbee around. It was fun seeing everyone engage and come together despite some language barriers at times. Around the campfire that night, we bonded by talking about our lives as well as watching the wildlife around us. I loved watching the bushbabies jump tree to tree, and in one instance a spotted hyena snuck through camp. One night, a lioness stalked through camp, and we got in our vehicles to watch her at the watering hole. While watching her, we also spotted an African wild cat hiding in the bushes nearby. There was even one evening when it started raining, and it made all our crazy come out. Rain, ‘pula’ in Setswana, started to pour out of the sky. As we scrambled to find cover, I hid under the cooking table laughing giddily as I called to others to join me. Grace and Coach hid under the table with me, and we hysterically laughed together at the mere weirdness of us squatting under a table in the sudden rain. Father, Nick, had to come in to be an adult and tell us that because of the lightning we needed to either go in our tent or the cars. Lexi, Grace, Coach, Nick, Chris, Hal, and I all piled into the car Lucy where I announced I had South Park downloaded on my phone, so we sat and watched an episode in the rain. It was a chaotic beautiful moment of pure crazy.
Near the end of the trip, we had the honor of learning basket weaving from Dix’s sister, Connie. I was able to make a bracelet from dried palm leaves with the help of XK. He was a very patient teacher, but we messed up the patterns of the bracelet. We then made another trip in to Sankoyo with the guides to teach students about ‘pholoholo monitoring’ or wildlife monitoring in English. We had three stations: binoculars/track ID, camera trapping and a protected wildlife area game. I helped run the protected area game that was a tag style game where safe zones represented game reserves where prey was protected from the taggers, aka the predators. I had a lot of fun interacting with the Sankoyo community. On our drive to Sankoyo that day, we sadly saw a female elephant standing over her baby who had passed during birth. Our last night in Kaziikini we had a traditional dinner cooked for us from the community members including foods like pap, beef seswaa, and collard greens. Our time spent in Sankoyo was one I will never forget especially because of the bonds we created with the escort guides and community members. All our guides continued with us to our next destination, mopane camp, except XK who we were sad to see go. It is heartwarming to know that no matter where you are in the world you can always make connections with the people around you as we are all more alike than different.
