My first stay at the Kruger National Park
This was my first time at the Kruger a National Park and we were staying at Tamboti which is a tented camp near Orpen Gate. These are my highlights. On the first night we heard some tip of crashing noise my dad woke me up because there were two honey badgers at the dustbin who had got hold of my three year old brother’s nappy! From our porch we saw an elephant eating grass in the river bed and we also saw two buffalo. It was night time while we were eating dinner we saw a baby python underneath the table. There were lots of cool night time sounds like the hyenas calling and the scops owls too. On one early evening we saw a hyena walking at the side of the dried up river as well. We also saw a huge elephant right next to the fence with big tusks. We had some amazing game drives these are some of them. We went to a dam and some giraffe walked slowly to the water. Two of them started drinking it was amazing to watch. Then we saw a troop of baboons playing in the trees next to a dried up river. There were two babies and one was older than the other one. The older one kept on biting all of the other baboons and the other little one stayed in its mother’s arms. On another day we were watching herd of Buffalo, there were probably 20 of them and they were wallowing in a big muddy dam. A few minutes later we saw a herd of elephants. There were probably 60 of them and they drank in a reservoir. Then they were probably going to go for a swim but no they started chasing the Buffalo. It was amazing! Then we drove to Sunset Dam and it was fantastic to see a heron surfing on a hippo. Slowly the hippo started to go beneath the water and then the heron started pecking the hippo until he flew away. We were going on a drive and we were heading towards a big fire. Hornbills and Rollers were swooping all over because the bugs were hopping out of the fire. It was brilliant! We were going to our next camp at Lower Sabie and ahead of us there was a crowd of cars so we went there. We asked a man in a white car what he had seen and he said that there was a leopard in a huge tree. I was so excited because this was my first time seeing a leopard in the wild and it was sleeping. It was amazing to spend some time with my brother and my dad in such a beautiful place. I can’t wait to go there again. Bella Watson Age 9 So it has been some time since I last visited the Kruger, and with the money I received from the Matric Exam Marking, I decided to take the kids for a week. It was the most magical experience, and although I will write a more reflective entry later, here are some photographs which maybe provide some of the highlights to our trip:
He was lagging behind the rest of the men. Trudging with heaving feet, his boots strangled in mud. He felt beyond exhausted. Each footfall was an effort. He no longer felt the blisters as he walked. The men plodded towards a small town. They crossed a stone bridge. He was almost oblivious to the deep river that meandered beneath it. Ahead of him the town was a shell. Buildings had been reduced to rubble. Nothing was left and the whole place felt hollow. Another empty town: another point to secure.
The damage in the city gave away hints to the lives that its occupants had once led. There was a broken piano listing sideways near what once must have been a cafe. The piano’s ivory keys had been spat onto the pavement. This was where they stopped. The men ejected their packs, leaning them against a cobblestone, tumbledown wall. The men unwrapped their rifles from their bodies, and stretched the weight off their shoulders. He was the last to arrive and did the same as the other men. He was desperately trying to unload the agonizing stiffness from his body. The rest of the men began to smoke, and he drifted away from them. The smell of acrid tobacco was something he couldn’t face. The young man found himself arriving at the gaping mouth of a doorless home. It’s glass windows had been blown out and littered the pavement. He sat on some of the brick and concrete that had collapsed from the house’s structure and undid his boots. The laces were grimy. He looked at his shaking hands: his knuckles bloody and split from the cold and the damp. Removing the boots were an agony as he smudged layers of open blisters at his heels. His socks were blood-stuck to his feet. He clenched his jaw as he exposed his sore, bare soles. His shoulders were slumped, his head hanging into his hands. A picture of dejection. After a time the soldier absently lifted his gaze to the interior of the broken house. He felt like an intruder as his eyes drifted between personal objects that had been abandoned when the family had fled the destruction. There were moldy books with splayed out pages stuck between the rubble. A face-down painting leaned against a broken armchair. A wooden table was splintered against the floor. His eye was drawn something hidden beneath the wreckage. It looked like a small, circular leather pouch. He stood up slowly, and began to pick his way through the rubble. The young man reached for the pouch. It lay comfortably in the palm of his hand. He ran his fingers over the scuffed leather and then clicked it open. Inside was a steel fly reel complete with the thin thread of fishing line. It felt familiar, a relic from a previous life. Another time. He found the end of the line and tugged it quickly, remembering the sing of the reel as it turned. For the first time in months, the beginnings of a smile appeared at the edges of his mouth. He wound the line back and then placed the reel into its pouch. Then he began to explore the rubble. The soldier removed chunks of plaster, fragments of wallpaper and crumbled bricks. He was only just eighteen years old: a boy in a man’s body. If one had watched him squirrel around the destruction, one might be forgiven in thinking him a child on a treasure hunt. But there was a slow despondency to his movements that gave a hint of spent maturity begrudgingly earned. There was a lack of hope. Suddenly his body language changed, his shoulders lifted and his heart began to feel less worn out. He bend down and gently lifted the long tube of a rod case. It was creased near one end from the weight of a collapsed roof beam, but a sparkle of possibility had begun to emerge in his eyes. He dusted off the case in a broad sweep of his hand and then unzipped the top. Inside, he tenuously pitched the edge of a material bag between two fingers. The young man gently pulled the bag from within its case, feeling for the ribs of a fishing rod. He took the bag outside, feeling like he had found a hidden present. He unwrapped the bag, finding the two pieces of a varnished cane fly rod. It was intact and only one of the steel eyes needed to be bent straight. He squeezed the two rod pieces together and held the cork handle. The faint indentations from the fingers of its absent owner were smooth in his hand. He flicked the rod above his head, listening to the whip of its movement. The creased grin transformed into a smile. The first in months. With the reel locked against the handle and the line neatly fed from eye to eye, he placed the rod on the ground. Memories of happier times were at the foreground of his mind. The chatter of the other soldiers, the cold, and the past few months began to evaporate, if only for a moment. Barefoot, he went back to his pack and rummaged through a side pocked to find some tape and a pair of pliers. The other soldiers ignored his movements as they always had; they didn’t see the purpose in his step. It was nothing new. He had never felt that he belonged in this knot of other men. When he returned to the broken home, the young man began searching the rubble again. When he emerged, he had found a nail stud from some furniture and feathers from a burst cushion. He had also scratched some horse hair from the padding of a rumpled settee. He worked away the thread from a seam in his jacket and cut some wool from his sock. He placed the nail in the teeth of the pliers began to bend it into the arc of a hook. Once that was done, he fashioned an eyelet which would anchor the fishing gut. Satisfied with its shape, he then taped the plier’s handle together so that to hook was held firm in its grasp. Wedging the pliers between two bricks, and on his haunches, he began to fashion a fly from his hook. He wound the wool, thread and feathers and hair around trying to imitate a mayfly. His hands found their way around the hook with an old familiarity. After some time, he was satisfied by the product of his imitation. The young man then retrieved the rod, pulled out a length of line and threaded the fishing gut through the hook. He shrugged off his military jacket and then made his way back to the river. With every footstep towards the stream, the violence of his life began to recede. He chose a break between some gnarled trees and made his way down the bank. There was a patch of pebbled sand which hurt his feet and then he was in the water. Upstream he saw some telltale rises. Something was feeding gentle off the surface. He distracted himself from the cold by drawing out more line and deciding where he would aim his first cast. He chose what looked like a deep pool that looked slower than the fast-running water that pushed against his shins. With a beautiful arc of his arm, he conducted the rod into looping notes of line. With a final flourish, he threw the fly towards the pool. It landed gently on the surface, ebbing with the current not quite where he wanted it. He drew in the slack, his eye focused on the fly. Nothing... For his second cast, the memory began to return to his arms more readily. With a swish, the infinity of line looped behind him, gained momentum, and landed in a neat seam across the water during his forward cast. The fly landed perfectly. It was gentle. Enticing. He stripped in the line too quickly, excitement and recollections taking their firm hold of his mind. There was a rise. An abrupt swallowing of the water. His heart beat quicker into his throat. And the fish disappeared, leaving his fly untouched. And so it was that the young man made his way along the stream. His footing became more sure over the slippery rocks, his body measuring the current. He cast towards the rises he saw, desperately hoping that one of them would plunge his fly deep into the water. Time seemed to elapse without him knowing and the town became a speck in the distance. The conflict that had knotted his shoulders were massaged away and he remembered a simpler time. He thought about afternoons stalking trout in the Drakensberg streams. He thought about walks in the mountains with his father and their collie, Impi. He thought of the day he tracked one of the Nguni calves into a deep kranz where he was forced to spend the night after the weather had turned. It had been a long time since he had thought of anything other than foxholes, keeping his rifle clean and the paralyzing fear of gunshots. The artistry returned as his mind wandered. He traced a signature in the air with the line, and threw the fly to the water’s edge of the opposite bank. It was smooth and flowing and wonderful. The fly drifted over ripples made in the water. And then it was gone. It was taken into the deep caverns of the river. Pulling tight, the line stretched away from him. Almost by instinct the young man struck the tip of the rod upwards, and the line unzipped the water, sending with it a spray of liquidity. The reel began to whine as it stripped out the line. The fish was running fast. He gained better footing, and as he did so, everything went slack. He furiously clawed the line back in. There was an explosion in the water in front of him. The silver silhouette of a fish danced on its tail, straddling the surface. And then it was gone in a splash. He was connected to the fish and felt its life through the line as it darted beneath the water. He let out a yelp: it burst from his lungs with a boyish innocence and bounded over the water. Life seemed better. The trout ran again and the boy was lost in his fishing. And then he felt the sound of a blast in his chest. It almost knocked the young man over. Behind him there was an eruption of frantic shouting. Panic. Men’s voices. And then flames. They exploded over the town in the distance and licked at the edges of the stream. An empty stone returned to the pit of his stomach and fear clawed towards his neck. He glanced at the carnage over his shoulder. And then looked back and the arc of his fishing rod... Online Teaching has been a real learning curve for me. In a subject like English, it is difficult to transition from such a discussion-based methodology to one where a dialogue is created on a screen. This, I feel, is a barrier to the meaningful debate and as a result, I have attempted to create engaging and enriching material which will serve as a springboard into my students'imagination. At least, that is the hope. I tend to structure my lessons with some sort of a hook, or idea to get them going, then build onto our online meeting and then finish with their task. I have used YouTube as a platform for some of my resources, and felt that sharing a few here would at least document what I feel will be a watershed in our thinking about teaching. What I have learnt in this space, is that with providing resources online, there is the promise of students being able to govern their own initial learning, and this is a rich epiphany. Perhaps we can recreate schools where we see the students three or four times a week, with one day dedicated to the tasks, and the development of responses? Maybe we can look at a later start to allow for sport in the morning? Many of my boys have found that they are far more productive after a morning run or cycle - and it makes sense. Fresh oxygen is going to their brain, they feel the release of endorphins and are energised for the work ahead. And then we could devote our contact time to the richness of discussion that is foregrounded by the work already done on that day at home. Anyway - some thoughts. I just hope that we take this opportunity to grow our teaching craft, because history doesn't afford opportunities to redefine a system very often. So, here are some of my works - predominantly around the Grade 10s where the boys are studying an elected 'Into the Wild' module with our setwork being one of my all-time favorite books - 'Where the Crawdads Sing' by Delia Owens. There is some other work from my Grade 11s related to the Power of Words as well. Enjoy.
I have a number of fond memories of Manyeleti, and I think that in a lot of ways, those experiences were responsible for whittling away to the core of my love of the bush. On one afternoon, our band of grubby, barefooted teenagers managed to convince the teacher, Stuart Walls, to allow us to have a clay-lat fight in a muddy pan. We chose our weapons, de-branching bendy sticks which would be used to launch our muddy projectiles. In the centre of the pan, we stripped down to our shorts and lay siege against one another, flinging tightly packed mud bombs with not so accurate aim. When they hit home, we were rewarded by a precocious thud and a yelp from one of our friends. In the midst of our battle, we were interrupted by a herd of elephants that meandered to the shore. The teachers and ourselves were completely oblivious to their presence, so engrossed were we all in our muddy war. So when they arrived, it was too late to retreat to the game vehicle and instead we called a cease fire and lay down in the thick mud. Our bodies were coated in an oozing brown and only our eyes winked from the surface, peering at the elephants. I am certain they knew that we were there, but paid no attention to our presence and the herd walked deeper into the mud, squelching and sliding to a point which was a bit more watery and began their ritual of thrashing the liquid onto their backs and wallowing in its coolness. If you have ever seen an elephant play in the shallows of a dam, you will know the pleasure that the onlooker receives, and watching from our eye-level vantage point is something that I will never forget. The low rumbles from their stomachs and the joy that they displayed some twenty meters away from us was very special. It might have been the mixture of our fear and some sense of admiration, but either way, there was a definite connection. Every since that day, I have developed a love of these animals and their is an affinity between their humanness or our elephantness that speaks to the soul.
I guess that gleaming a lesson from everything is wired into my Teacher DNA. We search for meaning and purpose in everything.
This is the insight that Lockdown has given me. Let me start from day 1. Like many of you, when I found out that I would be confined to my home with my family for this extended period, I started to plan. I made lists of things I was going to do: came up with little projects to sustain the days and tried to work out how I was going to balance my life. All I wanted during Lockdown was for our household to be a happy place – full of laughter and shining eyes. How I was going to achieve this, goodness only knew. Whilst I was trying to get my head around the next few weeks quite by accident I came across a Mindfulness Journey run online by Londolozi. I hadn’t done anything like it before, so thought I would give the course a go. Their quiet reflections often spoke about gratitude, and this became a subtle theme in the background to my Lockdown. The most over-riding emotion that I feel after looking back on the past 21+14 Days is that of gratitude. I have always known my thankfulness for the life that I have been given, but considering the perspective which I have gleaned now, this gratitude is more intense. I have gleaned a better understanding of what it means to be grateful. I think that too often being appreciative is dummed down to a list of obligations, or sometimes guilts, but I learnt that being grateful is a million little realisations that happen all the time, and leave one feeling humbled. I am grateful for being able to live on a campus abundant with birds and small wildlife: an oasis in the city. I am grateful for having my wife and two children with me over Lockdown. I am grateful to be able to end each day in the arms of the woman I love. I am grateful for having a salary where I could put food on the table. Grateful for the warm summer days, for imagination, for virtual safaris, my workshop, laughter, warm conversations after the kids had gone to sleep, books, a pencil and paper, music, wine (until it ran out). Grateful for the rain, for the “Good Lord Deliver Us” Nightjar in the field next to our house. I am grateful for all of the people that were not with me: my parents, brother, friends, students, colleagues. I would start my day with these thoughts every morning, trying not to repeat any of my gratitudes. Before the sun came up, and the dawn was an orange blush on the horizon, I would ride my mountain bike around our school trails on my own. We were lucky to have this privilege living on the campus. Our house and the rest of the world was still asleep, and as I rode, the world would awaken with a chorus of birds, each one joining with songs as they were shaken from rest. There was a peacefulness without traffic, without aircraft overhead. I would startle spurfowl near the ridge, the same family of two adults and three podgy chicks. I joined flocks of brown red bishops, fluffy in their winter coats and watched long-tailed mousebirds fly overhead. The grass would be entwined with dewy spiderwebs and if I was lucky I would see the slender mongooses behind the astro. And I would escape into my mind as I rode. This me time became so important. It gave me a space to reflect on past, present and future. In the pace of our world, brimming with doing and not enough breathing, I had forgotten to be still and introspect. And so in this way I began to look at how to disrupt the imminent “Groundhog Day” feel that lockdown would wear. I found that social media became a scrapbook more than an activity. I found that television and Netflix lost their appeal very quickly. So instead of a digital world, we decided to explore our garden more and make things together. We started creating a list of birds that visited our garden which swelled to over 50 different species. We watched a Black Sparrowhawk chase a dove overhead, counted the starlings and barbets that feasted at our bird table. We crept up to the thrushes and robins that flitted in the dark recesses of trees. On one afternoon, the louries were alarming in the paperbark tree and following their gaze, we saw a spotted eagle owl that was sunning itself on a hidden corner of our roof. We made kites, flew tethered Chinese Lanterns, created board games. We watched the sunrise and counted the stars. We had picnics on the lawn and created pretend campsites under the trees. We played with the dogs, whittled model boats from wood and had drive ins in the garden. We watched our neighboring the blacksmith plovers hatch and fledge. My daughter created safaris where we stalked around the garden to find hidden soft toy animals. We painted, sketched and drew. Made things out of clay. And baked…a lot. We made our own pizzas, braai’d on the patio and read books. We made milkshakes, roasted marshmallows, climbed trees and lay in the sun. We enjoyed virtual game drives and watched the hyaena pups grow up on Wild Earth. We revisited old photographs of family holidays and made our own colorfully frothy experiments. We did all of the things that we never seemed to find the time for in our normal life. Not that there weren’t the distractions of the odd iPad here and there, but we tried to bury the technology as much as we could. Outside was our refuge. And in each of these moments, I realsed something. I found that creating time together as a family where we did small things together was so important, and something that I had neglected prior to lockdown. And most of it evolved around being outdoors. As a family we began to thirst for the bush, for the wild spaces. I don’t know how many other people felt the same. I guess that with the silence of the deserted streets and clear skies, nature showed herself more regularly, or maybe we just spent more time outside to see her. I wonder how many other things had been forgotten prior to Lockdown. I wonder how many of those things would hold more meaning in all of our lives after Lockdown? I wonder if we will all carry on being grateful for the world around us when life returns to normal? I wonder… I guess that what I am trying to say is that despite being confined to missing so much, I think that we gained a lot as a family as well. I am not sure that I want to be inside all the time in front of a screen. I think that I need to slow things down sometimes. I need to make more time for the people that are rooted in my heart. I need to make space to think. Time has allowed me more moments to be thankful for all of this. As the crisp autumn leaves begin to drop from the trees, I find that my gratitude has made me re-scaffold my priorities. I will not always have time like this, and when work begins again, another layer will be added to my world. As it must. But I should not forget what I have learnt. As I prepare for the new term, I find that my teaching prep is becoming more inquisitive, more probing. I focus my efforts more on life lessons than how to guides. I look at transplanting more introspection between lines of literature and self-awareness in the rhyme of a poem. I will work at the balance of my life. What can say with conviction, is that there is something about being outside that serves as a constant reminder of this balance. As the wind presses gently against my skin and the sun warms my back, I feel something nourishing about just being outside. Being able to look at the piercing blue sky just feels less sterile. There is an energy to the world that is given by the elements. It brings a feeling of interconnectedness, it brings a sense of rhythmic life. It brings joy. And what I have realized, is what I am most grateful for: the opportunities that the outside world creates to feel this joy with the people that I love. Because eventually, our global crisis will end, and when it does, it will be important that what we have all learnt during Lockdown does not. One thing that I have always wanted to do is to create a scrapbook with my favorite animals and some interesting facts behind each of them. I would include some of my photographs and then my very amateur watercolor and sketching...maybe with the odd feather pasted in between. And now I have time to do it, so here goes...
I went on a ride on my bike through the spirit towards Delta Park. When I reached the park, it was bursting with people (all at an appropriate social distance) absorbing their last chance to be in nature for a while. There was so much joy and happiness at being outdoors which was in stark contrast to the crisis looming over our country. It was moving. So I got off my bike and wrote this.
The Corona Prism Tomorrow has taken on new significance: Tonight not just another sunset Today not just another day. Tomorrow has filtered the spectrum of our lives Colours for what is important And what Is not. We lived today for itself Realizing the little things that matter And forgetting the big things that don’t. We walked together in parks (At a distance) Wrapping ourselves in nature Some for the first time In a long time. We noticed pinkwhite cosmos That were rooted there for months And bee eaters of telephone lines That have been here since October. We reveled in the simplicity of a walk And dusted off a bicycle. We listened to the wind in the leaves And children laughing. The world seemed different today. Maybe a difference that should be A just is. And tomorrow things will change. But maybe we will look through our prisms And nurture the nucleus of our families. We will find joy in books again, Have real conversations And learn about each other. We will empathize, Reassess And love. Maybe the day after tomorrow Will reveal a world Of better people All because of today. When I though of Etosha, my mind went to images of parched desert and waterholes that were overflowing with animals. My experience there was something very different.
After being in Windhoek for the Junior Round Square Conference, we made our way north to Etosha. It had been raining for days, and the Namibians were celebrating the vast deluges from the sky. The drought had been broken and dams that had been empty for years were reaching full capacity. By the time we would leave, the sluice gates were being opened...the first time on fifteen years. So Etosha was wet to say the least. The ground which was meant to be pretty much devoid of plant life, was filled with the yellow flowers of devil thorns. A blanket of green stretched as far as the eye could see. As a result, the waterholes had become superfluous as the animals were drinking from the huge puddles that had formed on the side of roads, or they gained the moisture that had quenched the vegetation. So we spent a lot of time driving, and we saw some great sightings. I was unaccustomed to the fast herds of regal-looking gemsbok, black-faced impala, and rutting springbok. There were dazzling numbers of zebra and lots of bird life. For some reason, thee was something effecting the zebra and at one point we saw seven different dead zebra, each one being feasted upon by gangs of vultures. We also saw two separate lion kills and families of jackal. The vast open spaces were dotted with gargantuan sociable weaver nests that hung from umbrella thorn trees. The earth had a flatness that seemed to draw the landscape into infinity. I could imagine Etosha being a harsh place to exist when there wasn’t rain, but this time, there was an unusual abundance. The springbok seemed to be the most celebratory when it came to the rain, with spirited pronking happening at any opportunity. We spent much of our time at Okaukuejo, the loosest camp, that featured remnants of the German occupation decades earlier. In the center is a lookout tower that looks like it belongs in Europe, built by the white stones from the area. The rondawels were also previously accommodation for Goan officers as they fortified the area. So, Etosha was not the desert that I expected and although we didn’t follow the queues of game that would make their way to the waterholes, I enjoyed the wildness of the place. It feel untamed and with a bit of an imagination, I could imagine this arid eden carving away a special place in my heart. It was a beautiful space, and I would like to visit there again. |
ContentSome thoughts about things, sometimes philosophical, sometimes just musings. The world through my eyes... Archives
March 2023
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