An African bedtime story

At Camp Okavango and Xugana Island Lodge, guests find a different laminated bedtime story waiting for them each evening. One of the directors of Desert & Delta asked me whether I might write one, and I did, based on an interview with legendary guide John Odumetse Kata at Camp Okavango. (You can read the piece I wrote about him at www.desertdelta.blogspot.com)
But here's the bedtime story and a photo of John. He's the one wearing the green-striped socks. He's sitting beside Section, a tracker, poler and groundsman who carves tiny mokoros sold as keychains. He gave me one as a going-away gift. I'm going to hang it on my Christmas tree.

THE STORY OF THE LION AND THE HARE

Tau was a lion in the Okavango Delta. He prided himself on being the king of beasts.

“I am the king,” he said. “No one hunts better than I. No one has more meat in the stewpot than I do. I am the best.”

When dinnertime came, he paraded around his stewpot, inspecting the meat. There’s a nice, fat, juicy piece for me, he thought. And there’s another. And another. Mmmm! It’s good to be king.

All of the other animals gathered around and waited to be served. After all, they had helped in the hunt, and they were all neighbors. But when their time came to eat, Tau gave them only the tiniest pieces that had no fat. He didn’t really want to share. He didn’t really like to share. He handed out the worst pieces, and only begrudgingly, to his animal neighbors of the delta.

This upset the animals, particularly a hare named Mmutla.

“There must be a way to have a better dinner than this,” Mmutla said in dismay. Night after night, it had always been the same. Tau got the best. They got hardly anything at all, mostly gristle.

Mmutla thought a while. Then he gathered all of the animals, except Tau, and made a plan. They whispered well into the next day.

“Tau,” Mmutla said, “come here and let us groom you. You’ve had a hard day being king. We’ll pick the lice from your tail so you will sleep well tomorrow.”

They lured him to a tree near the stewpot.

“Tap! Tap! Tap!” came the sounds.

“Hey, Mmutla, you are hurting me,” Tau said gruffly. Tau was bothered but gazing so proudly at his stew that he never even turned around to look at the animals.

Mmutla said, “Sorry, brother. These lice are huge, and there are many. We will keep working.”

Tau grumbled and roared but allowed them to continue.

After some time Mmutla and the other animals were finished. They rubbed their paws and claws with satisfaction. Mmutla led a parade to the stewpot, right in front of Tau’s nose but far enough away for safety.

Mmutla reached into the pot and grabbed the thickest, fattest piece of meat and dangled it before Tau.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Tau roared.

“I am going to eat this one, brother!” Mmutla said with a smile. And he did.

Tau lunged in fury. But he didn’t get far. In a brilliant stroke of teamwork, the animals had nailed Tau’s tail to a tree. Too bad for Tau, but he had it coming.

All of the animals ate well that night, except Tau. He gnawed on the tiniest piece of meat, the one without any fat. And so Tau went to sleep hungry and feeling less than kingly. The animals went to sleep fat and happy.

“Robale sentle,” they whispered. From the delta their wishes abounded: Sleep well.

****

This is a modern adaptation of a story that
John Odumetse Kata said his grandmother, Maxaao, told him when he was a boy growing up on the islands of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. The legendary veteran guide at Camp Okavango for 28 years didn’t have schools when he was growing up. As a river bushman of the ethnic Bayeyi tribe, John Kata learned his lessons beside the campfire. The stories that the grandparents -- especially grandmothers—shared often had morals for the children’s education.

“The main point is sharing and that cooperation is always the most important thing in families,” John Kata said in recalling his grandmother Maxaao’s tale of the lion and the hare.


The best guess is that John Kata was born in 1944 on what is now known as the famous Chief’s Island. His clan moved among the islands in search of food and fish. They lived in makeshift reed huts, at each new location near a big shade tree.

Today John Kata leads Camp Okavango’s guests on walks where his villages once stood and where his tribe’s storytelling echoed around campfires into the night.

---Maria Henson

Not in my own words

I took the photo at Xugana Island Lodge, where I moved to my assistant lodge manager assignment in the Okavango Delta in June.


I'll be struggling for a while to try to describe what it was like living with Botswana camp workers in an amazing wilderness for three months. I miss it already. For now, I'll share with you something I read from a dusty book tucked away in "Jessie's Suite" at Camp Okavango. (Jessie was the eccentric billionairess who collected pilots' toothbrushes, if you get my drift. Her suite has a notable array of mirrored walls and black tiles, although apparently fewer than when she lived there, and that's saying something.)

This is from Venture to the Interior by Laurens van der Post:
It is one of the more unjustifiable pretensions of our age that it measures time and experience by the clock. There are obviously a host of considerations and values which a clock cannot possibly measure. There is, above all, the fact that time spent on a journey, particularly on a journey which sets in motion the abiding symbolism of our natures, is different from the time devoured at such a terrifying speed in the daily routine of what is accepted, with such curious complacency, as our normal lives. This seems axiomatic to me; the truer the moment and the greater its content of reality the slower the swing of the universal pendulum.
*****

....Van Der Post loved Africa and filmed and wrote books about the Kalahari and its bushmen. This book, published in the early 1950s, is about one of his many journeys to Africa.
He opens it with this:

We carry with us the wonders
We seek without us: there is all
Africa and her prodigies in us. --Sir Thomas Browne

She can dance but don't let her sing....

It is an interminable process to try to get photos uploaded on this blog. I'd like to show you more, but the clock and the pula tick away while I wait. But I wanted to show you some photos of one of my going-away moments: one with the staff choir at Camp Okavango. They sent me off with a rousing rendition of "Mma Pula naledi," which I was told meant that Ms. Rain (my nickname translated from Mma Pula) is a shining star." Another is on a boat from Xugana Island Lodge going back to Camp Okavango to pick up a staff member. The tent is my home at Camp Okavango. The other is Pilot One, my side of a little building near the office. I lived there. A lesser-tailed swallow built a nest right above my door, and I visited her every morning.

What I did on my career break....

By popular demand I am going to provide you with first a photo of my roommate in my staff room at Savute Marsh, second a black mamba found on the lawn (one of six I saw in 3 weeks) and third a picture that one must say "doesn't belong." Those cuties I saw at Camp Moremi two weekends ago.

I am already missing the remote bush life, but I am settling into my little cottage on the Boro River. I heard the screeeeeech of a resident barn owl last night and the pitter patter on the roof of what we would fondly call "tree mice," when in fact they might be rats. I'd rather not know....If you have never seen a barn owl, it's worth looking it up. I saw one that was sitting in a tree at Savute Lodge, and it was one of my most memorable moments. What a gorgeous creature!

Moments in Maun

Morning. I'll do other versions of the lion kill story and the John Kata interview later, but look on the Desert & Delta Safaris blog for what I had mentioned in a posting below.

You might imagine what I am doing now that I'm back for a little while from the bush. I'm sure you're thinking it's something exciting. Nope. Tomorrow will be. I'll hop another bush plane and head east for my last few days with DDS. But for now I am eating pizza, a cheeseburger, french fries,a Kit-Kat bar (not at one sitting) and hoping to get a manicure and a pedicure during my 48 hours in town. Oh, the small pleasures.

What I am not doing: drinking red wine or Jameson's. Life in the bush provides ample opportunity for sundowner drinks, and I took advantage of every opportunity. Plus, I became an erstwhile bar tender at Xugana Island Lodge. Got quite good at gin and tonics. Shook with fear when a guest requested "a Manhattan" or "a cosmopolitan." I ran for help every time. Drinking the fancy-pants cocktails is quite different from mixing them.
Healthy living. That's what starts today.

I also woke up in the night hearing a strange animal noise. It was new to me. It sounded like a motorcycle at first, punctuated by ee-ors. Ah, yes. The sound of Maun: wall to wall donkeys. If I can't hear the lions' roar, the donkey is a poor substitute. But, then again, I acted just as frightened of them when I was walking down a Maun road in March as I did when I got close to the lions at Camp Okavango.

Next week I'll be up and running with the blog again. It's been a pleasure to hear from you who've sent emails and notes. Many thanks.

Escaping the puff adder

Hi friends -- I'm back in Maun for a few days and finishing up my safari life stint in the remote wild of botswana. I hate for it to end! Below entries are a couple of things I wrote about camp experiences. I figure I'll add them to my blog so you can get the flavor of my life in the bush.

I tell you it was over-the-top grand. I'll have a lot to contemplate when I move to my little cottage on the Boro next week. I'm not sure how I will manage without the wonderful staff around and the many guests I've met, who've ranged from a professional clown to a UN adviser on climate change and architecture. As if to complete my introduction to truly wild life, yesterday marked the occasion for me to watch a puff adder slither away. Now i can say I have seen black mambas, boomslangs, a cobra and a puff adder. Pythons were nearby a couple of times, but I didn't have the pleasure of meeting them.I happen to work with a woman, however, who once pulled a problematic python out of a trough in front of men who were chicken. Even she was surprised to see that snake turn out to be longer than she was tall. It started wrapping itself around her arm and the men had to extricate her. It takes some kind of guts to be that kind of heroine in the bush. I cannot count myself among them.

Thanks for your notes and well wishes by snail mail. They arrived by mail bag on our bush planes, and when any of us received mail in the camps it was a red letter day!
more after I come back from my next assignment.

Bright lights, big city of Maun!

Sunday
May 4, 2008
Maun

I'm at Bon Arrive, the flight-themed bar and restaurant across from the Maun Airport, having breakfast and waiting for the Internet cafe to open next door. I'll have 30 minutes before I fly into the bush -- this time for 2 months solid. Next stop is Camp Okavango in the Delta.

I got a quick trip into Maun for a couple of nights but hardly any Internet time. The shops close early on Saturday and few are open on Sunday, so I couldn't find time to prepare many proper dispatches, let alone post photos. I used by precious "city" time to do essentials shopping for such luxuries as toothpaste and to seek out my favorite girly-girl things -- a pedicure and massage. And one big bonus: Adrienne, head of HR for Desert and Delta Safaris, picked me up at the airport Friday afternoon and whisked me away to Katia's house so we could both have haircuts. Katia was a Belgian hairstylist of fancy training who suffered from "cocky fever," which is really "khaki fever," but "cocky" is how they say it in Maun. Adrienne told me everyone around here knows that means Katia came on holiday and fell in love with her guide. They now live in a house worthy of a magazine cover for European metropolitan homes with their tiny blond-haired boy, Ethan, who crawls around on the stained concrete floor while his mother cuts hair in an open room that serves as kitchen, dining room, child's playroom and living room. It's a truly beautiful place, and, oh happiness!, Katia can cut my hair.

I hated to leave Savute, though. What a place of enchantment. When I walked out every morning, I prepared to greet the elephants beside the watering hole, or the impala that butted antlers, or search the sky for the juvenile martial eagle that was always swooping down to harass the baby impala. I'll even miss the baby yellow-billed hornbills, one of whom moved in on my face, beak open, to steal the cake off my plate. He succeeded. I'll have to describe Savute in more detail later, but you can see 2 of my postings that arrived to hq by CD on the Desert and Delta blog (www.desertdelta.blogspot.com). Just know for now that this has been a dream come true -- with a few nightmarish moments.

I can now officially call my literary parody "Eek! Prey! Leap!" I was walking guests from bungalow 10 to 11 on Thursday when we rounded a crook in the path. The guy to my left jumped, and so did I.

"What was that?! I almost stepped on it and it was one meter away!" Those were the exclamations of the poor fellow from Switzerland as the people in 10 rushed to the balcony to see what was amiss.

I'm so proud of myself.

I didn't scream. I calmly looked over at the gray snake now slipping toward #10, paused, took a deep breath and said, "Well, I'm afraid that was a black mamba."

I figure it was about 4-5 feet long. I also am sad to say that I could recognize it because the camp has been dripping with poisonous snakes since my arrival 3 weeks ago. This is not the norm, just a major kerfuffle before winter sets in. When the birds start a maniacal chatter, those of us in the manager's office know what's up: SNAKES. We have gone outside to find boomslangs in trees, black mambas crossing paths (even one with its mouth pressed up against the pipe on the lawn used to connect water hoses), pythons and in one watering hole at a very safe distance a cobra. I think my nearly stepping on rattlesnakes in the U.S. prepared me for the African bush. The ridiculous part is how I still jump a mile in the air and squeal loudly if bugs fly at me.

As I mentioned to Mr.and Mrs. Scared out of their Wits Swiss people, I too am struggling to get used to the snakes but I have been assured by experienced guides that snakes want to get away from people and don't mean harm (except for the puff adders, known without affection as "ambush" snakes.) And so I was able to tell the Swiss couple, "You see. It's true what they say. We've witnessed it. That snake did want to get away from us!" Plus, I told them they would have a good story to tell when they got home.

Myself, I returned to the office and collapsed in a camp chair. My knees were no stronger than overcooked spaghetti.

That's all for now -- off to the Delta and once again, off the grid! Send snail mail to the address in the blog item from April 9-ish. It took 3 weeks for me to get something from the U.S., so it's doable!