Ive been in Kasane now for a week and staying at Kabelo’s house. He’s a friend of a friend thru Mokolodi and he is letting me pitch my tent in his yard. It’s a dirt lot with an assortment of chickens, goats, and warthogs who amble by my tent to smell what food the human might be hiding inside. One of them picked up the chocolate scent and tore a small hole in my tent. Im only certain of two things: if it rains, Im screwed and if I find out which varmint bamboozled me, I’ll be dining on him with some Fava beans and a fine Chianti.
There is no running warm water and no shower here so it’s a bit basic. I buy them groceries and we cook meals together. Kabelo is unemployed and his girlfriend works for the local Dept of Water Affairs. To help make ends meet, Kabelo, or “Heavy K” as he call himself (confident that one day he’ll become the bomb Botswana rap star) sells sausages in the parking lot in front of the bar in town. He sets up a little portable grill and thumps hip hop from the trunk of his crappy car. I helped him sell some meat one evening but sales were slumping. I think Im bad for business. When locals see a whitey at an establishment, they instantly assume it must be expensive. So only the seriously sauced patrons came to make purchases. Kabelo never invited me again to help out.
Today, I started a new volunteer project working for a wildlife biologist. She has several different projects going on but at the moment, she has me chasing mongoose. I’m tracking a specific troop of Banded Mongoose and recording behavioural data. Every five minutes, I record exactly what they are doing (foraging, resting, moving, mating, denning, grooming, etc) and where they are located (using GPS). There are 22 in this troop and this species is intensely social. They have me scurrying thru thick bush, the river’s edge, and dry creek bed’s to keep up with them. Sometimes I’m sure they are just messing with me to have a laugh. “Let’s see the humanoid follow us past this crocodile.” When there are croc’s, Im more than happy to skip a sampling. And they don’t seem to mind the presence of large Water Monitor lizards, some of which are 4 feet long. The focus of the study is to determine the possibility of the transmission of human pathogens to wildlife. There have been recent cases of tuberculosis found in the mongoose and the scientist I work for suspects the mongoose are eating out of the exposed rubbish bins at human settlements and contracting human diseases.
There is another project about to get underway which this biologist has been contracted to do from the Dept of Wildlife. It’s a population density survey of cheetah & leopard in the Moremi Game Reserve (within the Okavango Delta). Im hoping to impress with meticulous work on the mongoose project in order to participate in this cat survey. Counting kitties would be nice.
|  | 
|
