We began in Nylsvley Nature Reserve, where we were introduced to each other, our professors, the savanna ecosystem, and fieldwork. Preliminary lectures in all of the courses began the program; these courses including Savanna Ecology, Conservation & Management, History through Culture of South Africa, and Field Research Skills. There are no dangerous game in this reserve, so we were able to walk throughout, from studying insects with our Professor Alan, to studying the catena with our Professor Laurence, to walking to the fire tower to have wonderful sundowners. We got to see our first African animals, with giraffes and many birds enticing us as we prepared to head to Kruger National Park next.
We then went to the Kruger, a mysterious and huge place, home to the animals that drew me to Africa. In Skukuza, we immediately jumped into experiencing the landscape with early morning game drives and our first independent research projects. In 15 research sites along the Sabie River, we were placed into groups each studying the biodiversity of a distinct group of organisms. These included birds, herps, butterflies, dung beetles, and plants, while I was placed with ants. No one in my group had really gotten our first choice, with the charismatic creatures often not including these small but very important animals. We learned to collect by both active searching and passive traps dug in the ground, and we pushed through the frustration of using microscopes to identify each down to at least genus level by using such defining features as the number of toes or number of segments in the antennae, all of which is difficult to determine with certainty. Overall, a sometimes frustrating project, but in retrospect we were able to spend time walking around the Kruger and contribute to understanding the biodiversity of the ecosystem. We saw elephants, hippo, and buffalo while standing outside away from the protection of a car, a luxury not given to just a tourist. We found hyenas and leopards along the road, as Skukuza is home to one of the highest densities of leopards in the world, and we could hear the hyenas whooping at night from our camps. Lions however, evaded me until we went to our next site in Punda Maria in the northern end of the Kruger.
After an all day game drive through the park, Punda Maria was a beautiful new site in a more open, mopane tree dominated ecosystem. We spent our days completing bird and mopane worm field projects. We went to a beautiful archeological site of an ancient Venda community in the park at Thulamela. We also went to Crooks Corner, the location of the borders of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe that is notorious for criminals crossing the borders into the park to evade authorities. We spent our evenings playing soccer with the park staff and local communities, and the nights star gazing the foreign, southerly stars, and searching for owls by calling the beautiful species into our camp.
We then headed into one of the most significant experiences of the semester, the homestay in a extremely rural Venda village, Hamakuya. We were dropped off into a clean-swept cow-dung courtyard with three round houses and one square hut. My house mother was Mpiriseni (or Josephine) Mmbi, who spoke fast Venda, but was patient and helped to clarify things for me with a few words in English or Afrikaans. She was very willing to share the Venda culture, laugh as I fumbled with the cooking, bowing correctly, or speaking, and support me into comprehending the new words and ideas. Her daughter’s name is Shumani, a young woman similar to her mother in demeanor towards me, as she both supported and lightened the mood as we struggled with the language. My best Venda language teachers were the children in the area – Shumani’s twins, their friends, and the many other children all seemingly at home in the small homestead. While probably being most excited about the new presence of the white Americans in their small, very rural town, they were excited to share, patient, and ready to help us learn, most often focusing on easily tangible bodyparts and other nouns, along with games using rocks and dances in lines. My Venda name was immediately declared to be Dakalo (happiness), and I loved using this new name over my Western name irrelevant to this setting and to the local people who could not pronounce it. We slept in a small mud hut without windows separate from the Venda family, but on grass mats and in all ways possible similar to their lifestyle.
We spent our days learning to sweep using brooms from lala palms, to spread cow dung on the floors, to collect firewood and water and carry both on my head, ungracefully despite my efforts. We held a community workshop to study the natural resource use in the village. We visited the Sangormas, the traditional healers, who use herbal medicine from bark and plants. I was intrigued by their confidence in their work as they claimed to cure cancer, but admitted to being unable to help someone who has lost too much blood. During meals of mopane worms, locusts and pup, I learnt how to eat in the particular Venda way using our fingers and the correct ways to talk about food. I found it difficult not to thank my host family for the delicious food, but in Venda that is considered rude. A truly unique experience we had was attending a child christening ceremony at the Zion Christian Church. We crossed the river in full traditional Venda nwede outfits, while holding the hands of our children friends. It was a hot afternoon of listening to songs and preaches, we didn’t understand everything that happened but we were lucky to observe and it was humbling to be fully embraced by this community.
The next place we went was near Hamakuya; Tshulu camp in rural South Africa is a beautiful tented camp on cliffs along a beautiful river where we hiked along the shore and swam in the rapids. We spent busy days in the field studying huge baobabs, including climbing the biggest baobab in the world that is thousands of years old to eat a picnic lunch in its branches.
Our next days were spent in Pretoria and Cape Town. We better learned about South African history by visiting museums and monuments, including the important the apartheid museum which was eye-opening. In Cape Town I appreciated the beautiful setting as we climbed Table Mountain and spent days at Cape Point and on the beach.
We then spent a few weeks in De Hoop Nature Reserve on the South Coast. While we were extremely busy with many papers and presentations, I got to focus on an amazing faculty field project on the coast. With an inspiring grad student from the University of Cape Town, my friends Elizabeth, Stevie, and I studied the biodiversity of the intertidal rock pools on a beautiful coastline where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. This was so incredible as we tackled some complex research while getting to jump into beautiful pools and playing with incredible organisms from seastars to octopi. One of the best nights of the semester was spent under the full moon studying the changes in temperature and chemical levels of the pools at night. On one of our few days off we also traveled down to Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of the African continent and an incredible place to stare out at the waves.
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