(POU-lah) 'rain'. sometimes means, 'thank you'; also name of the currency
We have just returned from our weekend retreat at the Mokolodi reserve. It is a short drive from the city, and is the countries first conservation, established either 10 or 15 years ago (I forget).
It was a wonderful, beautiful weekend. Our days were still busy and very scheduled, but they were full of outdoor activities, and a real change of pace from city life. It was also yet another good bonding activity for our group.
We slept in dormatories full of bunkbeds intended to house up to 60 children (yes children...very small bunkbeds.) We went on several Game Drives, where we saw elephants, ostriches, impala, kudu, warthogs, hyenas (caged), cheeatahs (caged), and giraffes. This is nothing like a zoo, and not even like "African lion safari". This is a 4.5 hectar conservation, and the animals really are wild. It was very very very cool. And for the record, very safe, as we were always in a vehicle, and always with extrememly knowledgeable and experienced rangers.
We spent two mornings rhino tracking. Rain made it difficult for their 'rhino guy' to track them, but finally at the very end of the second day, we left the truck in a single file line behind him and his rifle and went silently to the clearing where they were lying. He explained to us that they were aware of our presence, and simply didn't find us threatening. They wouldve been terrifying, were it not for the ranger. But they were magnificent.
We also had a talk from a reptile guy, and saw several of the most dangerous snakes in africa. I held two of the non dangerous ones.
Our coordinator was reading 28 stories of Aids in Africa, and a few people asked to borrow it from her, so I suggested we read it aloud at night, one story at a time. She read the first one around the campfire. The group finds them very powerful.
Also around the campfire we sang tried to sing some songs. The British guy volunteering their led us in American Pie, and I was the only one who could keep up with him with the lyrics. Dad, aren't you proud?
Then Mmapaseka sang us some beautiful Setswana songs, including a lullaby, in her MUCH more beautiful voice.
This week we are excited and anxious to start work placements.
Hi Laura,
ReplyDeleteChris sent me your blog address. Hope you don't mind. She knows I visited South Africa in 2007 and loved it! Sounds like you're having a fun, learningful and transformative time.
I was fascinated to read this post about pula. I just read this last week, so thought I'd share it with you. Take care and enjoy!
Julie Johnston
http://www.greenhearted.org
Tales from the Edges of Nature and Culture
(an excerpt from Managing at the Edge, by George Holmes Honadle
The following stories illustrate two types of clashes that are actually intertwined [let me know if you'd like to hear the second one, Laura]. The first is the clash between cultures. The second is the flash point that exists where cultures meet nature.
A. Clashing cultures
The southern African nation of Botswana is home to the Kalahari Desert and it is a difficult place to live. It is so dry that a difference of one inch of rainfall can separate a livable place form an unlivable one for a farmer.
Many of the people who live in the deep desert speak click languages. Other people call them "Bushmen" for where they live, but they call themselves the "San." The non-bushmen speak Bantu languages and all the local cultures reflect the importance of the presence of the Kalahari.
The Government of Botswana, with international assistance, had embarked on a program to raise the living standard of poor villages in remote areas, protect wildlife and habitat, and do both in a way that would be viable over a long period of time.
The strategy for accomplishing this this was to help people to conserve wild areas and wild species in perpetuity through self-management of local resources. To do this, community trusts were established as legal entities to manage income from local wildlife-based activities such as game viewing and hunting, and the trusts received technical advice from a team of American advisors.
The trusts, in villages of only a few hundred people with annual incomes of only a few hundred dollars each, had amassed bank balances in the hundreds of thousands of US dollars, and in a few cases even more than that. The Americans pushed the trusts to distribute some of the money so that people would see the connection between wildlife management and personal income.
After all, the Americans came from a world where marketing and the creation of demand drive the economic engine, where growth is the objective of economic activity, and where the multiplier effect is the foundation for the understanding of economic performance. They could not imagine a need to forego present consumption. Their MBA degrees, PhDs and management qualifications perfectly reflected the culture that produced them. Indeed, when the president of the USA asked its citizens to "go shopping" in response to a terrorist attack, it showed how deeply ingrained expansion and consumption were in the culture. Representatives of the kudzu culture [kudzu is a prolific Japanese vine introduced in the USA in 1876 but now invasive in the southern states, engulfing and smothering everything in its path -- a rather apt metaphor, eh?] were now face to face with the San -- the oldest human culture on Earth.
But the San officers of the community trusts had no growth-crazed cultural handicap and they refused to spend or distribute the funds they had accumulated. And this created conflict with the Americans.
I asked the American advisors, one-by-one without the others hearing, the following question:
"Do you know what pula is?"
They each answered, "It is the currency of Botswana."
"Yes," I replied, "that is true. But do you know what pula means in Setswana, the local language?"
None of them did. They had been working in Botswana for over two years, but none of them had enough language skill or local cultural knowledge to tell me what pula meant.
But I knew. When I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, I learned a Bantu language called "Chitumbuka." The word for "rain" in Chitumbuka is "vula." The word for rain in Setswana, another Bantu language, is "pula." The importance of rain in this desert society is so great that the word was chosen as its unit of currency. Rain represented wealth and security. Pula in the bank was literally rain in the bank. Desert people do not save for a "rainy day." Instead, they save to get through the drought.
What outsiders saw as irrational financial management and uneconomic behavior made perfect sense to local people. And, since the past few years had been relatively wet ones, the argument for building reserves was even stronger. Surpluses in bank balances could compensate for deficits in future rainfall. If wisely used, financial capital could temporarily substitute for natural capital.
Knowledge of local ecology often reveals the foundations underpinning language, culture and economic behavior. In fact, culture cannot be understood by studying culture alone.