This isn’t going to be a usual description of a luxury camp. It won’t wax rhapsodic about the view or lyrical about wildlife – but then, it wasn’t really a usual week that I experienced. This was a week in which I was challenged and humbled and amazed by a bunch of street children from the shelters – and streets obviously – of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban. A week that went like this: Monday we had a mudfight in the Luvuvhu River with elephants looking on. Tuesday we made Poo Charts. Wednesday was 44 degrees and we still ran the programme – enough said! Thursday we exchanged gases with an acacia and did Animal Aerobics (I think I sprained a thumb doing the baboon gallop – or maybe it was the mozzie buzz…). And Friday, we all had to say goodbye and return home. But the word ‘home’ for some of us is a friendly solid place, with family, friends, community, job, while for our charges it is perhaps less benign: a shelter if they’re lucky, an abusive home, or just the street.
So a little background is in order as you wrinkle your foreheads (“Poo Chart? Is that what I think it means?”) about these mad, happy, heartbreaking few days. Children in the Wilderness , initiated by Wilderness Safaris, is a programme where the company closes one of its lodges to paying guests and instead hosts a bunch of street children, orphans or other similarly disadvantaged children where they have the time of their lives – some of them have never slept in a bed for example – as well as hopefully teach them a few things about nature, the possibilities of life, HIV and nutrition.
Children in the Wilderness has been running successfully for the past five years in Botswana, Namibia and Malawi, but this collaborative effort was only the second to take place in South Africa. National radio station 5 FM approached Children in the Wilderness to run a programme in conjunction with their Teddy Bear Patrol – a police-driven project to try and get the street kids off the streets, off the glue and drugs, and into shelters. McDonald’s came to the party with financial sponsorship and 5 FM “The Mark Gillman Show” did their show live from the camp each morning– they took to calling the programme “Kids in the Park”….
After much frenzied and flurried organisation, on Sunday 13th November an eclectic bunch of people met at the Protea Wanderers hotel in Joburg: Five kids and their caretakers from each metropolitan area (and five local Makuleke kids from the Pafuri area where we were heading); six extremely nervous councillors, assorted photographers and other volunteers, all ready to bus up to the very north of Kruger.
Why nervous, you ask? Well, this isn’t exactly privileged kids heading off on some holiday camp (You should have seen the size of their bags they brought for the week; I’ve seen vanity cases that were larger…). Firstly, they weren’t the original bunch we’d been expecting; they had run away (no, really) and these were another bunch, much younger than we’d planned for. And then we were told to be careful because they might take it into their heads to ‘do a runner’ anywhere and we should avoid them disappearing into Joburg traffic.We were half expecting to have problems with stealing, with possible cases of abusive behaviour… I mean, who knows? Hence that ‘impala in the headlights’ look. Now, perhaps some of these kids were capable of such things, but all we saw was a bunch of excited kids who were nervous themselves, having left familiar surroundings for an unknown destination filled with wild animals. It’s more unfamiliar when you consider that when we showed them a map they didn’t understand it at all, or their place on it. Can you even imagine such a lack of sense of place? Or perhaps it’s the other way around: we have a sense of place that is based on theoretical knowledge of a map and not on a purely three-dimensional existence… but I digress.
Speaking of maps, Pafuri is practically off the South African one. It’s the most remote you can get in the Kruger, which in today’s heavy commercialisation and many tourists is a rare and precious thing. You must drive many kilometres and some seven hours to get there – north all the way, through the fringes of the Waterberg, then on, on through Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg), across the Tropic of Capricorn, and then over a beautiful pass in the Soutpansberg, through a tunnel still, oddly enough, known as the Verwoed Tunnels. The towns become villages and then scatterings of huts as you turn east toward the very top corner of South Africa, with baobabs now squatting hugely on the roadside.
Then, finally, Pafuri Gate looms oasis-like, and after the various formalities, you follow the road to the newly opened Pafuri Camp, blithely ignoring the No Entry sign that still remains from the days when access to the area was restricted to Kruger Park field staff. As for Pafuri, well, it’s just stunning: raised up on decks overlooking the Luvuvhu River which burbles busily two metres below – and there’s always something coming down to drink – be it baboon, nyala, bushbuck, or the four big old buffalo “dagga boys” who now have decided this is their hangout. There are enormous trees overhanging everywhere casting deep shade and coolness – very different to most of the rest of Kruger - and as for the birds! Well I won’t go into them now, but the deep silence that pervades is shattered by a cacophony of bird yells (no other word really sums it up) every morning at 4:30, and the Fish Eagle calls sweetly throughout the day (apologies for this one rhapsodic outburst).
Of course, the deep silence was also shattered by the laughter and squeals of 30 children. At first they were quieter, but as time went on they felt more and more comfortable with each other and the fact of being in the bush. The camp game rangers were incredible with them, giving them two game drives a day and getting them to hug baobab trees and appreciate everything from an elephant to a shongololo, showing them how to make Poo Charts to which they stuck all manner of dung big and small… oh and they all saw a lion stalking a bushbuck which engendered much excitement and awe.
They also suggested – on the day when it was a mere 42 degrees Celsius – that instead of following our programme, we get the kids and ourselves into old clothes or bathing costumes (the same in some of the kids’ cases). The rangers checked up and down the Luvuvhu for crocodiles, and finding none, told us we could all jump into the water. Crocs there weren’t, but there was a herd of elephant a little way up, and they watched in evident bemusement as 30 yelling children and ten bellowing adults flung themselves into the water (it only came up to our knees which meant it was more of a muddy experience than a watery one…). The energy was so enticing that before long I found myself in the middle of a pile of children all splashing each other with equal parts of mud and water, shrieking away. The elephants must just deal, was my last coherent thought as I went face down into the mud. (I don’t even want to think of the various invertebrate forms I came into contact with…)
Of course, there were serious ‘games’ too – mainly to do with HIV/AIDS – brilliant ones, which explained HIV in terms children could understand. I watched as Nomasisi, one of the youngest kids, who I had often seen with brow furrowed in a fog of incomprehension (not sure of her ‘home’ language but she struggled to follow), suddenly work out the meaning of an HIV game: her eyes widened and her brow cleared. “I finally get it!” she seemed to be saying. Other fun as we played the Senses Game: where you have five stations, one for each sense; for example listening to animal sounds which you have to guess, or tasting all sorts of things blindfolded. ….
The funniest yet perhaps saddest kids were two young boys, Lukas and Johannes, who understood only Afrikaans and spoke it with such a heavy accent that after three sentences I’d just nod vaguely at them, hoping I hadn’t agreed to them going out to pat the crocodile. We’re convinced too that they had no idea what had happened to them; I mean, one moment they’re in a shelter in Montagu in the Cape, the next, they’re in the hot bushveld with people feeding them five times a day and having to hug baobab trees. We think this because the first time they saw a baboon, the one turned to the other with great surprise and said, “Haai! Hy’s kaalgat!” (“Hey, he’s stark naked!”)
Undersized bodies, wizened faces – but whenever there was a fracas, Lukas or Johannes was usually in the middle of it. And no matter how exhausted we were, we couldn’t just let them do their own thing because their own thing was either kicking a ball over the deck into buffalo-infested grass, thinking nothing of scampering over the side to get it, or teasing and fighting anyone in the vicinity! Yet, Godfrey, their tent leader, told us that at 1 in the morning he would be woken up by Lukas telling him he was lonely - a need for security that is heartbreaking when one thinks: and next week? Who will he tell then?
There are many other stories of Lukas and Johannes, and their sidekick Anrich who has the sweetest smile this side of the Limpopo: how they came to complain to me about the pap – the look on their faces said all too plainly: “What sort of food do you think this is?!” And when we had birthday cake for Elizabeth from the Hillbrow shelter, Lukas took one bite of the very fancy cake that Kenny Lugayeni the AMAZING chef made, wrinkled his nose, shook his head and said in tones of deep disgust, “Hierdie mense kan nie koek bak nie!” (“These people can’t bake cakes!”)
As for Kenny and the rest of the staff, well, they were truly amazing at how they took the kids under their wings and into their hearts, playing with them, making them snacks at the drop of a hat, singing and dancing with them. And the guides were particularly great at the end of the day, passing out a welcome drink to some very tired, frazzled councillors!
Culture is a funny thing, you know. Take our rain game, which caused interesting reactions. On a hot, hot day, clouds began to come up and we decided to play the rainmaking game with them – we got all the kids to copy us as we made noises that sounded at first like a soft drizzle (rubbing hands together), then harder rain (clicking your fingers), then a cloudburst (clapping hands, stamping feet) and finally dying down again to a drizzle. The kids loved it and we went off to have a bit of afternoon tea, at which point an enormous wind came tearing along the riverbed, the clouds grew larger and darker, and the storm hit: A magnificent storm, with incredible lightning and thunder, but somewhat scary out there in the open and in its unexpectedness. What we didn’t realise was that for the kids it was scarier: they thought that either one of the councillors had brought the rain (the next Queen Modjadji?) or, by doing the rainmaking, we’d angered God and so he’d sent a violent storm….
But cultural shocks aside I was dazzled with the creativity and intelligence they showed: painting banners, T-shirts, making Christmas cards, songs and dances… On Quiz Night they remembered not one, but ALL the trees they’d seen, they correctly identified all the dung, and they lustily made animal noises (including a buffalo, which according to them went “MOO!”). Again, I was humbled at the assumptions I had made … just because they don’t go to school every day.
There’s a lot more to tell. Of fun in the pool, startling sunrise, intense heat that radiated from above and the ground below, of a “bush dinner” where we asked the children to be silent and contemplate for a while – they lasted four minutes which is a whole lot longer than any other kids I know.
Of course the age range of 10-16 and 4 different languages (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu) presented some challenges. On the last night, we did the “pass the candle” thing – you know, whoever has the candle talks about his/her feelings, or what he/she learnt – only we didn’t use a candle in case someone set someone else alight so we used a torch…. Well, some kids made silly remarks, others plainly didn’t understand what they were supposed to say, and I was worried that no-one was getting it but then my little Nomasisi stood up and said: “I learned that one should have respect for others even if they’re different from me and to know that we need to understand each other….” Well naturally the tears began and didn’t stop, especially when I had to hug this little girl goodbye and send her back to a harsher reality than I have ever known.
I feel humbled at what I have learned from these children. I have no idea if I taught them anything (although I hope I did), but they taught me over and over how much we judge others, have preconceived ideas of them. And how wrong we can be. I learned how being out in the wilds allows us to heal, encourages us to see our commonalities rather than our differences and so to open up our hearts to each other and be vulnerable. I learnt that I am truly privileged: not just in terms of my material existence but to be able to be of some use, even a little, to a few brave children in Africa.
Ilana Stein – Councillor Children in the Wilderness, Pafuri Camp