November 6, 2017
Goin’ on Safari
At 5:00 AM, we were heading out of Kigali for a two-day
excursion at Akagera National Park in the Eastern Province, a two and a half
hour drive from the city through some of the most dramatic terrain in
Rwanda. This surely is a country of a
Thousand Hills and an agricultural economy that cultivates and harvests in
dramatic fashion up steep terraced slopes of rich red soil. The drive also
reveals a Rwanda very different than the bustling, sophisticated Kigali scene.
Barely 30 minutes out of the city, the villages and open
markets that mark these areas are already busy with many people on the road.
Most are walking or leading bicycles up the steep hills laden with huge stalks
of bananas and burlap bags bulging with produce. They are all heading towards
the market areas. There are also many people, men and women of all ages working
in the fields that line the highway. At 6:00 AM there is already a great deal
of work going on in these rural sections of Rwanda.
By 6:30, 6:45 we begin to see the children dressed in their various colorful uniforms heading to
schools along the busy highway. We see a few children riding on the back of
bicycles, but most students are walking in groups or alone as the sun is
brightening the sky. We saw one student reading a book as she walked along. But
we also saw children who appeared to be of elementary and secondary school ages
without school uniforms. Some of them were helping adults transport the produce
to the markets. Others were watching the commotion of the morning, some silent,
some laughing and waving at the traffic going by. One assumes these children
are not enrolled in school because their families have not been able to pay for
the uniforms that all families must purchase for students, whether for the
public or private schools. Universal education at K-12 is still a challenge for
the policy makers in Rwanda.
I cannot help but think about the contrasting scenes of the
past 4 days. The celebration of the
Maranyundo graduates, their enthusiasm for moving into careers or
post-secondary education, imagining futures as part of the new Rwandan middle class
in which they exercise the motto of their school…respect, responsibility and
leadership. In this early Monday morning scene along a rural highway the scene
is of an agricultural economy marked by manual labor and technology of past
centuries. Thinking about this contrast…the rush to compete in the 21st
century with the stark realty of the agricultural economy in these rural
villages one wants to believe that this brave African nation will resolve the
economic inequalities that frustrate all our economies. But our own nation has
not resolved the inequalities so apparent in many aspects of life. Can
education be expected to resolve the complex circumstances of economic
inequalities?
These are rather deep issues to consider in the early
morning headed for safari in the Akagera National Park.
November 6, 2017
On Safari
“You
know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.” Karen Blixen
Out of
Africa
There was something about being on
safari today that made me feel as though I was channeling Meryl Streep when she
played Karen Blixen in Out of Africa.
I have always loved that film; I’ve seen it many times. But I don’t think I
truly appreciated that film of the life of that remarkable writer until I had
experienced the Akagera National Park on safari.
The word safari has such an interesting
history, as do so many of the words from the colonial era that saw European
nations bringing “civilization” to Africa. Safari is a Swahili term that means journey and came to mean a journey into
the East African bush to either hunt or observe and admire wild animals. In Out of Africa, Denys Finch Hatton, the
brash handsome British adventurer who became Blixen’s lover, included fine
china, elegant dinner and Mozart on the Victrola as safari accouterments’. He
represented the tradition of gentlemen tracking game for sport and creating a whole
mythology about exploring the Africa landscape.
Our safari was for exploring and
observing animals in their natural habitat, and it was amazing. The Akagera National
Park had once been a park that included both Rwandan and Tanzanian boundaries
in 1934. But after 1994, the park was redrawn to include only the Rwandan land.
Today it is a wonderful tourist attraction and model of animal protection.
“No
domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have
lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild
before they are accepted by it.” Karen
Blixen in Out of Africa
Among the animals we saw were elephants,
hippos, warthogs, water buffalo, giraffes, antelopes, zebras, baboons, three
types of monkeys, and all sorts of birds. I can’t really describe how
beautiful, how magnificent these animals are as they make their way through the
day. Some are bold, fast and skedaddle away as they feel the approach of the
Range Rover with its camera-toting humans. Others, like the giraffe, are
careful, modest and can be so still that they are part of the landscape,
literally. When I saw this stillness it
literally took my breath away…and I understood anew what Blixen meant when she
described the “aptitude of stillness” that we must learn in order to really be
at peace, with one’s self, with one another, with “the wild.”
We did see something quite
extraordinary that amazed even our driver and our guide. We saw a leopard kill
an antelope. We caught the end of the chase as the leopard felled the antelope
and took its face in its mouth. I thought the kill would be a bloody affair.
Instead, the leopard clamped her/his jaws around the mouth and nose of the
antelope and smothered it to death. It took awhile for the antelope to die.
After that, we watched the leopard for a
few minutes as s/he sat and watched us watching the kill. We rode ever so slowly
by, not wanting to interrupt the conquest and leopard’s chance to eat the
beast. Later, on our drive back to the lodge, the driver went by the spot where
we had seen the kill. Sure enough, we saw the carcass of the antelope had been
dragged to a space under a bush. The guide explained that the leopard would
first drink the blood and then eat what s/he needed. S/he would take the rest
and either hang it from a tree (although the antelope was pretty big) or hide
it to eat another day…before the carcass began to smell. So that kill
represented at least two days of food and the nourishment of the blood. The
leopard would not hunt again until the antelope was finished.
“When
you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all
her music.” Karen Blixen
And so our group of compassionate women
from Boston watched as the leopard killed the antelope…absolutely still and
fascinated… in awe, even, of the power and raw necessity of the kill. I guess
we had been caught up in the rhythm of this majestic landscape. At one place,
atop the crest of a hill from which we could see the lakes , valleys and
mountains of the area, I thought I was
actually looking at the whole world and all that it could teach me about space,
time and truth. Karen Blixen described what I saw today exactly right…
“The
views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and
freedom, and unequalled nobility.”
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