Keith and Lisa founded ‘The Aware Trust’ to help the endangered wildlife of Zimbabwe – rendered even more threatened by the political crises of the last few years and the poverty and unemployment that ensued.
Rhino horn used to be poached for dagger handles in Yemen, but now it’s taken for Chinese medicine – and worth fifteen thousand US dollars a kilo in-country. That’s a hell of a temptation for hungry men.
There are stories of angry poachers killing dehorned rhinos out of spite or to avoid wasting a night tracking a worthless beast – but the current feeling is that if a whole population in an area is dehorned, the poachers will leave them alone and search further afield,
Here in the Matopos Hills, near Bulawayo, there is a healthy population of some fifty white rhinos and about fifteen of the smaller black species.
When we started on Sunday, there were twenty two to do, and in two days we managed eleven.
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Endangered wildlife of Zimbabwe
Monday, 20 September 2010
Return to Zimbabwe
I must admit it came as a pleasant surprise. The last time I came here, the price on the morning newspaper was six hundred and forty million dollars. Honestly. They’d just started printing a new set of bank notes, and the smallest was ten trillion dollars – which would just about have bought you a cup of tea – as long as the kettle took less than ten minutes to boil, prices were going up so quickly.
But this time it’s all changed. The official currencies are now the US dollar or the South African rand – and once again there is food in the shops and fuel in the garages (but only one pump working, obviously).
That doesn’t mean there isn’t still huge poverty – with massive unemployment, especially in the rural areas.
So our little welfare project around Bulawayo is still very much needed. The team travels around, sometimes huge distances, visiting villages or even stopping the carts on the roads, and giving basic veterinary care to the thousands of donkeys still working hard in the African sun.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Curiouser and Curiouser
“Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I’m afraid the fox is back on the runway again so we’ll now have to wait until they move it on.”
Its 8.20pm. I am on the tarmac at Heathrow. It is a cold, wet winters evening, and I’m in a cramped aeroplane seat next to a huge and equally cramped South African. If the captain had said, over the tannoy, that there was large white rabbit running around the runway with a pocket watch and saying “I’m late. I’m late.” it would have been no stranger or more surprising than much of what we were to see over the next few days as we began the long slog down to Zimbabwe.
Having lived in Namibia for two years, I realized (when I saw Zimbabwe for the first time) that this was the picture-book idea I had grown up with when I was small. All redolent of “Daktari” and “Born Free”. Namibia with its sweeping, cinemascope type grandeur, breathtaking desert colours and huge skies, is an Africa all of its own. But Zimbabwe was the Africa I thought I knew – the Africa that made me want to go there in the first place.
The strange thing about Zimbabwe now is that it's not even the place I thought it was. It now has this indefinable, mercurial quality about it, which is further fogged by the fact that it's not that place I’m reading about in the newspapers, or watching on TV. For a start it's green. There have been plentiful rains, which means that driving across Northern Matabeleland land from Bulawayo to Gweru, there are fields of grass, waving gently in the breeze. You might be in Wyoming, or Kansas. It doesn’t seem or feel like the sort of place where people are going to rise up against anybody. Elsewhere in the world, indignant Icelanders were rioting in the streets and throwing custard at the Parliament building. Bulgarians were holding rallies and railing against the ills of capitalism. In Zimbabwe, where the people are oppressed and subjugated, they are going about their days with a smile, a wave and (nearly always) the most important thing they want to know is “Did you sleep well?”.
This is perhaps because a good night’s sleep is something that can be achieved with no money (which hardly any of them have) and then you begin to realize that encapsulated in that question and answer may well be one of the most precious things they have – the chance to sleep, and rest, and forget.
Maybe the people are broken, dispirited, have no fight left. But I didn’t get that feeling. The smiles are still there, but other things are missing and I’m still trying to work out what they are.
Simon Pope
Friday, 23 January 2009
Zimbabwe
The flight to Zimbabwe is long and hard – not made any easier by sharing the London / Johannesburg stretch with what appeared to be an Afrikaner Rugby Club reunion dinner and booze up. Several chaps, with very little neck, in khaki shirts and shorts, drank and sang and squabbled their way throughout the eleven hours – one even deciding he needed to change his clothes in the aisle halfway through. Then there’s a charming five hour wait in the airport for the flight to Bulawayo.
Finally arriving at the ‘temporary’ Joshua Nkomo Airport Terminal (the new one has rested, unfinished and unloved, swathed in scaffolding – which is gradually being stolen – for the last ten years), it is a shock to be ushered into the customs and immigration hall by smiling customs officers, asking whether we have slept well, and whether we are enjoying our visit.
Now, say what you like, but the Zim economy is a basket case. The day we arrived the Government issued a new set of bank notes – ten to fifty trillion dollar bills. The morning paper costs six hundred million dollars. Now even our own dear Gordon Brown doesn’t have problems like that.
Though come to think of it, the two Supreme Leaders do have quite a lot in common: both unelected, both in charge of collapsed economies, both arrest opposition MPs and neither have got much of a sense of humour.
And by God you need a sense of humour to survive in Zim. It’s hard to believe, but the people are unfailingly polite and cheerful, gentle and optimistic.
There’s 92% unemployment, bread and meat queues outside the few shops that have anything to sell – most are closed and boarded up. And everyone gently reminds you not to drink the water – “We don’t want you to catch cholera” – it’s rampant in the countryside, where perversely, the much needed rains also wash sewage into the streams and rivers used for drinking.
The hospitals have no drugs or equipment, and the schools are on strike, probably because the teachers’ pay – in Zim dollars – no longer even pretends to put food in their families’ mouths.
Yet they stay cheerful.
Someone quips: “There are so many potholes in the Bulawayo roads, it’s the only town in the world where the police arrest you for drink-driving if they see you driving straight".
So it’s a little miracle to see the SPANA funded Donkey Protection Trust out every day on the roads around town and in the surrounding countryside, gently treating the animals that pull the carts that now service the region’s economy – whatever little that might be.
We went north to Gueru to meet two brave young vets, Keith and Lisa, also trying to help the donkeys of the struggling people up there. They also happen to be wild-life specialists – many of the game parks and reserves are being decimated by hungry poachers.
Before we had fully grasped the severity of the situation we had been recruited to help them dart and immobilise about ten fully grown lions. Somehow that Pope fellow got himself the safer end, sticking a thermometer up the unmentionables, while poor little me got the sharp end. Literally. I had to open the jaws of recumbent lions, draw out their tongues, slip an electronic sensor on the end, and try to concentrate on the readings (blood oxygen level and pulse rate), while Lisa kept asking disquieting questions, like “Is he coming round yet?”.
I can tell you, when he started growling, I “came round” pretty blooming quickly. I went out through the gate like a whippet.
I wish I could be as nifty in that blessed marathon.
Jeremy Hulme
