Sunday bird blogging

An osprey, a rare visitor to the Chobe River.

Sunday bird blogging

And we now resume our regular blogging schedule, even as I am starting to think that it will be weeks before I have the African story sorted out and that "catching up" is not something I may be able to do.

I can post the pictures, but explaining them, conveying what it was like to be there, is turning out to be extraordinarily difficult.

Anyway, here's a dark-capped bulbul. I saw a lot of them around the hotel in Johannesburg, and at first their behavior puzzled me. Several of them sat in a leafless tree, and periodically one would take off, fly in a small circle, and return to the same branch. My impression was that they were aimless and not very bright; I finally realized that they were catching insects so small I couldn't see them, so smoothly I couldn't even catch them in the act.

This bulbul, behind our lodge in Botswana, has something a little more exciting to show for his efforts.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started

Back in Johannesburg, back at the D'Oreale Grande, after a journey that was less than two weeks but seemed much longer. Every day was so rich and full of new experiences that it was as though time itself expanded and suddenly accommodated many more hours than the paltry twenty-four I'm used to.

I'm having herb tea in the garden, listening to what I now know are Cape turtledoves cooing in the trees, the four notes that struck me as so foreign, doves "with a South African accent," our first day here, and now is a familiar, and reassuring, sound.

The tour group has broken up. Those going on the optional extension to Cape Town left this morning; everyone else is doing a tour of Soweto and a visit to Nelson Mandela's house, now a museum, before heading to the airport for flights home this evening.

I woke up with one of those intestinal viruses we were warned to expect here, which at least waited until the last day to show up. I couldn't possibly endure a bus tour, so I arranged to keep my hotel room until five o'clock and I'm trying to recover enough to face the sixteen hour flight tonight. Being unwell so far away from home is always stressful; being unwell here is almost hallucinatory.

Wherever you go, there you are. I've quoted that many times about being in new places and new situations. I've always thought that it was obviously true, that it was in fact what I love most about travel. When you find yourself on the Great Wall, or riding a camel by the pyramids, or sitting at a cafe in Paris, the fact that it's still you there, the same old self, is what makes the new place, a place you may have dreamed about for years, suddenly possible, suddenly real.

                       The world, it was the old world yet,
                       I was I, my things were wet

But so much of this trip felt like a dream, a fiction, that I started to feel as though I myself was also a fiction. I don't think I've ever been less self-conscious, in the best possible way, than I was on this trip.

Leaving Zambia

This morning we're flying to Lusaka, and then back to Johannesburg. There were several elephants grazing in the bush by the lodge's airstrip, and a family of warthogs trotting across the tarmac.



Another elephant family, with a very young baby, came out as our truck stopped, and it was a magic moment. After so much wildlife, so many elephants, it was the perfect coda.

Then our plane arrived, roaring down the airstrip. Mama elephant trumpeted indignantly and hustled the baby out of there. Goodbye, Zambia.

Goodbye, Africa.

Paul

No picture here, just a story.

I noticed him when I was walking through the corn field on the way to the school. I had fallen behind the group and the children holding my hands were tugging at me to go faster, and I caught a glimpse of a boy sitting alone on the ground, watching us go by. I had an impression that he was crippled, but didn't really see him clearly.

Later, after the visits to the school and the orphanage, when everyone was milling around outside and taking photos, I saw him coming down the hill. He couldn't walk; his legs were folded underneath him and he moved forward by swinging his hips one side at a time. His right arm ended above the elbow, without a hand.

It had taken him all that time to catch up with us, and I walked over and asked him his name.

"Paul," he said shyly.

"Hi, Paul." I told him that my name was Kathleen and I came from New York, in America. I thanked him for letting us visit his village. I shook his left hand, and told him that I was very happy to meet him.

And he gave me such a radiant smile it pierced my heart. I hadn't done anything more than I had done with the other children; in fact I had done less.

I didn't take his picture. This was just a reflex; I would never take a picture of a disabled child in New York, so of course I wouldn't take one in Zambia. He wasn't on display like the wildlife. But in fact getting their pictures taken and seeing their digital selves was such a treat for all the other children in the village, it probably would have been an even bigger one for Paul, one way in which he could have been like all the other children there. It was the one gift I could have given him -- I'm not Angelina Jolie, I can't adopt him and give him a new life and have him seen by the finest doctors -- and it didn't even occur to me until much later that I could have, should have, done it.

Instead what I have is that smile, the gift that he gave me, I who already have so much.

I've promised myself that I'm going to be worthy of it.

More pictures of the children

Village children

Sausage tree

Really, that's what it's called.

What else would you call them? Those are actually the fruits of this peculiar tree, not some tasty cured meats that someone hung from the branches to keep them away from the hyenas.

Up close, the "sausages" are some kind of potato-like tuber. We'd seen several of these trees before but this was my first opportunity to get a good picture, so I stood underneath the tree and aimed up. And after narrowly escaping getting conked on the head by several falling sausages, I decided that the picture above was quite good enough.

Dancer

The feet of the one of the women dancing. Those are rattles attached to her ankles.

Orchestra seating

Some of the seats around the small stage where the dancers and musicians performed. Each one was a different shape and design.

Petronella

Petronella was our guide through the cultural village, taking us to present ourselves to the village headman, taking us through the houses and explaining the rituals, and here, describing a magic talisman in the museum.

Orphanage

(Thanks to Ron Adler for letting me post his pictures of the orphanage as his were much better than mine.)

There are 18 million orphans in Africa because of AIDS, an entire generation of parents decimated, so I imagine that most villages of any size have an orphanage like this one. Some people in the village have taken in orphans to raise along with their own children; it's hard to imagine how people who are already struggling can take on this great burden, all these children to feed and clothe and educate, but all of the children in this village seem happy and well-taken care of -- the little girls who fought over who got to hold my hand and thought it was great giggling fun leading me in circles in the cornfield so that I got to the orphanage late could have been children anywhere.

I arrived just as the children were singing a song for us and everyone was crowded around the doors so I couldn't see much. We sang America the Beautiful as our song for them.