A Blog in Three Parts: Kacgae

June 25, 2012

This past week has simply flown by.  I don’t know where it’s gone.  But I’ll try and do a recap for you.

Last Sunday was a trip to a small village about two hours away, called Kacgae (as best I can tell it’s pronounced cog-GUY or maybe cockeye).  Anyway, it’s a bit of an uneventful drive away.  It seemed to be mostly San  people, but I could be wrong.

The double cab was still in the shop, so Max and Phale took Caoilfhionn and I in the two single cabs.  I got the pleasure of listening to Radio Botswana 2 and the return of the power ballad.  I also managed to get two hours of reading in the Kite Runner (which was fantastic, I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to get around to reading it).

We turned off the two lane highway onto a relatively wide, moderately maintained dirt road.  There were a surprising number of goats wandering about.  The thing about Kacgae, is that kind of sneaks up on you.  One minute you’re driving through the veld, the next there are houses and a school sort of lurking behind some of the larger acacia.

It was a Sunday, which apparently meant that there was a soccer game on and the entire town was there, including the people we were there to talk to.

Now, you might be wondering, why were we there in the first place?  Well, one of CCB’s major goals is reducing human-predator conflict and they’d received a grant to build 10 predator proof corrals (or kraals as they’re called here) in this village.  The village had the task of choosing who would receive the kraals.  They went by a lottery system so the 10 families were from all different backgrounds and levels of wealth.  A few months back, the CCB crew went out and put up the wood and wire fences that form the base of the predator proof pens.

The job of the families was to put up acacia all around the kraals to keep the predators out and the guardian dogs in.  A few of the families did, most didn’t.

When we made it out to the soccer pitch, we sent someone in search of the people we were looking for.  There were two full teams on the pitch, in uniforms with shin guards and everything.  I was a little surprised, since most everyone was in nearly indecent castoffs.  Then I saw them closer and realized that the soccer uniforms were treated with love and respect, but they were still showing some serious wear.  Made me think about just how nice some of my “worn-out” stuff really is.

Anyway, we tracked down our families and Phale debated with them for quite some time (all in Setswana so I didn’t understand a word) while the little kids stared at Caoilfhionn and I, trying to get us to wave and give thumbs up.  Caoilfhionn was trying to be serious, but I obliged them.  They were freaking cute.

After that, we got a group organized and went about hacking down blackthorn, which is a native invasive species.  We took branches as big around as your forearm (even you big guys) and hit them hard against the fence so that the thorns would latch onto the wires and onto the other branches.  There’s a knack to doing it without losing all of your skin the process.  I have not mastered it.  At first Caoilfhionn and I actively helped, then we settled for dragging branches.  At some point, we had enough helpers that Caoilfhionn and I were politely told to stay out of the way and let them do all the work.

At the end of the day, we’d done five kraals.  Max had done a similar number on his own.  It took prodding to get them going but once they were, the villagers were unstoppable.

Next Episode: Gaborone