Mokolodi Safari!

Hey everyone!

It's been crazy busy here - I was so tired I passed out at 9:30 last night with my lights on! Quite the surprise when I woke up again at 4. We started our clinical rotations and classes this week and it's been absolutely awesome! However, I still need to fill you all in on my adventures at Mokolodi Nature Reserve!

Mokolodi Nature Reserve is a game park near Gaborone, Botswana - maybe 10 minutes outside of town. Our program arranged for us all to go there to have a game drive (safari), educational lecture, and stay the night so that we could volunteer the next day. I was so pumped!

About to head out!!

We headed out on Thursday at 2pm and went straight to our lodging area to put our stuff away, then headed out to the lecture area. They started out by telling us that the government had recently banned the hunting of large game animals, which I initially thought was fantastic. However, they went on to explain that because of this, the reserve is currently at 158% capacity and so are many other parks around the country. This is a huge issue because the animals now have to be either given supplementary feed or humanely killed, while the park is operating at a loss. They pointed out that if they were allowed to auction off the hunting of just one animal, they would be able to make a huge profit and use that to save other animals as well. It was definitely a different way of looking at the problem - a way I don't think most Americans would ever see for themselves. It reminded me how self-centered our whole culture is - if it doesn't explicitly have to do with us, we just mindlessly promote whatever we "think" is best, without ever actually thinking about it. We so often forget how much influence we have.

After this thought-provoking lecture, we got into our game drive vehicle with our guides, Glen (a very sarcastic UK native) and Junior (a very good driver given all the potholes in the road) and headed out into the reserve! I honestly can't put most of it into words, so I'll just show pictures.

 Spotted Hyena!

 Male and female Kudu (the male is fully grown when its horns have 3 twists!)

 Pumbaa and baby Pumbaa! (Possibly the cutest, ugliest thing I've ever seen)

 Giraffe! (We actually went on a hunt on foot for this picture! Shout out to Glen for being an awesome tour guide!)

 Impala!

We had a bonfire as the sun was setting (my camera had died so I'm stealing a picture from one of my friends. Thanks Michelle!) and toasted marshmallows. It was so much fun to hang out with everyone and just chill.

The next morning we were up bright and early for breakfast before gearing up to volunteer! We were filling in some of the potholes in the road that had gotten really bad and building flash flood barriers to prevent more potholes from occurring, while conveniently providing a little watering hole for the animals. I was rather painfully reminded that I have no upper body strength during this and promptly decided my best efforts would be best put into motivating those who could actually do work. But I did attempt for about 45 minutes, so I will consider that a success.

We finally came home at 2pm on Friday, after buying a few gifts in the shop for friends and family! :) I am so glad I had the opportunity to go and learn and I can't wait to go to some other game reserves here as well!

I had to end with this awesome Lion King mural they had in our lodge!