The Dean’s Blog: Hippos and things …

I was becoming reluctantly somewhat of an expert on ‘Big 5’ poo. This was esoteric and not what I expected. The trouble was it was sun-up, say 6.15, in a piece of the Kalahari Desert in northern Botswana rampant with elephants and hippos and things but no-one had told them. So we tracked them on foot for four and a half hours getting closer quite often as the guide could tell from the shape, texture, colour and heat of the aforementioned poo we kept passing or in the case of elephants falling over. By 09.00 I could differentiate old baboon from fresh impala; by 10.30 I could locate elephants’ movements on a timetable down to half an hour just by the… well there’s no need to go into further detail.

‘Shhhhhhhh!!!’ hissed the large guide at me as I aired my views on just getting my boot and my dignity stuck into a hippo’s under swamp foot print (it must have been executing a single footed pirouette at the time to get that deep). ‘There are probably elephants behind that bush!’ he exclaimed agitatedly, ‘and they can hear a voice at a kilometre!’ That impressed me. The danger potential did not as the bush was close but small and it was obvious, again, that no one had told an elephant to go and hide behind it. The sun rose in the burnished blue sky, the steam rose from the rainy season soaked desert and disgruntlement rose in me as we plunged yet again up to mid calf in smelly water and reeds and micro frogs and bugs and underwater slimy things. Later we saw a small splodge on the horizon that we were told was either an elephant or a termite heap – through my bins I think I saw it move but I cannot swear to it so that could rule out the termite heap.

But the following day, a Wednesday, I saw hippos and elephants and giraffes respectively playing submerged submarines, frolicking flirtatiously in the shallows and laboriously folding up legs and cranking wide their stance just to get a drink, from a small and dilapidated motor boat from a distance of less than 30 meters on the Namibian side of the Chobe river. So there you go…
‘And that is a swimming black mamba, very deadly poisonous!’ the guide told us as a dead branch apparently floated by at arm’s reach of the side of the boat.

Earlier, as I hovered in an arthritic little helicopter over the two kilometres of raw power and blunt noise of the Victoria Falls, and later tumbling about in clear air turbulence, approached a grass landing strip about the length of a cricket pitch in a rusty, single-engine plane that had far more people in it than space or oxygen, I was struck by the truism of how different this all was in every conceivable way from teaching the use of the possessive apostrophe on singular collectives to grade 9 at ICS in Zumikon. The plane landed as the extended family of baboons which were lined up like Russian dolls, applauded and I wondered how much of the zillion experiences quite new to me I could relevantly bring back to the classroom. I wondered how much the 360o horizons uninterrupted by anything remotely to do with mankind, and vast, semi-dome skies unsullied by the ubiquitous vapour trails of jets that clog up European skies, would simply fill me with new ideas. I talked to Zimbabweans at the Safari Lodge on the election Saturday and again on Sunday and Monday and they told me that for the opposition ‘no news was bad news. I failed to buy a beer with a 10 million Zimbabwean dollar note. And I studied the profoundly moving Hector Pieterson Memorial in Orlando just outside Jo’burg.

And the following week I spent an intensely professional six and a half busy days on a CIS/NEASC accreditation team in an international school nearby in Gaberone and that was concentrated, relevant, eye opening professional development unavailable in any other medium anywhere. There were different ideas, different methods, a happy and polite bunch of different students with a respectful and open relationship with the teaching staff. And period 1 started at 07.05. Hundreds of international teachers all over the world acquire similar or more profound experiences every year before returning to their teaching and administration duties. And when they return to their own schools the benefit goes to the kids even if at a subliminal level, ohne Zweifel.