New Respect.
– Taz Watson
I have developed a new respect for the rangers and individuals who sacrifice not only their time and energy, but their sleep, their comfort, and their safety to protect our precious rhinos.
We were given a challenge – one that sounded a lot easier to us at the time than it actually proved to be. We were to embark on a 48 hour anti-poaching/survival trip where we had to build our own shelters, make fires, sleep in the bush, and patrol for poachers. Oh, and we had barely any food and water, so we needed to make do with what we could find in nature. We set off at 7am on Friday morning in good spirits and enjoyed a day of game-drives, berry-picking, competitive dung-spitting (which is apparently a ‘thing’ in the bush), fire-making, leaf-picking, and animal-spotting. We learned a lot about survival in the bush and our guide taught us valuable techniques that would be sure to save us in a dangerous situation.
The day ended with us being given our dinner rations, which consisted of a tin of beans each. We pried these open with penknives and warmed them on the amber coals by the fire. We ate with spoons that we had carved out of sticks and laughed and told stories around the flickering flames. It was fun. But the fun was about to end.
The next 10 hours saw us shivering in pain from the harsh winter cold. We drove around the reserve wrapped in a total of 15 layers (we counted), blankets and sleeping bags and we could still barely endure it. We winged. A lot. We had to do fence patrol, where we drove along the perimeter of the reserve to check if the fence had any evidence of tampering – a sign that poachers have entered. Then we had 30-minute naps in the car from a viewpoint while two people stayed on watch. It was 1am and we were hungry, cold and on the verge of giving up. Again, we moaned about the biting cold. This was not fun.
We eventually headed back to our ‘home campsite’ in the bush, where we built a fire (which proved very difficult due to the dew that had settled on all of our kindling) and we got two hours of broken sleep while, two by two, we rotated night-watch. At 4:30am we watched the fire die out as we braced ourselves for our next stint of poacher patrol. We got back into the car in silence, feeling teased by the three hours of partial warmth we had by the fire that was over far too soon. Now we needed to find all of the rhinos to check that they were ok. And by ok, I mean not hacked to death by inhumane poachers. The prospect of finding such a gruesome scene was terrifying. This ‘adventure’ was proving to be extremely mentally and physically challenging on all fronts.
At 7am, when the sun finally rose, we were ecstatic. Our beanies and jackets were covered in a layer of frost, our hair was frozen stiff and our spirits were low. As the sun got warmer, so did we. Slowly but surely we began to peel back our layers and, despite growling tummies and a lack of sleep, our spirits returned and we continued to find our precious rhinos, beaming with delight as we found each one grazing peacefully on the plains.
The whole experience was extremely difficult for us. We knew it would be unpleasant, but not for a second did we consider the extent of the challenge. There are rangers and trackers who do this daily, and they do it out of the goodness of their hearts. These are the people that prove, time and time again, that they can think of the good that is greater than themselves. We struggled to do that at times because we were cold, hungry, grumpy, tired and bored. It was some of the hardest work I’ve ever had to do and it instilled incredible respect in me for the individuals who are so dedicated to protecting our rhinos from the harm of these greedy savages that we know as poachers.
Thank you to you all, dear rangers/trackers, you do the things that no one else wants to, and you do it without complaining. You really are heroes in our eyes.