News & Updates
Team and volunteers with snared kudu
Katshana Lodge
Zimbabwe, Newsletter October 2009
Dear readers,
This month is even extremer than the previous; Temperatures 34C+ are no
exception and despite a little drop there was no serious rainfall yet. Despite
this, some of the trees anticipate that the rain is coming and start to show
their young light green leaves. Always special to see this in the further dry
and dusty October surroundings.
I moved to ‘Katshana Lodge’ (which means: ‘far away place’) about 9 km’s
from Ganda Lodge were I used to stay. The room became too small (2m x
3m!) and this house is a lot spicier. The team will follow soon since it’s time
to change their basis.
Besides keeping the team busy I had to renew the thatch roof and had to
repair all sort of things. Also there is no running water, which gives quite
some work in both physically getting it there and preparing the necessary
pump & equipment. It is still not possible to buy everything and if you can
the things are generally 3x more expensive then for example in South Africa.
I share the lodge with a French research organization and some members
from the anti poaching from our sister organization PDC.
This does not mean that we are forgetting about the anti poaching side of
things; Since it was already 6 weeks ago that we went to the ‘Shangani
River’ were we were able to find a record braking amount of snares, we
thought it was time to redo the operation to see what had happened. The
result was one third of the amount of snares, still some 111. Worth going we
thought. Also in the ‘Jackal Berry camp’ area (Gwayi River) were a lot of
people settled, our presence proved valuable.
In all we recovered 321 snares this month, compared to 379 last year. A
slight improvement, but the total of snares at the end of this month already
exceeds the total of the whole of 2008.
Also on a social level some of us are quite active: Our team leader Collet
Ndlovu (photo) became the proud father of his fourth child and first daughter!
All are well...
This month we were honored by a visit from our webmaster Flavia Carozza.
She stayed with us for two weeks and brought us a pile of beautiful
ALL4AP-WEZ Annual calendars. We would like to thank her for her efforts;
the result is great!
Rumour has it that Collet will call his firstborn baby girl to her!
See you next month,
Martin & Team
Collet
