Independence Day

On the weekend of the 29th of September the whole of Botswana Stops working for the annual Independence Day holiday. At Bana Ba Metsi it was no different, the children had Saturday to Tuesday off school and manual work. On Monday the big plan was to take the big school boat up the river with all the boys to an island where it was safer to swim in the river. We would camp there for the night and head back the next day. We all trouped down to the boat in the morning, only to find that we could only get one of the 2 motors to work on the boat. No worries. Mr Dow quickly made up a new plan and it was decided that we would drive the boys down in the two Hiluxes a couple of kilometers to a place on the river that is nice and you can catch fish from the shore. The place was beautiful, it would not looked out of place on National Geographic. There was grass on the shore, trees that over hung the river, birds everywhere and reeds on the opposite bank. It was right at the heart of the Delta. We parked the trucks and all of us walked down to the river, on the way we heard a shout from one of the boys. We ran over to see what the fuss was about and we were hit by a stench that burned the inside of your nostrils. The same smell as when we carried back a baby elephant skull from a walk the previous week. Right there before us was an elephant., from the smell it was quite apparent that it was dead. So we ventured over to investigate. Wow, what a magnificent sight. A full grown elephant was there on the floor and it looked like it had only died in the last day or two so most of it was intact. It was strange to feel what the skin felt like and how heavy the trunk was because you will never get an opportunity to get close to a live elephant elephant in the wild. They are just too dangerous. So after this brief diversion we get back on the mission of catching fish.We watched the boys make makeshift fishing lines out of nylon and a stick for the rod. Some of them were wading in the deep mud of the shallows trying to find worms to put on their hooks. For the couple of hours that we were there, not many of the boys managed to catch a fish. All that was apart from the one boy called 'Trust', he managed to catch five! I have absolutely no idea how he managed to get so many more that the boys, perhaps he knew an ancient African fish dance, or perhaps he just had the right hook.
On the way back to the trucks we went back past the dead elephant, i noticed that the tusk underneath the head was still there. As the flesh had rotten slightly it wasn't two hard to pull out. I then had to take it back to the school and hand it in the next day to the Wildlife Fund in order to avoid being imprisoned as a poacher. But for that night i was in possession of a £600 tusk as well as a pair of hands that smelt like rotten elephant.