6 March (Fri)

Rained all night. Keita up at 4.45 again. Everyone grumpy this morning for some reason.  Cold and grey.

Nick, Amanda and Anthony left this morning which is sad for us. Rio was fighting with Anthony all morning so I am trying to see an upside to their leaving. My little man is taking strain. Keita gets on very well with Anthony and she may miss him, although generally Rio is enough company for her.

As the day goes on I start to feel more and more depressed. Don’t know whether to hope it is hormonal or not. Started with the fight with Brad a week ago about parenting and have been feeling very flat since, only really wanting to be in bed and asleep. Today I feel like I am in a real, pervasive depression, the likes of which I haven’t experienced since the mind-blowing Larium incident when I first came to Botswana 14 years ago. I feel utterly devoid of humour and completely unable to create or do anything. Hope it is a phase and passes soon.

My crap day is compounded by the fact that Keita was again munched by mozzies last night and has enormous red welts all over her face, arms and feet. She reacts terribly and itches for hours until she scratched a hole in herself which later leaves a scar. She looks terrible and this time in the bush has really taken a toll on her physically. 

We now have a resident vervet monkey. This is a large male who must have been kicked out of his troop. He doesn’t seem very old and looks to be in good condition. He has been hanging around close to camp since yesterday but so far hasn’t launched any raiding parties.

 

4 March (Wed)

Bucketed down all night. The heaviest rain I have experienced in ages. Even Brad was anxious and we lay awake for about an hour. Every now and then I heard a “hmm’ from him as the rain came down harder and harder for hours. Didn’t get much sleep. Camp was a swamp in the morning. Rio and Keita found frogs and chased them around, wading through the puddles and getting drenched.

Later that day I had one of those “never live it down” moments. Sitting on the long drop having a wee I see a wild dog walking past, about 30 metres from me. Very excited I run back to camp to grab a camera and some kids with the intention of getting a shot of all in frame together. There is a general flurry as all the bodies in camp start heading off in the direction of the long drop. Brad gets on the radio to Graham and tells him to stop everything and get here cos there are dogs. We march off en masse to the loo. When we get there we see 3 little impala head peering at us above the grass. There can be no doubt that there are no wild dogs in the area, and what I saw must have been an impala. Very embarrassing. Needless to say on our drive later I was not allowed to forget it, and every impala we pass, at least one person sniggers and says “oh look, there is a wild dog”. Ha ha.  

Worrying how I could have made such a mistake though. Don’t know whether to hope it is an eye thing or a brain thing. Rather hope I am going blind as opposed to senile.  

The rain set in from 5 o clock and didn’t stop all night. Brad brought me the large silver tub with masses of hot water and set up a kikoi screen and a hurricane lamp. I had the best bath of my entire life outside our tent. Was just getting dark, rain was falling and I could have stayed there forever. Couldn’t even get to dinner that night. Was clean and warm and had no inclination to venture out into the cold. It was the sweetest gesture from Brad and really what I need right now. Love Brad madly. 

 

30 years ago

I came across these old photos of Brad and his family in the Delta, setting up Xaxaba Camp, where Brad lived for the first few years of his life. These were taken in the late 1970's when Brad was about 2.

2 March (Mon)

This morning we are infested by ants. Nick and Amanda had had a sleepless night as a result and when we opened up the office tent we found that they had made a nest in Amanda’s laptop. She clearly wasn’t having a good ant day. Had to embark on a big clean up so didn’t get around to any work until late. Amanda spent most of the day trying to coax the “donderse miere” out of the workings of her computer and swearing profusely in Afrikaans all the time.

From the window of my office tent I noticed Rio freeing a frog over the fence. He walked past Mouse’s grave, did a double take and started sobbing. He came running to me, tears and snot all over his face, body heaving, howling that he missed The Mouse.

We sat at his grave and chatted. Rio wanted to dig him up to play with him (because he said he missed playing with him) so I had to explain how he couldn’t because the skin and body decomposes and only the bones are left, so it wouldn’t be very nice if we dug him up. Rio had a litany of questions: “Why did he die if he was so little?”, “wont he be lonely?”, “how will he breathe?”, “wont he be sad?” so I had to stumble through an impromptu Life, The Universe and Everything chat, wishing that I had had a little more time to prepare a satisfactory story. I gave some vague answers about how his spirit has gone into the sky where he would be with other squirrels who love him and would look after him. I was glad he didn’t pick up on certain gaping ideological gaps in this story. I made an immediate mental not to formalize and solidify my views on this (something that I had been working on for 20 years but had largely put on the backburner) so I could at the very least offer his a cohesive philosophy. It is on my to do list.     

We both had a good sob and decided a game drive would be a wonderful diversion in the circumstances. We didn’t see much but it was good to be out. I pointed out a Yellowbilled stork to Rio who thinks it is called an Old bald stork.

Rio is getting all grown up. Increasingly I am finding his interactions more mature. He is occasionally very sweet to Keita and this afternoon he was pushing her on the swing and helped her off. She loves it when he is nice to her and they were hugging and loving each other which was so great to see.

 

28 Feb (Sat)

Had another visit by a hyena in the early hours of the morning. Clearly some have moved into the area and they have found the camp, so we can expect nightly visits, and we are going to have to be vigilant about what we leave lying around.

We woke up to a drama this morning. Frannette found Mouse (our baby squirrel) very lethargic and practically comatose this morning. It looked like he was breathing his last. We suspected cold or dehydration or both and gave him some sugar water. This seemed to perk him up a bit and he started moving a little more.

The day became increasingly awful. Keita had a huge hairy worm episode and screamed for at least 30 minutes before falling asleep. Brad and I were nitpicking Rio and this turned into a war between us that went on long into the night, and poor little Mouse died quietly at about 9.30. He was up and about at 8 pm, but was definitely not well and Frannette put him in her shirt for warmth and comfort. When we checked on him later he was dead. We all had a little cry and a snivel and felt very sad for the little thing. 

While Brad and I putting the kids to sleep we heard impalas snorting and quite a commotion outside. It turned out that wild dogs had eaten an impala a few hundred yards from our camp. 

27 Feb (Fri)

Today is Keita’s birthday. We had prepped her for a few days before hand and she had practiced singing happy birthday to herself. When she was having her morning bottle I reminded her that it was her birthday and she was full of smiles. We presented her with a stuffed lion and a stuffed giraffe, which she seemed to like. The rest of the day was spent preparing for the party. Frannette baked a brilliant chocolate cake in a pot on coals and Rio helped decorate with smarties and finger biscuits dipped in chocolate.

We had a birthday picnic party. Friends are here from Durban for the occasion so we can have a real party. We decided to go back to the beautiful, remote island where we had reconstructed the hippo, despite the fact that there is a vehicle-destroying water crossing to get there. So we packed a picnic and headed off, stopping for a swim in the water crossing on the way.

Brad had picked out a spot where there was shade and flat ground so we set up the camera (becoming tedious in the extreme) and set up the picnic. Keita opened her presents on the car, then blew out her candles. This behind the scenes filming is really becoming a pain. All spontaneity is lost and the kids are constantly being constrained by us, being told to wait, do it again, do it differently etc.

After the food and the filming we had a fabulous game of frisby and an insane game where Rio and Anthony were on the roof of the car and the adults were throwing the ball to them to catch. It is a wonder nobody fell off. Negligent parents 101. But is was great fun and we left the picnic in very good spirits with all 3 kids perched on the windscreen of our pink-balloon-adorned car, singing happy birthday over and over again. There were 3 storms on the horizon and it was a brilliant balmy evening and was wonderful with my Rio snuggled on my lap, driving slowly watching the stars and the sky.

That night, back in camp with all safely tucked in, Brad and I were visiting the long drop. It is always better to do this in teams considering there are no fences and it is a 60 metre walk from the camp. While there we heard Amanda shouting that there was a hyena heading down the path towards us. The hyenas in this part are not to be trifled with so Brad grabbed some clods of earth and headed at a pace down the path, his logic being that one should confront it with aggression. This seemed to work because it detoured off the path as soon as it saw us coming. When relating this incident to Caryn, a friend of mine on skype the following day, she said “at least you were in the right place to shit yourself”. She is very funny. 

26 Feb (Thurs)

Have been filming a lot if the Behind The Scenes stuff for the programme. I have a clear idea of what I want to produce but am not managing to achieve it. This feeds my major insecurity about the fact that I am trying to do constructive work while simultaneously keeping the family sane and intact (in the unusual circumstances we are in) and actually not managing to do either very well. I am a generally diligent, A-type, irritating person and creating sub-standard anything sparks off a low-grade panic in my system. I have come to realize that this is why I manage to stay thin despite consuming alarming amounts of food. Since I have had kids I have been in a permanent state of latent hysteria that I am not doing it well enough. This burns up lots of calories.

The toss up is which ‘job’ to focus on. I could abdicate all parenting responsibilities to She-Who-Is-Calm-And-Happy-At-All-Times and reclaim the kids when they are well-nourished, polite, relaxed 10 year olds. I could then focus all my energy on doing fabulous work, which I know I am capable of, instead of churning out the mindless drivel I am currently producing. Sometimes I think this is a really good idea. The major upside is that the kids will probably at least respect me, even if they don’t know me very well.

The alternative is to dedicate my entire self to raising kids. This is such a nice idea in theory. There are some drawbacks however. First and foremost, Keita would never actually eat. She will only eat when Frannette removes her from all external stimulation and puts her in an empty tent and does whatever she does to make the food go down. I don’t believe in this. My theory is that she must learn to eat socially as everyone must do and I think she will eventually get hungry enough to do this. This is why she lost one third of her body weight when Frannette was on leave for 3 weeks.

The second major drawback is my sanity. My children are high maintenance and will only spend fractions of time entertaining themselves or playing together. In our innocence we created this monster but now we have a situation where they always want to play with mommy or daddy. Daddy films a lot so I spend my afternoons playing armies, or baby mongoose, or Lion King. I am not Frannette so for me, after an hour this gets tedious. Summer is great because we swim a lot and even I can do this with enthusiasm. Not sure what I will do in winter.

So I am in this weird space. When I am working in the mornings my mind is on the kids, and when I am playing with the kids in the afternoon my mind is on all the work I that is piling up. Not very satisfying at all. I have heard that other people manage to have children and still function in a work capacity. Maybe they are less neurotic.  

My mission now is to be where I am at, absolutely at that time, and not half way in between.

So, back to Behind-The-Scenes … Rio has now rebelled and will not be on camera at all. There were the most wonderful, spontaneous moments that I would hear from my office tent, rush out and make them redo – spontaneously. I now have to bribe him, but he is getting wise to this. He took the chocolate I promised him and hid behind the tent until it was all eaten, then still refused to recatch the toad. Every time Keita sees me with a camera she rushes to me, attaches herself like a limpet to my legs and demands a hug. It is a fiasco. All the time I have the office producer sending me helpful e-mails about what sort of content they would like to see coming out of Moremi. I sent a few whining sort of mails in response about how difficult it is because the kids have now developed a pathological hatred for, and jealousy of, the camera, but it does seem like an excuse. Back to the point I made above …

Gotta just do it.