I am on the verge of a life-changing experience. Lucky? Immensely. Terrified?? 100 percent!!!
I (I should say 'we'... will explain later...) have finally taken the decision to go home. Having spent 7 years in the rat-race that is London and trying to force my little Zimbabwean mind to accept that 'home' may never be a realistic possibility other than for those snatched weeks of holiday every year, times have finally changed and the perfect opportunity has just risen it's pretty head.
A switch has flicked in my brain now and I am already sitting on the edge of the river in spirit, listening to thunderstorms, watching fireflies. (This does make concentrating on Risk Management principles and Compliance culture slightly more of a challenge than usual, you can understand...) I don't think I have looked forward to something so much since I was a child!
What a privileged position to be in.
Now, back to the 'we'... The WE part is that my very British fiance is joining me... (This is the man who sees geckos as man-eating dragons and wall-spiders as vicious killers. Oh dear...) This will be an adventure for him to say the least! The fact that he is yet to learn to drive, change a tyre, work a GPS, shoot a gun or wrestle crocodiles makes this coming year a drama in the making... And boy is he looking forward to it! He is an 'African-to-be', an African in training... I am looking forward to watching him succumb to our wilderness like we all have...
I set up this blog (..why is 'blog' such a nasty word?! Always makes me think of something toiletish...) to track our progress over the next year as it is going to be such a change from London living and also because I am hoping it will encourage other people to take the plunge and do something wild. (Do it!) I think it will also help keep me sane as we will be spending a lot of time in a very remote part of this earth and you can start to forget that the rest of the world exists! My main focus will be our progress in setting up home in the bush and getting the project up and running and successful. Africa being Africa, we are likely to have more than our fair share of break-downs, near misses with wild animals, language issues etc. I'm hoping to provide some entertainment for your troubles...
We will be leaving London on the 6th of October and spending a few days with friends and family in Joburg before flying onto Harare where our family home is, which will be our weekend base while we are getting things up and running. The project will be based in Nyatana which is in the north-east near the Mozambican border, and right on the edge of a stunning stretch of the Mazowe River.
A bit about the project:
- The project focuses on reforestation and avoided deforestation on a 60,000 hectare piece of land.
- 6 local villages will be involved who will directly benefit from this project in a number of ways (income from jobs like planting and anti-poaching patrols, better farming methods, income from the sale of carbon credits, help with problem animal control such as rogue elephants, better access to 'clean' firewood for cooking and reeds for weaving, cleaner water, local business initiatives etc...)
- Main income generators for us will be from the sale of carbon credits (to Europe etc.) from the forests involved and income from hunts generated from the hunting of animals on the cull list or problem animal control (POC) list. (Local communities also get all the meat from these hunts which can sustain them for months at a time in some cases.)
- To do this we aim to plant 1 million indigenous trees a year, and have put in place a number closely monitored initiatives to protect these forests and the wildlife within them, and more importantly the special people who live in the area.
Exciting stuff... no???!
The slight catch (but the BEAUTY of it all!) is that we are moving into a bare, concrete shell of a building with no electricity and no running water or phone signal of any sort, 3 hours from the nearest town! Yikes!
CONS:
- No phone, no internet, no TV, no fridge, no stove, no hot water, no lighting... ET CETERA!
PROS:
- Lovely warm nights outside (watching fireflies!), dinner by candle-light, braais every night (BBQs to those who don't know what 'braai's are...), river swimming, glorious hot days, no TV, no phone, night sounds, fireside philosophy - oh it's ENDLESS!
What a lucky little fish I am!
There will be a lot of work to do as we aim to get all up to scratch and connected so we can run the place like an office as well as a home. Boreholes need to be dug, satellite dishes arranged, a generator got, internet set up etc.... and lots of lovely work on the house to make it more homely and cosy for us (hot shower would be nice, and a lick of paint... a bed...). We are also going to be designing and building a few lodges as accommodation for potential hunts that are arranged and hopefully for some future eco-tourism as the spot is truly touched by the gods... achingly beautiful.
Now we need to just get through these last 6 weeks of work and sort out all the boring stuff us humans have to do like packing, shipping, tickets and all that nonsense.
Well that is the intro folks, 47 sleeps to go... and counting!
