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by Thomas Elliott

As today represents a month since my return to South Africa, it’s time to take stock of what I’ve done so far.

A string of days in the office followed my excursions into the field to fix our weather stations and to continue setting out our community resource harvesting plots, and my official first task was a rather boring but important one. Cleaning data consists of taking the raw data that comes from the field in the form of databases or spreadsheets and standardizing entries or correcting errors. In this case, field workers had gone to 600 households in the community for five years and had asked them about their natural resource use. The names of trees, medicinal plants, bushmeat, and other species were entered in Shangaan, the local language. My job was to go through all of these entries, thousands of them, and correct for spelling, caps […]

by Thomas Elliott

Aaaah-woooee, Aaaah-woooe. I will never get used to the sound of hyenas at night. There is something unsettling in the cries of that animal. I saw a few the other day; they are strangely beautiful. Their backs slope down from powerful, muscular shoulders making them look like bodybuilders on all fours. I’m separated from them by a fence, but to most animals, a fence doesn’t mean much. It isn’t rare to have all sorts of things break through.

But this is life at Wits Rural Facility. A few days ago, I awoke to the sound of rustling leaves. As always, I ran through my mental checklist. Impalas? No, couldn’t be. They wouldn’t be in the trees. Vervet monkeys? Naah, they’re usually a bit louder. So that just leaves… Giraffes! I was right. I looked out my window, and there they were, three giraffes just standing there, eating, a […]

by Thomas Elliott

9/10/2014

Avuxeni! Mi njani? Ekaisa!

(Hello! How’s it? It’s hot!).

The experts over in Norway (tip: Norwegian website yr.no is considered world’s best meteorological website out here) say it’s about 38 C, or 100 F. Fortunately, I spent the day in the field.

SUNRAE (Sustaining Natural Resources in African Ecosystems, the program I work for) is in the process of setting up natural resource monitoring plots in a few of the local villages. While any number of resources could be monitored, our work specifically deals with firewood harvesting. Our job is to set up the plots, while the actual monitoring will be done by others. This is an extremely labor intensive task, but fortunately the university (Wits) has been assigned four environmental monitors, two of which are being used for this project.

The South African government, in an effort to decrease unemployment, created the expanded public works program. This provides labor intensive […]