This is my love affair with Africa. Three visits - 2010, 2014 and 2017 including South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Each visit was both a safari and an opportunity to meet local residents in the major cities of Cape Town and Nairobi, and in rural villages. As a health care professional, my visit to Tanzania included time with the founders and staff of The Foundation for African Medicine & Education (FAME) a modern medical center in rural Karatu.
Clearly not enough time to absorb and understand this country. Actually, I am not sure if, as an outsider, I would ever fully understand it. On one hand, there is the gorgeous scenery and magnificent animals starting with the "Big Five" -- elephant, rhinoceros, lion, cape buffalo, and leopard. The migration of massive herds of wildebeests and zebras, -- always on the move as they migrate through the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Mara in Kenya. And the Ngorongoro Crater and the Oldupai Gorge, the site where Louis and Mary Leakey discovered Homo habilis, one of the earliest members of the human genus.
Yet the other story is the people and how they exist on this land. I saw and photographed life as it goes on every day; the tending of herds of cattle and goats in fields and along the roads. People cultivating meager crops for food. Gathering water in buckets from water holes shared with animals -- water that was used for drinking, cooking and cleaning, yet never purified. This accounts for the high rates of intestinal parasites and malnutrition in children. People carrying wood needed for fires, grass for livestock, bananas to sell in the market. Motorcycle taxis grouped together under a tree, all of the drivers waiting for fares that never seemed to come because most people walk everywhere.
Conservation to save and grow the numbers of endangered animals is not always a priority of people or their governments. It is hard to imagine an Africa without lions or elephants, for example. It is also difficult coming as I do from a country where education, health care, social and government support are taken for granted, to see so many ways things could improve there. Yes there are private missions and countries providing resources for schools, hospitals, medicine, digging wells for pure water; yet it just seems to barely scratch the surface.
My family and friends know that I would go back to Africa in a heartbeat to work on these issues thru my photography! And maybe soon that will happen.