I would like to encourage you to look after yourself in 2008.

I've just been taught a very important lesson - one that I sincerely hope to learn from. The lesson, is that there can be severe implications for letting stress become a dominant factor in your life. I spent 7 days over Christmas in hospital with meningitis. From the opinions of the specialists and doctors I have seen, it appears that I probably contracted it because my immune system was compromised - and this was related to stress, fatigue and poor diet. In the week leading up to the meningitis, it took me 3 days to make a 16-hour journey from Kasane, Botswana to Johannesburg, ending with 10 hours of my debilitated car on the back of a farm truck. Then I nearly missed getting a visa to the USA - a few days before my booked flight. It was a 4-day period of stress, very little sleep and general mistreatment of myself. The consequence is that I have permanent severe hearing loss in my left ear (as a complication of the meningitis).

None of the issues at stake - the breakdown of a car, getting to a visa interview on time, getting the said visa, and making it to the USA on time for classes - were worth the stress which lead to the current state of affairs. In fact, the stress, as it usually does, only compounded those issues. What would have helped me would have been to keep the situation in perspective. I know that it is easy to say to someone, "Don't stress." I've been on the receiving end so often and usually think to myself, "You just don't understand the intricacies of the situation." That is precisely the problem - being in the situation limits our perspective.

So, what is the solution? I think that the way forward is to remind each other regularly of the things that really are important and to use positive reinforcement. I don't claim to be any good at this - in fact, of all the people I know personally, I think I am the most prone to forgetting the big picture and to letting stress take over. In this, I'm asking for the collective help of friends and family. Let's help each other count our blessings.

One of the things that we need to remind each other about and help each other with is personal health. I'm reading a book (it was given to me while in hospital) which deals with precisely that - "the Maker's Diet", excellently developed and written by Jordan Rubin. I highly recommend the book to you if you feel the need to make fundamental lifestyle and diet changes and if you are tired of hearing about quick fixes and shallow promises. A lot of what the book recommends is really just common sense based on age-old wisdom.

To extend this thought a little from one's own personal problems to the problems of the collective - thinking about the year ahead can also lead to stress. There is so much talk of social, economic and environmental change. There are several elections going on around the world, and most are fraught with corruption and violence. There is the ever-present conflict in the middle east, and the equally devastating wars and crises that seem to fly under the international media radar (i.e. Zimbabwe). There is talk of worldwide food shortages in the coming years, which along with fuel crises could have considerable impacts on our lifestyles. The looming threat of global warming also leaves us with a constant low level of stress.

The perspective that I think we need to keep in all of this is that these problems also present opportunities. There are opportunities for us to be innovative and creative and especially for us to join together in combating issues. The most fundamental opportunity is for us to be influential in a personal capacity - by making changes in our own lives and by impacting the people closest to us. This hearkens back to the environmental mantra of "think global and act local", but I think it is just as applicable from a social perspective. The fruits of these small changes will collectively go a long way to improving the bigger picture. They will also improve our stress levels and our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

So, please look after yourself this year, and help your friends by counting blessings with them and by keeping a healthy perspective.

I received confirmation today that I have been accepted into the PhD programme in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences of Virginia Tech.

For me, a striking feature of the Kazungula/Kasane area has been the interface between wildlife and humans. As it turns out, the elephant from Thursday evening was indeed shot (see below). On Friday the meat was divided up amongst some of the locals. By yesterday, the carcass was almost clean thanks to about 100 hooded and white-backed vultures. And so, life goes on ... for us humans.

Kasane is the main town here with its industry focused on tourism in Chobe National Park. Kazungula is the border post. The two areas are separated by a few kilometres and it is difficult to define the boundary between the two. There are approximately 10,000 people in this area (Kasane - 8,000; Kazungula - 2,000). At the same time, Chobe National Park has one of the highest concentrations of wildlife in southern Africa, almost assuredly of elephants. It also has no fences. Occasionally, the result of this combination of factors is what happened on Thursday. This is an age-old conservation conundrum - how can humans, our humanity, and wildlife, peacefully co-exist? This question is partly what has brought me here - to try to get a better understanding of how a human disease, TB, has broken out in a wildlife population, and whether the wildlife could become a reservoir for re-transmission.

This is an incredibly exciting place to be. The two rivers and their numerous tributaries have created an oasis in otherwise dry savanna woodland. This makes it a haven for about 500 species of birds. The park is obviously a big drawcard, with tourism revenue actually exceeding that of Moremi (in the Delta). It is also the meeting point of 4 countries. This, with the transient nature of tourism employees, and the tourists themselves, makes for a melting pot of cultures. After one week here my nerves have settled, and I'm beginning to enjoy the surroundings, the people, and the challenge that lies ahead.

I hope you'll come and visit.

With the smell of the first rains so strong that you can reach out and touch it, I've made a temporary home in Kazungula. I arrived safely on the 2nd of October, after a 3-day journey, a battle with a bank, and a few fretful moments.

I learnt some very valuable lessons:

(1) without my family, I'd be lost ... (a statement which is true on so many levels!) ... thanks especially to Andy this time

(2) never travel in a foreign country without arranging a little bit of currency (even if the forex department of your bank tells you otherwise)

(3) in spite of what their marketing people will tell you, MasterCard is not accepted worldwide ... if you travel to Botswana and don't want to carry cash or T-cheques, get a Visa card.

(4) in Africa, when a signpost warns of potholes, they usually mean car-eating craters, so heed the warning and slow down.

I'll give more info about where I am at a later stage - suffice it to say that I can see the confluence of the Chobe and Zambezi Rivers from the house, there are elephants all about, and this place might be close to being a birder's paradise.

This evening, the electric fence went down. Armed with my trusty torch, I set out into the inky night to see what was wrong. Hearing elephants next door, I assumed that they had touched the fence and set the alarm signal off. It took about 30 minutes to walk the fenceline - to no avail. Getting back to the house, several shots rang out, followed by an umbilical moan from an ellie. I'll have to go out in daylight to repair the fence ...

Hi there! I'll be leaving South Africa for Botswana in the beginning of October this year. I've just taken a position with a conservation and rural development non-profit, CARACAL, in Chobe National Park and as a doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech. I'll be based in Chobe for fieldwork for the next few months.

This site will be my online home for a while - for photos and stories from the field. I'll continue to use my email (petelaverbluebottle.com), and I'll update this site with new telephone and mail details.

I hope to see you in Chobe, in Blacksburg, or in transit. Be blessed!