Hunted

Well guys, I regret to say that the title of this message has a sort of double meaning. Lions hunting people and people hunting lions, I'm afraid.

The lions hunting people bit is a near death experience that my truck had last night. Ok, probably not truly near death, but it was enough to scare the absolute shit out of us. It was probably the most scared I have ever been in my entire life--including when our car just about smashed into a tour bus on the way home from St. Lucia. The sun was just going down, and I did a check for Zero with the telemetry. He was still pretty far away, but kind of close, and mobile. (We can tell by the kind of beeps if they are mobile and stationary). We were having major problems plugging the spotlight into the truck--one of the prongs had completely fallen off the plug and we couldn't get anything to work properly. So, my staff memeber, Helen, and a fellow volunteer, Jenny, got out of the truck to try and fix it. That took about six or seven minutes. When it finally started working, Helen started jumping around like an idiot, throwing her hands in the air and screaming, "I'm a genius, I'm a genius!" Then, she's like, "Oh, Shit! Jenny, get in the car, Jenny, get in the car! JENNY GET IN THE CAR!!!" We looked up and not even 10 meters away from the front of the truck we see the dusky outline of not only Zero, but Lisa (adult lioness) and Mpho (subadult male (mpho means little brother)), walking towards our truck. And not just walking towards the truck, but looking right at the girls on the ground, walking towards them. They get in the truck as fast as possible (Helen was so fast I didn't even see her run all the way around the back). Zero and Lisa split up, go on either side of the truck, and then Lisa eyes up us volunteers sitting on the back and looks like she is stalking us and is about to jump on the back of the truck. Helen sees her out of her side view mirror, starts the car and floors it. This scares the shit out of Zero, who starts to run around the truck, thus, scaring the shit out of me. By the end of it all we were all sitting there saying very incoherent things, breathing very heavily, and also saying "Fuck" alot. I can't even tell you how scarry it was.

Now, the double meaning of hunted comes in with Lex and Luthor, my first lion loves. They need to be removed from the reserve, because we have too many lions, they are about to mate with Lisa (their mother) and Maggie (their aunt), and they are also starting to kill more giraffe than the reserve manager is comfortable with. The problem is that there is no real market for selling male lions, because every reserve pretty much has too many. Plus, there's about a 90% chance that when they are sold, they will be resold to a place that does canned hunting. So, the manager decided to sell hunting rights for Lex and Luther on our reserve. One of them is being hunted even as I'm writing this. The other will be dead by the end of the month.

We are all obviously upset by this, and a few of us (myself included) were even doing a small bit of crying. But we all understand and 100% agree with the decision. What a learning tool for reserve management.

In other news, it has rained every single day this week. And its cold. Cold, cold, cold. And also, yesterday one of the toilet cisterns fell off the wall and smashed the pipes underneath it. So, we're left with only one toilet for 26 people. And we got to eat a posh dinner at one of the lodges on Saturday night.

I'm still having fun, still don't want to come home yet, and I still miss all of you, my friends and family, more than I will be able to say.

And I will not be eaten, don't worry. I might have the shit scared out of me again, but I will not be eaten. Or hit by a bus. Don't panic.

Love you all!