And then there are PEOPLE at Moholoholo

       I've spent a lot of time introducing you to the animals of Moholoholo, and a lot of time going on and on about ME at Moholoholo, but you may have gotten the impression that the animals and I were on our own.  You HAVE met Jan our supervisor, and Jamie the "mom" to Ollie the Rhino and Melmin the giraffe, and you've seen Charlie and his sables, but that's about it.  With this blog, I intend to rectify that situation and begin to introduce you to some of the other people there.
       There were many black people employed at Moholoholo.  I never was so much as introduced to any of them except Oskar, whom I will introduce later.  I feel very strange about this fact.  I may have told some of you that one of the reasons I was eager to go to South Africa was that language was an incredible barrier in Cambodia.  I could not even say the most basic things to the local people there because the language was so completely different from any language I'd ever spoken.  I could not read it at all.  It was totally bewildering.  I knew that most people in South Africa speak at least some English, so I thought my chances of getting to communicate with local people would be much greater.  I was wrong.
       Of course, language is not the only barrier among different groups of people.  At Moholoholo, we all worked--very hard, I might add-- side by side.  BUT, we might as well have been on different planets.  Blacks seldom even made eye contact with whites and never spoke more than the briefest of greetings.  And vice versa.
       There was a very unpleasant event while I was there.  One of the non-South African volunteers--a young woman--went out of her way to be cheerful and pleasant to all the black workers there.  One of the workers--a young man--concluded that she must be interested in him and began some rather aggressive flirtation.  On one occasion, he stood in front of a doorway she was attempting to pass through and told her she couldn't go through unless she gave him her telephone number.  That scared her, and she mentioned it to her supervisor.  The next day the guy was fired, and I saw him being escorted off the premises, sitting forlornly in the back of a bokke (truck).  She felt terribly guilty, and I'm sure he was sorry to have his lost his job.
       What can one say about such an event?  Should she not have been friendly?  Shouldn't he have "known better"?  I find myself completely confused over the matter, and after that happened, I made it a point to be friendly but very formal with the staff.  And I felt like a completely hypocritical jerk doing it.  But even so, I still don't know what the "right" answer is.
       Well, for some reason, this guy Oskar overcame all that racial stuff, and he was apparently well-respected and well-liked by everybody.  He was included in our occasional nights out and seemed to feel comfortable mingling with us all.  I would be interested to know why that was, but I was being too polite and formal to ask!  He was clearly well educated, very articulate and bright, and funny and personable.  He was employed as a tour guide and showed tourists around the Rehabilitation Center, but also helped with some of the animal tending that required expertise. 
       Here is Oskar

 


Besides Oskar, all the rest of the many black employees at the Center were referred to as "the green men," in reference to the green coveralls they all wore.  They were electricians, carpenters, groundskeepers--an unbelievable amount of work goes into maintaining a place like Moholoholo.  They also processed the enormous amount of meat that goes through the place  [In this photo, they are working on some of the killer elephant meat that would eventually find its way to Bullet and others' bellies], and I'm sure many had responsibilities I wasn't even vaguely aware of.  I wish I had made more of an effort to find out.