Firebreak

Saturday, June 16^th, 2007

We arrived in camp on Thursday in the afternoon, set up, and had time to make a water run. By the time the group had left for the village, it was six o’clock, and I decided that I would stay back and wait to see if my father could reach me via spotty cell phone coverage recently improved by the phone signal booster that Buddy had put in. At around 8:15, convinced that the connection would not work, I retreated to my tent and was in the process of unzipping the door when the call came through. I managed to have a three minute conversation standing on top of the chair I am sitting in right now, holding the cell phone as high as possible while using the speakerphone.

Buddy and Laly had been out of the bush for the last week. Buddy had left several workers with the task of creating two firebreaks to protect camp from fires during the dry season. The work was supposed to take three to six days, but the workers ended up staying for twelve days and did not follow Buddy’s instructions. They burned a large patch of grass very close to camp instead of cutting it. Not only did burning the grass endanger the safety of the camp, it posed other problems, as well. People have used preventative burning for years as a technique to cut down the size of wildfires, but one can only wonder what the burning has done to change the ecological composition of the area. As Laly morbidly jested yesterday evening at the campfire using the same saccharine, cooing voice with which she talks to her two Great Danes, “I feel sorry for the animals who can’t escape. They must be crispy.” When my family visited Katavi last summer, the park had burned huge patches of land, as well. We would drive through the vast planes of charred black earth and occasionally see the bleached-white shell of a tortoise who had met his untimely end in the fire. But it is not just what is killed in the fire that poses significance; it is just as important what does survive the burning. When we went yesterday to look at the progress made on digging a shallow well, we walked along the road and then down part of the workers’ improvised firebreak. While the fire had burned one type of grass, it left another plant unharmed. The result of one plant surviving the fires and another not means that over time (and who knows how much time) the composition of the ecosystem may change so that there is much more of this fire-resistant brush.

Yesterday, Friday, we went into town for two more water runs. On the second water run, Laly, Buddy, Suruni, and I went into town with a container full of diesel for the women’s empowerment initiative that Laly and Buddy helped start. They have been bringing diesel to the village women to sell at town prices, excluding transportation costs. The women who buy it save a lot of money, allowing the mill to make more of a profit. In the future, they would like to help the women sell their own jewelry line to bring in more money and further empower them.

Rebecca Lieb, PPF Intern