Amakhala Safari Lodge is a place where anything your heart desires are offered to you, before you even know you want them. A fragrant hot towel to wipe the dust off your face after a Big Five game drive. Candles and champagne beside your bath when you return to your luxury tented suite. Amarula and an African bedtime story awaiting you after from dinner. It really is also by far the most romantic places I’ve visited on this trip and here I am, alone in the luxurious four poster bed. Well thank goodness for the English tourists. Not that they make up for my missing boyfriend but they are very warm and lovely towards me and because of their company at dinner and on the game drives I am not lonely for a minute.
But my visit to Amakhala is not for the sheer enjoyment of being pampered. It is to find out more about the work being done by the Amakhala Trust. This foundation is the umbrella body for the Social Development Programme and the Amakhala Conservation Centre (ACC).
Jennifer Gush is the kind of scientist who can make science sound exciting, even to me. She meets me on my first morning at Amakhala and takes me to visit the ACC which is located in an old milking shed. The ACC was established in 2003 and runs a variety of programmes which cover research and monitoring, environmental education and conservation. Jennifer tells me that this centre is funded by bed levies applied to all the lodges on the reserve. “We have three big days a year here with the (mostly rural) school children who visit the centre,” she tells me as we walk around the main building looking at the various displays – a snake skeleton, antelope horns. “There’s Water Day in March, World Environmental Day in June and Arbour Day in September. The children who visit us range from Grade R to Grade 7. We make their visit here a very hands-on experience with as little “˜classroom’ type activities as possible. The kids go on Game Drives and the students from the Ranger Training School come and spend time with them.
When it comes to research and monitoring, I am amazed when Jennifer tells me how they have to count each animal on the entire reserve from the ground, twice a year, in order to keep track of numbers. They also have to analyze and calculate the amount of vegetation available to feed the herbivore population, which of course in turn determines the number of carnivorous game they can keep. While counting animals and working with grass samples may sounds like a rather mundane way to spend time, Jennifer is enthusiastic about how far the ACC has come in working out the scientific facts and figures that allow tourists to enjoy seeing healthy, well fed game on their drives. Other ongoing projects include monitoring of cheetah and lion behaviour.
All research done at the ACC is for the purpose of creating a sustainable environment on the reserve.
The ACC has strong links with Rhodes and other local universities and a number of students do their PHD studies here – Amakhala allows them access to their reserve and in return benefit from the research done.
I ask about rhino poaching and Jennifer’s face clouds over. “We lost two rhino to poachers last year. We have two public roads through the reserve and though we can monitor who comes and in goes out we aren’t allowed to stop and search vehicles,” she says. When I ask how many rhino they have she says she can’t tell me for security reasons.
As we leave, after popping in at the lab where volunteers are capturing data on PCs, Jennifer tells me that an annual camp is held for the children from the Isipho safe house – a school where Aids orphans are cared for, and another Amakhala Trust project.
“With all school programmes, we aim to teach the children about the environment, but also to create a love of nature in these little ones,” she says enthusiastically, her smile back. With such a passionate woman and her helpers teaching them, I have little doubt that this agenda is being achieved.
Amakhala Craft Centre
Justine Weeks is expecting us at the Amakhala Craft Centre and Art Gallery. I’m practically melting in the heat by the time we arrive – it’s a hot day in this corner of the Eastern Cape – and she appears like an angel with a mug of fresh cold water. The centre is in an old wool sorting shed and since June 2009 this spacious, charmingly rustic building has been a place that is helping to create employment and generate income for the local community. .
Justine and her husband Michael are, like Jennifer and Giles Gush, co-owners of Amakhala. They are also both artists and their own work is housed in the gallery section of the centre. Alongside this, a selection of striking black and white graphic prints is on display from the Egazini Outreach Project in Grahamstown, which I plan to visit when I leave Amakhala.
I speak to Fezi (Feziwe Keye) who is permanently employed at the centre as their seamstress. A single mother with two teenage daughters, Fezi lost her job at a clothing factory after 30 years and was unemployed when she first came back to the area. Now she can support her family again. She also loves her work and it is clear she is happy and content working alongside Justine to create staff uniforms and other pieces for all the lodges, as well as items to sell at the centre. Two other local women come here twice a week to make beaded necklaces and they are paid a wage for their time, rather than having to wait to earn commission when their work is sold. Justine has been carrying the costs to a large extent on her own.
Some of the local teenage girls who come to the Drop In centre at Isipho school spend their Thursday afternoons creating beaded bracelets as part of the Bracelets for Bursaries initiative – another of Justine’s projects. Not only do the moneys raised from the sale of these gorgeous items go into a fund for a tertiary education bursary, but each girl also earns a percentage of the profit which they can use for toiletries and other items they may not otherwise have been able to afford.
Sitting in the shade of a tree outside having more cold water and waiting for a lift to Isipho, I ask Justine how many Amakhala guests stop in to visit the craft centre and buy some of the items. She smiles and shakes her head. “Not as many as we would like. The rangers sometimes bring them here on the way back from a game drive but many of the guests never get here. We have created information booklets to put in the rooms in the hope that more will read about the centre and ask to come here. If that doesn’t work we’ll have to come up with another plan.”
It seems that as most guests spend around four days here, going on game drives twice a day, it isn’t too much to ask that they spend 20 minutes and some of their money at the Craft centre to support the amazing work being done in the community by the Amakhala Trust.
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