life at its rawest

Satisfying Sips Photograph by Chris Johns
A melon plucked from the ground provides a drink. Bushmen once found water in plants and rainy–season pools. Now they draw it from the deep wells, or boreholes, that opened the Kalahari Desert to cattle grazing and allowed Bushmen to settle in permanent villages.

Southern Africa’s hunter-gatherers seek a foothold By Peter Godwin [To read the entire article, click here.]
"We set up camp in a clearing in the bush close to the village, and that night I lie awake listening to the hawking of phlegm-filled chests, the hacking of tubercular coughs, and the wavering wails of the babies, which compete with the yelps of patrolling jackals to fill the dome of stars above us. It is winter in the Kalahari and bone-achingly cold when the cocks begin to crow a few minutes before four. As I emerge from my tent, “dawn’s heart,” as Bushmen traditionally call Jupiter, is burning brightly on the horizon. The water in my billycan is frozen solid.

When we enter the village, the families are huddled around their tiny fires; some of the children are shirtless, and the adults have, at most, a single threadbare blanket clasped around each pair of bony shoulders and each toast a rack of prominent ribs. They are breakfasting meagerly on berries and weak tea.

N!amce, a Den/ui leader, sits on a log making arrows. He rolls the yellow reed shaft in the ashes, then squints down its barrel and straightens it. He smears bitumen from an old car battery onto the end of the shaft, heats it again, and binds twine made of kudu sinew around it. He cuts a notch at the back end for the bow string to slot into, and on the other end he inserts a spike of giraffe bone, which connects to another little cylinder of reed into which the arrowhead, a length of gauge wire whose end has been hammered into a triangle, is forced. He gingerly coats the four inches of the wire shaft behind the arrow tip with poison stored in a steenbok horn. "

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I wish that was me, lying awake in the night, listening to the sounds of nature, being in a different culture, a culture not my own, living their lives, loving people of the wild. To experience life at its barest, in it's rawest form. Just imagining it makes me smile.