Ian Beilfuss, Helicopter Boy

Greg Carr was in Chitengo for the past couple of weeks, affording us the opportunity to see more of the Park by helicopter! Greg always arrives here by helicopter, and keeps it here during his stay in order that he can get around the Park and the region for his work.
Happily, he also invites others to use the helicopter to accomplish goals, whether they be looking for the lone small herd of zebra in this vast park, conducting anti-poaching raids, escorting important visitors, or checking out the status of cutting and burning on the Mountain.
We were the lucky beneficiares of Greg's generosity last week, making two family helicopter flights, one to look for the zebra (didn't find them, alas), and one to visit the top of Gorongosa Mountain.

Ian is a terrific flyer, whether facing forwards or backwards in the 7-seater helicopter, and is often even the spotter of wildlife. We saw crocodiles, hippo, tons of waterbuck, sable, elephant, warthogs, and many other kinds of animals during our trip round the Park in the helicopter.
Alas even flying on a helicopter becomes old hat for this small boy after a short time. Ian snoozed on the return trip home...

Our Local Lawnmowers

We sat this evening with the lights of our house and porch turned off so that we could watch the activity of our local lawnmowing squad: the neighborhood warthogs.

Tonight we had seven warthogs, some adult, some young, chomping on the grass outside our house. Sometimes they prefer the grass by the pool, or behind the visitors' reception. Mostly they don't mind people much, unless you come too close. You can tell if they are comfortable with your presence by their stance: when they are relaxed, they lower themselves onto their frong "knees" like the warthog in this picture so that their mouths are at ground height, making grass chomping easier. Once they get spooked, they come up on all fours ready to run, and eye you warily.

I love their little tails that tend to stick straight up in the air when they run.

"Loja do Chitengo"

Here is the team for "Loja do Chitengo" -- the Chitengo Gift Shop (l to r): Mane (head carpenter) , Maneca (assistant), Jose Carlos (or Zeca for short), and Sophia. Mane, Maneca, and Zeca have built all the shelving for the shop as well as secure storage trunks and cabinets for keeping the shop wares, and a wall to screen ff the area behind the shop, all out of locally-available bamboo. They work hard, they are friendly, and, most importantly, they put up with my Portuguese! We now have added a woman, Maria, to the team, and hope to train her to assist Natasha with the children's activities as well.

Chitengo School

Natasha has founded Chitengo's first school! At the moment it is purposefully small - only 4-6 students, all beween the ages of 3 and 6. We have supplied the school with a variety of materials including children's books in Portuguese, fingerpuppets, a small kitchen with plastic plates and utensils, and wooden food (Mom, remember these?), and a variety of musical instruments. Sophia and Natasha brought a lot of things from Portugal as well - plasticine clay, paints, colored pencils, and other games. These kids haven't yet had any school here, and are delighted by everything they are exposed to. I bought a chalkboard along the road in Chimoio last week so now Natasha is working with the kids on reading and writing letters and numbers, and even a little bit of math. The local kids are due to be moved to their new housing situation soon, and we're not sure what will become of the school when this happens. Natasha is planning on offering her services for visiting tourists as well, or for any of the kids of staff who are living in Chitengo. Ian is very happy to have friends and playmates, and as the school is all in Portuguese, he is forced to listen and try to understand, and maybe he will start speaking some of the Portuguese that we know has managed its way into his brain...

Ian the swimmer

Swimming daily, or even twice daily, in the pool here at Chitengo has turned Ian into a real swimmer. We came with a "noodle" - one of those long noodle-shaped floaty things that helps keep a kid above water, and soon he was jumping off the side of the pool with impunity. Natasha showed him the breast stroke with his arms, and suddenly he wanted to swim all alone - no noodle, no help from anyone. He has also discovered the fun of swimming underwater. Yesterday, he swam underwater between my legs and back up again. Amazing! Soon he'll be doing laps in the pool. Nothing like a little regular exposure to boost a kid's confidence and skill.

A Day in the Life of the Beilfi

The sun usually rises on Chitengo at about 5:00 or 5:30 AM, although the birds herald the sun's arrival earlier than that most days. This morning Rich and our friend Carlos (who knows more of Mozambique's birds than nearly anyone else) spent the early hours listing to the birds and chronicling the order of the morning's songs. Another sure sound of morning is the sound of the guys arriving with the wheelbarrow behind our house to stock our hot water tank with coal to heat the water. (We get hot water twice a day - if all things are going as planned: once first thing in the morning and once about 12 hours later. )

The camp is up and moving before 7:00 AM. The typical workday here is 7:00 AM until 3:30 PM. Not being much of a morning person, I am trying to adapt to this schedule! We usually eat breakfast in our house (cereal or, if we're lucky, granola, or sometimes eggs--no toast as bread is tough to come by here--and tea (Milo for Ian - sort of like Ovaltine). We can also be found at the restaurant for a buffet breakfast of scrambled eggs and biscuits on days when we're feeling social. We are one of only two houses to have kitchen facilities, and those without must eat all their meals in the restaurant at the moment.

Our house is right in the middle of Chitengo, so our commute consists of walking 50 meters across the camp. Rich typically heads into meetings or to the computer lab/reception building (the only place with reliable electricity at the moment), and I head with Ian to our incipient gift shop. Ian spends his morning in "school" with his babysitter Natasha (22-year old Portuguese woman, daughter of my colleague Sophia) and several of the local kids (see another post for more about our school).

I am currently working with Sophia readying costumes for our group of women and kids who will perform songs and dances for tourists, starting with the President of Mozambique next Tuesday!!My summers in sewing class when I was a young teen are paying off now as I fashion shorts, tank tops, and skirts for our young performers on a little sewing machine Sophia found in Beira. The sewing isn't top quality, but it is sufficient for our purposes! And the outfits -- and the kids -- are very cute. (Hopefully this afternoon the kids and women will show up for rehearsal, and we'll get to see the costumes on! I will post photos here for you to see.)

We usually eat lunch at the restaurant to save the time of cooking and cleaning up in the middle of the day. Food at the restaurant is usually buffet-style with vegetables, salads of various kinds, rice or noodles, and some sort of meat or chicken in a sauce. Our cook is great -- he always prepares a variety of salads so we have plenty of vegetables -- green beans, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, green peppers, tomatoes, various bean salads, egg salad, etc. Alas for my waistline he also regularly makes dessert at lunchtime: chocolate mouse, fruit cocktail, flan, passion fruit pudding, or fresh fruit... yummy!

After lunch, Ian takes a nap while I either work or catch up on emails (and hopefully this blog). For the first week or more since we arrived, he needed me to stay in the house during his nap, but now so long as he knows where he can find me when he wakes up, he is comfortable with my leaving the house, which give me some much-needed freedom! When he wakes in the late afternoon, we usually have a swim in the small pool, and are often the only people there! The trees cast a beautiful deep shade over the pool during the late afternoon.

The sun sets around 5:00, and all is dark by 5:30. The generator that provides our power (we aren't yet serviced by electrical lines, but hope to be by September) comes on at about 5:15 PM, first time with electricity since lunchtime. We all don long sleeves and pants and spray exposed parts to prevent mosquito bites - we do live in a malaria zone, after all! Evening is a good time for socializing with a beer or G&T at the restaurant. We make dinner at home, in large part because dinner at the restaurant is served at 7:30 or 8:00 PM - quite late for a small boy. Noodles or rice with sauce, carrot salad or cucumber-tomato salad, or various other vegetables usually comprise our dinner. While we can access fresh vegetables, we also use a lot of canned food. Ian's favorite is creamed corn - anything with sugar. Milk here doesn't require refrigeration so long as the packages remain sealed, so we can buy milk by the case and keep it in the cupboard, opening them and storing them in the refrigerator as we need them. Same for juice.

Ian heads to bed at about 8:00, but rarely is asleep before 9PM. We all sleep under mosquito nets by night, and Ian is so accustomed to it by now that he wants to sleep under it during his nap as well, even though malaria mosquitoes don't pose a risk during this time. Rich and I read or work before bed, and tuck in when the power goes out at 10:00 PM. We light a candle inside a hurricane lamp that burns all night long as a nightlight for Ian, as the darkness of Africa without any lights whatsoever is truly dark!

Frog Man Ian

We are delighted to report that Ian's latest fascination is with frogs and toads! Our swimming pool here at camp is a big attractant for frogs and Ian has taken to checking several times a day in both the "grown-up pool" and the kiddie pool for resident frogs. He has discovered that the best place to look for them is on top of the little flap that leads to the filter. And we think that he is actually rescuing many of these frogs and toads from certain death, as there is no way for the frogs to actually exit the swimming pool -- the walls are too high and slippery for them to be able to jump out, and after a while they run out of energy from lack of food and from much effort trying to get out.

Ian carefully examines the frogs and is learning the important characteristics to look at in order to identify the frog or toad -- the shape of the pupil in the frog's eyes, the shape of the toes, the length of the hind legs, and other characteristics. So far we think we have identified four different species right here in our swimming pool!

Ian desperately wants to sleep with his frogs, but thankfully the most he has insisted on so far is to bring them into our shower for a few minutes. We are sure to let the frogs/toads go before too long so they can go find food! We are hoping our friend Carlos Bento might be able to bring up a terrarium from Maputo so that we might make a suitable home for a frog or two here inside the house... Rich and I are thrilled for our budding naturalist.

Haircuts!

We are happy to report that we all three have survived our first haircuts in Africa. Miraculously, I performed two of them (not my own) - Rich's with the #3 blade on his cordless trimmer (our colleage Mike said, "Adopted the African bush haircut, eh?") and Ian's with the sharpest scissors we could find. It's not exactly Studio 924, but we did OK. I lucked out in discovering that another staffer Cheryl was, in earlier days, a hairdresser! As if pre-arranged, a bushbuck and a vervet monkey passed by while Cheryl was cutting. Think of the money we'll save!

Chitengo Camp

The compound of Chitengo is about 40 km from the main north-south paved road in Mozambique, accessed along a dirt/gravel road that mostly is one-lane and in some parts is more pothole than road. Like nearly all the roads in the park, it must be regraded every year after the rainy season, and drainage is a regular problem. The many small bridges that span rivers that only flow during the wet season are all being repaced now, having weathered sometimes more than 40 years of use, and ultimately we hope to have the whole road paved to improve access to the park.


Chitengo is a small, somewhat chaotic little camp, although the chaos comes under control more every day. The core of the camp features about six rondavels (round bungalows) that remain from the 1950s and 60s when the Portuguese were the colonial power in Mozambique and managed this park. They've all undergone extensive renovation in the last 2 years and are quite nice, although still simple. We live in house #6 (in the photo). These rondavels cluster around oneside of the main "quad" of Chitengo, with various buildings -- visitors' reception, the historic bar and restaurant, and the old "dance floor" -- a large round cement platform roofed with grass but open on the sides. The old bar is currently functioning as our still very young and underdeveloped gift shop; in the near future both it and the old restaurant will be rebuilt into a conference center. The architect seems to be doing a good job of preserving the history and historic character while creating a state-of-the-art facility that will draw visitors (and income) to the park.


Two swimming pools decorate the center of this "quad" -- a deep one and a great, shallow kiddie pool. Ian is enjoying an almost daily swim here, as the pools are largely shaded in the heat of the afternoon. Occasionally we find frogs and toads swimming in the pool with us, which adds to Ian's pleasure.


In other areas of Chitengo are comfortable tents, most of which are large enough for two single beds and some of which have electricity (when the generator is running), and new rondavels under construction. Eventually the plan is to move all staff out of Chitengo to other locations (although the headquarters building will be in Chitengo, so most of us will work here), and have only tourist accommodation at Chitengo. But that is probably 2 years off. Many things will change in our little camp in the next few years!

You can read more about Chitengo here: http://www.gorongosa.net/tourism/chitengo.php?l=eng