One thing I learned very quickly on safari is that I am absolutely terrible at spotting animals.
“There! Under the tree!”
“Where?”
“Right beside the termite mound!”
“Oh yes, I see it!”
“Oh, never mind. It wasn’t an animal, it was a bush.”
Meanwhile, our guides had somehow spotted a lion from what felt like kilometres away while driving a Toyota Land Cruiser on a bumpy dirt road.
They spotted tracks I would have driven straight over. They noticed movement in what looked to me like an empty field. They picked up on details I never would have thought twice about. They also understood what changes in animal behaviour could mean. For example, if a giraffe was calmly walking around with her calf, chances were there weren’t any lions nearby. On the other hand, if a group of kudus suddenly looked unusually vigilant, there was a good chance a predator was somewhere close and that I should get my camera ready.
At first, I just assumed the guides had ridiculously good eyesight.
The more time I spent on safari, the more I realized that they were looking at exactly the same environment as I was. The difference was that they knew how to read it in a way that I could not.
During my international human rights internship in Namibia, I realized that this idea extended beyond the savannah.
When I arrived in Southern Africa, I had already completed six years of university in Canada. I had done legal clinics, read about human rights, studied legal frameworks and discussed complex issues in class. I thought I knew what I was in for.
Then I started working with Namibians who had lived there their whole lives and I quickly realized how different it is to study an issue from thousands of kilometres away compared to actually living with those realities every day. Of course, the Western-centered approaches inherent in legal education in Canada played into this too.
My Namibian colleagues could see details that I could not. They understood the history, the realities and the cultural and social context that no textbook in Canada ever could.
It did not mean that what I had learned back home was useless. My education gave me a lens through which to understand human rights. But it was only one lens.
Working in Windhoek taught me that in order to understand the realities and issues of a place, you need to listen to the people who know the landscape.
Fortunately, by the end of my safaris, I got slightly better at spotting animals. I learned where to look and started noticing things I would have completely ignored before.
I did not suddenly become an expert on the savannah. I had simply learned that experience can teach you things a textbook never could.
