The Day I Met the Elephant

Last week, I happened to be on a field visit to one of the camps we work with that’s just within the borders of Akagera Park, one of Rwanda’s three national parks. The visit started out like they often do – people chattering to me in Kinyarwanda hoping I might catch something (and sometimes I do!), lots of excited preparation for whatever performance they’re about to put on. I found myself standing by myself in a crowd of women, one of whom kept telling me something over and over about a “mutware.” I knew I knew the word but couldn’t place it, so I turned to Alexi, ARBEF’s fantastic driver and said “Mutware iki?” (roughly meaning “What’s ‘mutware’?”). Now, Alexi and I have a lovely relationship. We make each other laugh, he keeps me amused during long (and frankly boring) Kinyarwanda speeches, and he looks out for me around the office and on trips. It’s an interesting relationship though, because Alexi is unilingual (unless you count his sole French phrase, “Tu es fatiguer?”) and my Kinyarwanda is, well, interesting. Our friendship is based on limited Kinyarwanda, absurdly exaggerated gestures and a lot of observation. It was immediately apparent that Alexi knew what “mutware” was, and boy was he excited. He wandered off to speak to the woman who’d said it to me, and eventually got the message across to me that “mutware” meant… ELEPHANT! There was apparently an elephant near the village that often wandered over to raid food stores (including home-brewing banana beer!). Alexi was determined to find me the elephant.

After our sensitization session was finished, we piled into the car and set off for the next village. It was explained by my supervisor, Enock, in French that Alexi planned on finding someone who’d seen the elephant recently and was going to buy something to feed the elephant. Let me be clear that at this point, I really thought they were kidding. See an elephant? Sure, we might be so lucky, despite the numerous complaints I’ve heard from tourists that there are no elephants in Akagera. Alexi stops and asks villager after villager if they’ve seen the elephant. Someone says that they’ve seen it just that morning, so Alexi tells him to hop in. We buy some bananas (I still fully believed this was a joke) and off we go. We drove for quite awhile and all we’re seeing is cows and goats… Not exactly the wildlife we hoped for. The villager we collected along the way jumped out, called out to someone nearby and the two of them took off hand-in-hand over a hill, signaling Alexi to follow. I’m painfully aware of the branches scraping the sides and bottom of the Land Rover and thinking that maybe, just maybe, this is not a good idea. Until we get over the hill and there is the elephant.

I can’t even explain how shockingly amazing this was. Just a pure “Oh my god, I really am in AFRICA” moment. Enock, Alexi, and I hop out of the car and make our way over toward the elephant, where the two villagers are already close enough to touch it. I should say at this point that I was indeed pondering my sanity of getting out of the car near an elephant – it was absolutely breaking the number one rule of safaris, not to mention the likelihood that the Coady probably wouldn’t recommend it and my mother would surely kill me if the elephant didn’t. But, hell, if this wasn’t the chance of a lifetime, I don’t know what is. Enock fed a banana to the elephant and kept calling me over, but I refused – I was happy being photographer. The villagers were not satisfied and wanted the silly muzungu to get closer, and pulled me over. I tried to get Alexi to come with me but funny enough, the man who was determined to find the elephant was more scared of it than I was! So… I fed the elephant. A wild African elephant ate bananas out of my hand. I have never been more delighted in my life. Sadly, he decided immediately post-feeding that he wanted to have a bit of a wander, so we backed off and watched from a distance, but for five minutes, I was a foot away from an ELEPHANT.

So, for all the tourists who complain that there are absolutely no elephants in Akagera, there are – you just have to know the villagers ;)