The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

The Ju/’Hoansi-San Village is a living museum where the people show us how they used to live.

The “/’” in their name is a click sound. They use four different ones. Here is the older man explaining something about fire making in their language.

The women and younger children were sitting in the shade resting.

Some of the younger women were out gathering firewood.

They showed us how to find water if you are far from a river. First you find a plant that looks like a tiny twig. It’s so unnoticeable in the brush that we didn’t get a picture we can identify it in. (We will not fare well if we get lost in the desert.)

Then you dig a hole where the twig was.

Then you will find this giant root.

Then you scrape the root with your knife to get some pulp off.

You need quite a bit of the pulp.

Then you squeeze it over your mouth to get a drink.

After you are done you rebury the root and it will grow again.

They also showed us how they hunt. This is how you make a bird trap.

He wraps the string around  a bunch of sticks to hold it apart.

And then he leaves it to catch any birds that try to eat the nuts inside.

For bigger animals they hunt with a bow and arrow.

They crouch down so that they will be less likely to scare the animals away.

The arrow tip is a piece of sharpened bone. It is covered with poison before it is used. The tip is put into a long wooden arrow, and it is held by friction with the string wrapped around it. That way the stick part will fall out of the animal when it starts to run and can be used for tracking.

Here he is shooting the arrow. The arrow is in front of the tree on the right.

The San people also showed us how to make fire. First you cut notches into a stick.

They look like this. But probably not as burnt and worn when you first make the stick.

Then you make another stick like this. I’m not sure how rounded it was before it was used.

Then you take some dried grass and put it between the sticks, and spin the stick fast between your hands.

It was a two man operation, but after a bit it started to smoke.

Then he blew on the grass to keep it going.

And then added it to the sticks to make a big fire.