Newtown Student’s Dream Leads Her To Flood Ravaged Africa

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She went to Africa because she saw the continent in her dreams. As the flood waters poured in last week and picked up the houses around her, she saw a bit of that dream wash away.

Nothing could have foretold her experience: four years after graduating from Newtown High School she is holed up in the remote northeast corner of South Africa, fighting to rebuild a camp and village.

 “Well, this is it, I’m finally out of here,” she wrote next to her picture in her senior yearbook. The future looked bright on June 20, 1996, the auspicious day of graduation, and although she didn’t know it then, the penchant she would show for experiencing life outside classrooms eventually would steer her to the southern reaches of a continent.

By all accounts, Megan Lanigan is a mover, always opting for the firsthand experience rather than a view from the sidelines. Barely able to sit still during her high school studies, she worked for four years at the Mt Pleasant Hospital for Animals. More of her free time was given to Cassio Kennels, and summers were spent volunteering for the Department of Environmental Protection as an animal rehabilitator. “I was fairly clear as to my future career choice [after graduation],” she writes from South Africa.

But upon enrolling at Keene State in New Hampshire, circumstances, as she puts it, made it even more necessary to “seek opportunities outside of the classrooms at Keene.” She leap-frogged from major to major, considering everything from environmental science to psychology and fine arts. During the summer before her junior year, she moved to New York City and literally talked her way into a choice internship as an animal handler for the education department at the Central Park Wildlife Center.

On her return to Keene that fall, she declared her majors: biology and fine arts. Biology would give her the requisite background to explore her passion, ethnology, the study of animals. Fine arts would satisfy her internal need to express herself, a talent she says she has exhibited since childhood.

Good opportunities — that is, the life changing ones — are random, often falling on one’s lap unannounced and blowing away quickly with a slight breeze. As Megan Lanigan sipped her coffee and talked of Africa with a friend in a Florence café last spring, she couldn’t have known that a girl named Lucia Bay was listening to the conversation, and that this girl would alter her life.

Megan was in Italy studying art at the Lorenzo De’Medici school in Florence, where she arrived with two bags, knowing no one. She told her friend that she intended, somehow, to get to Africa, maybe after graduation, maybe upon completing the Italian study abroad program, “to see for myself if it was as beautiful in person as it was in my dreams.”

As chance would have it, Lucia Bay, a New Hampshire native, was in Florence having a month-long layover, after spending the past year in South Africa working at a bush camp tucked into a corner of South Africa along the banks of the Mutale River, just outside of Kruger National Park. Lucia approached Megan and told her of Wallers Camp, where she had worked. The two agreed to meet again, so Megan could grill Lucia on how she might be able to get involved in the camp. Upon that meeting, Lucia had already phoned the camp’s director and told him that she had found her replacement.

Back home last summer after the De’Medici program, Megan began making plans with the camp director to join him in the South African bush. She spoke to him only three or four times; she spoke to Lucia only once. She had one more semester until she would graduate from Keene. She obtained a visa, received the requisite shots, and with two bags and a knot in her stomach, she boarded a plane for Johannesburg for a 15-hour flight.

“I felt that this was my chance to make it to South Africa,” she writes, “and that alone was worth postponing my senior year at Keene.” 

The Wallers Camp

Sean Waller stood at the airport in Pietersburg, South Africa late September, where his new American volunteer was due to arrive on a flight from Johannesburg.

His scruffy brown hair was his trademark, that and his bush-worn feet, which seldom saw the inside of a shoe. This would be how Megan Lanigan would recognize him, and she did, breathing an admitted sigh of relief after a long journey, and accompanying him four hours further up the road to Wallers Camp.

It was always his dream to operate a bush camp. Sean Waller built Wallers Camp with his father in 1996, with the help of some men from Bende Mutale, a small village comprised of 65 families, which gave up some of its outskirts for the erection of the camp. Bende Mutale has no phones, no electricity or piped water. The nearest hospital is 150 kilometers away, and there is no public transport service to the village. Until recently, the community supported itself on subsistence farming, poaching in nearby Kruger National Park, and the sale of hard wood for fuel.

Mavhulani, the Venda word for the area where the camp is located, was completed two years after ground was first broken. The camp consisted of nine bungalows, a central dining area, a swimming pool and a small bar.

The camp catered to mostly South African clientele, nature enthusiasts who wanted to get away to the bush to view the region’s extensive bird populations. But perhaps the main services the camp provided were employment opportunities for nearby villagers desperate to eradicate the economic stagnation of Bende Mutale.

Most of the volunteers who helped with the camp’s construction stayed on as workers, learning the skills required to work as housekeepers, drivers, guides and maintenance personnel.

For much of her first five months at Wallers Camp, Megan was something of a motivator and organizer, charged with the task of keeping the 20-member native village staff working as a team. This translated into helping them become more comfortable with the camp’s guests, and keeping watch over the daily duties of maintenance, room preparations and cooking.

“As a foreigner, simply observing how the intricate way life is woven together in Africa amazed me,” she writes. “Watching two worlds live side by side, the fairly modern world alongside a more primitive culture. At the camp, the two worlds had found a perfect harmony of respect and happiness.”

Megan also took over the main cooking duties for the camp, working next to Sean to prepare traditional African meals. Both she and Sean spent much of their free time constructing new huts of mud and thatch for the villagers of Bende Mutale.

With the flourishing camp came a bolstered economy for Bende Mutale. One third of the families in the village had one member employed at Wallers Camp. Additional employment was created for the women who perform traditional tribal dances at the camp once or twice a week, and the disposable income the camp created for villagers spawned informal businesses and unlicensed bars, which in turn created more employment.

Native arts and crafts were sold to camp visitors, channeling additional income into Bende Mutale and placing a high emphasis on the traditional skills of artisanship that were fast being forgotten.

Wallers Camp has helped educate the community, not only by requiring its workers to learn new, marketable skills, but also by emphasizing the natural resources of the region and how to protect them. Children, who once had to compete for the attention of one village school teacher, now cooperate in education programs concerning malaria, birth control and disease prevention, in return for structural improvement that Wallers Camp volunteers have brought to the school.

Sean Waller saw the camp as an instrument of self-esteem, where villagers could see that their skills could have a direct impact on what happens in their native land.

Over the past months, Megan writes, “My tasks have been easy for me, I think because I feel like a sponge, absorbing so much history and knowledge of the bush. The combination of experiences were more than I imagined.” 

Locals know about the annual rains. The flat, arid landscape of this part of South Africa have always yielded to the seasonal torrents of monsoons and cyclones, which push the levels of local rivers to their limits.

Yet neither Megan Lanigan nor Sean Waller were prepared for the flooding of the past month. It only took a few hours for Wallers Camp, and much of Bende Mutale, to be swallowed up by the river and destroyed.

 

Trying To Rebuild After The Waters

Megan, Sean, and the rest of the camp’s workers watched the Mutale River rise. At first, the rains were typical. Soon after, considerably less so. The Mutale burst its banks as volunteers scrambled to remove furniture, bedding, linen and decorations from bedrooms. Within 30 minutes, the levels were too high and workers headed for higher ground.

Less than three hours later, the river rose 30 feet, and the camp was gone.

“We just sat as far back as we could and literally watched the cabins get crumbled,” Megan recalls. “It happened so quick that it was very surreal. Within a couple of hours, everything that was perfect was completely destroyed.”

The following morning the river had receded, leaving in its wake a stripped, mud-caked landscape devoid of trees or anything recognizable to Megan and the rest of the volunteers and villagers.

Like the rest of the region, the floods that have gripped the area around Wallers Camp and Bende Mutale have left many without homes. As few as 10 days ago, relentless sheets of rain all but washed away the mud huts of Bende Mutale. Bridges have given way and roads have been closed, cutting much of the area off from outside help. Ninety percent of Kruger National Park’s 7,523 square miles has been closed. There is a threat that diseases like cholera will ride the waves of future floods. More heavy rains are predicted for the next two months.

But Megan Lanigan is safe.

Along with Sean Waller and the rest of the camp’s volunteers, Megan knows that the devastation of the floods can only be met with an effort to rebuild. The task, however, will be daunting: the flood left only one bungalow standing at Wallers Camp, and additional resources that might be used to build new huts and shelters — trees, firm Earth — were either swept away with the surging currents or buried underneath thick, viscid mud.

Megan has no plans to retreat with the water. Right now, efforts are being made by Megan and her fellow workers to rebuild a tent site adjacent to the camp, which fared comparatively better in the floods. Clearing this area will allow tents to be pitched as temporary shelters.

Through dispatches from South Africa, she tells of the volunteers’ efforts to begin to petition for funds from the country’s government. She knows that relief efforts are not lacking in manpower, but are lacking severely in finances. As yet, however, funding is not forthcoming.

“I’ve put everything I have [into this camp],” Sean Waller says. “For myself, there’s really only one option: rebuild.” But he knows that government money will be directed to areas of South Africa and its neighbors that have suffered more during the floods. “Little places like us in the middle of nowhere are going to be forgotten. We have got to keep our chin up and keep going forward.”

“For the next couple of months we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Megan confides.

She has time, though, to breathe new life into Sean Waller’s dream, a dream now devastated. She has time to live more of her own African dream. The floods, though extreme by historical measures, are a part of that dream landscape she talked of entering in that Florence café. Megan says she plans to help pick up the pieces and start fresh, and raise as much money as possible to help with the relief efforts. For now that has involved reaching out to the South African government, and her friends.

Megan is due home this summer, and will complete her degree at Keene in the fall. But right now, home is a strange thing for her to consider. “My first couple of weeks at the camp were overwhelming, and it took some time to adjust to the lifestyle,” she writes. “No electricity, few people, and the simple solitude of life in the bush took some getting used to.

“But before I knew it, coming home seemed a silly thing to say. I already felt like I was home.”

(Anyone interested in contributing to the rebuilding of Wallers Camp can send donations to: Wallers Camp, c/o Megan Lanigan, PO Box 737, Sibasa 0970, Northern Province, R.S.A)