Andover woman devotes time to South African wildlife sanctuary
Angela Marie Latona
More than 4,000 wild animals roam the 23 square miles of bush country in South Africa's Sanwild Sanctuary for Wildlife.
Andover resident Barbara Murphy can tell you a thing or two about them. After all, she's fed the meerkats, been visited regularly by an ostrich and nearly had her Jeep tipped by a rhino there.
Murphy, who worked with animals at the wildlife sanctuary in Litsitele, South Africa, said her mother took her to the region just two years ago and she fell in love with it.
"[I] saw a documentary on T.V. about this woman who picked up this orphan zebra | on Animal Planet," Murphy said. "At the end was a Web site [that advertised having] volunteers around the world that come there for a short period of time."
So Murphy arranged to visit the sanctuary for a month and help rehabilitate some of its animals.
When she first decided to sign up, Murphy said her father asked her if she might be crazy.
But Murphy was ready to roll up her sleeves and try "learning on the job." She directed her father to diaries written by volunteers on the Sanwild Sanctuary for Wildlife Web site | sanwild.org | and felt "totally comfortable" with the idea of flying halfway across the world.
The diaries record the various day-to-day activities and adventures volunteers have during their stay. Murphy kept one of her own.
"This place is incredible," she wrote in one of her entries. "Andre took me around and Tonga the hippo, submerged in his waterhole (rescued from the circus), slowly swam over to us (we were in the Jeep) and lumbered out of the water and came up to say hello - one foot from the Jeep."
"My chalet is pretty plush," Murphy's entry continues. "There's no cook at the moment, so we volunteers fix our own food in a make-shift kitchen, since the main kitchen and lounge area is still under construction, but supposed to have been done in September."
In a separate diary entry, Murphy wrote that poaching in South Africa is a "horrific problem" and that a campaign was being spearheaded to "get some tougher legislation passed."
"Sometimes someone wants to have hippo meat or wants four warthogs for a big party, or a tribal leader wants a leopard claw for a ceremony, [and] the poachers go out with their dogs," she wrote. "They can get $100 per wart hog and $15,000 for a sable antelope, so it's incredibly lucrative for them. They hardly get any sentence when they get caught."
At Sanwild, Murphy was given the tasks of helping to rehabilitate injured animals, filling holes in the dirt roads dug up by aardvarks and weeding out invasive plants to keep electric fences in working order. She also fed the meerkats and mongooses.
"People all over (South Africa) know about this place," she said.
But what they might not know about are the day-to-day interactions Murphy had while working at the sanctuary. Her every day experiences were not so every day at all.
"(There was an) ostrich hanging around the office all the time," she said.
"The coolest thing," Murphy said, was the rhinoceros that she fed twice a day. "Just scratching and petting him, and putting pellets into his mouth | he was the cutest thing."
Murphy said that when the rhinoceros was freed, its "wild instincts" took over and, at one point it almost tipped the truck in which Murphy and her colleagues were sitting.
"You never knew when something like that was going to happen," she said.
Sanwild Sanctuary has, what Murphy referred to as, "the big five" | elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs and cape buffalo.
"If you stay there a couple of days, you'd see pretty much everything," she said. "Maybe not a leopard. They're pretty elusive."
