The Harnas Wild Life Foundation

A few days before Albert and the others went back home, we went to the Harnas Wildlife Foundation. It’s about an hour and a half drive away from Gobabis.

Harnas is a wildlife park where you can go on a safari trip by 4wd and on foot and watch lions, cheetas, crocodiles et cetera. But the Harnas Wild Life Foundation is more than just a park where you can watch wildlife. Here they help injured and orphaned animals grow up and they prepare them to go back into the wild again. If you are lucky you can even cuddle baby lions, cheetas and leopards if they’re around.

In our case we were able to get really close to two cheetas. An old cheeta fella named Goeters and a young female cheeta named Duma. Goeters has been around here since the beginning of the Harnas Wild Life Foundation project (26 years) and is basically as tame and friendly as a housecat, just a whole lot bigger! We also played with a young giraffe. Be carefull though, because he tends to kick every once in a while when he’s in a real playfull mood (there are signs warning for this in the park). The giraffe walks freely next to the bungaloo houses, so enjoy your breakfast with a giraffe breathing down your neck or stealing your food

Another nice thing to know is that Albert and Judith have been coming here for quite some years now, and they love Goeters so much that they even named their own dog in Holland after the cheeta. When Albert explained this to the owner of Harnas, she really appreciated to hear this.

Have a look at the pictures below, they’ll give you some idea of what you can see in Harnas. And for the record… I totally fell in love with this cheeta Duma  (as you will see in some of the pictures).

The last two pictures (with me, Judith and ‘our’ giraffe) are made by Emma Bloemhof. And the pictures of me and Duma were made by Judith.

On the second of july 2010 I’ll be flying with fellow CMD student Jelmer de Jong towards the second least densely populated country in the world which also happens to be one of the driest continents on the planet. This country is positioned above South Africa and is called Namibia.

Personal Reason

We were asked by a teacher at our faculty to make a film in Nambia. Jelmer and I were both still looking for suitable graduation film subjects, and this subject (which will be explained below) touched us both. So we decided to do some research, meet some people and take the job!

Purpose

For the last 15 years the Namibian municipality of Goababis and the Dutch municipality of Smallingerland have had a fellowship that is connected by development aid. Several projects have been set out in Gobabis for the last 15 years such as HIV/AIDS prevention, housing projects and many more.

The municipality of Smallingerland wants us to make a film about the last 15 years of development aid that has been brought to Goababis. They want to know how things are going today. So in short: what’s going great and what could be better?

They want us to shoot from our perspective – from a new way to look at the whole piece – and also with an eye to the future.

Symposium

The film will be played in october on an international symposium in Drachten which obviously is about development aid. the film is set to inform and create a discussion between the people at the symposium to create steps for the future.

On the 4th of september we’ll be back in Holland. I’ll try and post as many text and video blogs as I can about the proces, but it will be hard staying online where we are. I’ll also need a USB device so that I can connect my MacBook Pro with a telephone based internet connection but so far I haven’t been able to find one yet, not even the Mac Store.

More news coming soon, about the pre-production, the production and the post-production.

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