My Field
Trip to Imeri Camp
by Segun Adesina
We all got together at the Harare International School early in the day and we started getting ready for our field trip to Imeri. Imeri is one of the several game reserves in Zimbabwe. I wasn’t nervous as some of the other kids were. I was just going away from home for 3 days, nothing to be nervous about. Then the big van came to pick us up. The van had a luggage compartment hooked to it. We put our luggage in there. We got into the van, said bye to our moms and we were on our way to Imire.
When we got to Imeri, we met Peter. Peter was one of the guides and he showed us all the things we wanted to see. There were about 5 huts and I choose the 5th one. It was the farthest from the barbwires. The barbwires were there to keep the animals from coming into the sleeping areas. I shared a hut with my friends, Willie, Joe and Dylan. We didn’t do the things we were instructed to do first. Instead we played and rested for about an hour but we didn’t get into trouble for that. On the field trip, we did several enjoyable things. The only part I didn’t like was bird watching. For me, it wasn’t exciting because I am not really interested in birds. We walked and walked and saw different kinds of birds. We wrote about the birds. Some of the kids enjoyed bird watching.
We fed milk to the baby rhinos. It was fun to see how they sucked the milk from the wide bottles made of plastic. They made loud sucking sounds. Then we fed them cereal (not the type of cereal we eat). They were black rhinos. I had never seen those before. There were only two of them.
We rode on elephants, which was fun. The only problem was that sitting on an elephant gives one a very itchy bottom because of the hair on it’s back. We rode on the elephants for a fairly long distance. There were about 4 elephants I think. One of them was the baby one. No one could ride on him because its back was not yet strong enough. After the ride, we feed them the same type of cereal the rhinos had. They sucked the cereal up to their mouths using their trunks. Their trunks were all covered with mucous.
The part I loved the most was the dissection of the Impala that the hunters had shot. First they skinned it and that made a kind of ripping sound. Then they cut the parts out of the impala. The kidneys, the stomach, the heart, the ribs, and the liver. It was quite a sickening sight and I did feel like running to the bathroom to throw up. I didn’t go though, because I didn’t want to miss all the fun!
The three days went by quite quickly. I was glad to be back home. My mum said she had missed me a lot. This was my first trip away from home and I was proud of myself. I did not lose any of the things I had taken with me. I had been especially careful because I have the reputation of being the most careless in my family. I was so happy that I was able to prove them all wrong! Home food tasted better than ever after eating camp food for three days.
Segun Adesina
Fifth grade, Harare International School, 20 October 2000, Zimbabwe.
