Africa Selection Camp – Day 6

Blog written by Kate Wootton and Alyssa Stapleton

After our morning bike ride we met Roswitha, our scientist, who introduced us to the environment and ecosystem of Namibia and South Africa, our planned destinations for the expedition. Dry, dry and dry by the sounds of things! But interesting none the less, with lots of endemic species to look out for. Next we focused on water which, as such a rare resource in this area, will play a large part in our expedition. After discussing the many issues surrounding water projects, we got to play chemists and test a variety of mystery liquids for properties such as pH, conductivity and the presence of chemicals such as amonium to determine how safe they were to drink. It turns out that by drinking water standards, Coca-cola is not a safe liquid for consumption with a pH of 3!

During the day all the old young explorers have been showing up to share the weekend with us and pass the torch onto us! It`s been exciting and inspiring hearing their stories and adventures from past selection camps, expeditions and action projects afterwards. Finally we got to share our own projects which we`ve been working on since before camp. We had four presentations on water, sanitation, malaria and first aid. All groups did a stellar job (even the weather agreed with quite a show of thunder and lightning in the middle) and we`re looking forward to implementing these projects on the expedition!