What a whopper of a souvenir!

MOKUTI is the largest woodcarving of a giraffe ever made in Namibia and, as the name suggests, it was crafted for the Mokuti Lodge.

The lodge wanted a four-metre-tall giraffe and it had to be finished in three weeks. This was a challenge for the ‘Every River Has Its People’ project, which is a community-based programme in the Okavango River Basin, involving people living in Angola, Namibia and Botswana.The Shamburo woodcarvers, who belong to the Maduva Nyangana Conservancy just north of the Khaudom Game Reserve, were selected for this mammoth task.The Shamburo woodcarvers have legal permits to source suitable dead trees along the power line for woodcarvings and with the help of the German Development Services (DED) a big enough dry kiaat tree was found.The tree was pulled by four oxen to the working area where Daniel Ndara, Nickolaus Ndara and Petrus Kavinda started the work on Mokuti.The woodcarving was completed within the three-week deadline and taken to Grootfontein by the craft coordinator of the Every River project, Mark Paxton.This was a challenge for the ‘Every River Has Its People’ project, which is a community-based programme in the Okavango River Basin, involving people living in Angola, Namibia and Botswana.The Shamburo woodcarvers, who belong to the Maduva Nyangana Conservancy just north of the Khaudom Game Reserve, were selected for this mammoth task.The Shamburo woodcarvers have legal permits to source suitable dead trees along the power line for woodcarvings and with the help of the German Development Services (DED) a big enough dry kiaat tree was found.The tree was pulled by four oxen to the working area where Daniel Ndara, Nickolaus Ndara and Petrus Kavinda started the work on Mokuti.The woodcarving was completed within the three-week deadline and taken to Grootfontein by the craft coordinator of the Every River project, Mark Paxton.