Botswana’s female rangers: How women are rewriting conservation and survival in the Okavango Delta

Miss Peahlo was dressed in khaki, sitting across from me at the Sitatunga Great Plains Private Island Camp. Between us was a generous, carefully plated meal, but she ate cautiously, as if such abundance required permission. I asked her what her name meant. “It means pain and rejection in Setswana,” she said matter-of-factly. “My father left my mother before I was born.”

She prefers to be called Miss P. She is a mother to a six-year-old daughter and, like her own mother, is raising her child on her own. The meaning of her name, she says, will not be passed on to her daughter.