SarahChud
Registered: December 2009
City/Town/Province: Fort Portal
Posts: 1
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I’m Sarah, a 19 year old student from Pennsylvania, and I helped implement a conservation project in western Uganda while taking a gap year between high school and starting my studies at Boston University. I will be studying international relations and hope to work in the developing world for an NGO in the future, teaching or doing community development projects. So I consider myself more of an English or history geek, but growing up I have always been drawn to the outdoors. Every summer my dad took my sisters and me on camping trip to a different national park, and when I was seven I was convinced I would grow up to be a herpetologist. My grandparents lived right next to a wetland, and I would spend hours there catching toads and recreating elaborate habitats for them in TupperWare containers- mini swamps and ponds and meadows. Yeah, I was a strange kid.
I love to travel and learn about different cultures, so I decided to take a year off from the schoolwork grind and volunteer internationally. My aunt and uncle manage Semliki Safari Lodge, in the Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve, in western Uganda, and when their newly formed Wild Places Conservation Trust (www.wildplacestrust.org) began to get off the ground, I leapt at the opportunity to come and be the person to help get the Trust’s community conservation projects running.
The Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve, a small patch of protected land in Uganda’s Albertine Rift Valley, was once well known as the home for some of the most magnificently-maned male lions in East Africa, and earned the nickname“Little Tanzania” for its incredible variety of habitats. The chaos that ensued during the ousting of dictator Idi Amin and the subsequent lack of infrastructure that always accompanies war spelled doom for the copious game of the reserve. Over the next few decades, the park was devastated. Since ecotourism came to the reserve with the opening of the Semliki Safari Lodge in 1995, the wildlife has begun to recover fantastically. Funds from the lodge go back to the community through the Uganda Wildlife Authority, to pay for primary schools and sustainable business projects. The more diversity the Toro-Semliki Reserve has, the more tourists will come. The reserve, right on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, is unique for several reasons: the reserve serves as a valuable wildlife corridor for animals fleeing civil unrest in Congo, it houses both Eastern and Western African bird species, and contains both the forest elephant and African elephant, which are rarely found living together. The riverine forests are home to chimpanzees, black and white Colubus monkeys, and six other primate species; Lake Albert boasts the elusive shoebill and an occasional hippo; and, once in a while, elephants and buffalo can be seen roaming the savanna. Lions are beginning to return to the reserve, but currently there are no prides, only lone males. Two months ago a hyena was seen for the first time in years, and the number of Uganda kob (antelope) has grown to an estimated 8,000 from 650 in 1995. When the Safari Lodge was first opened, it took three years for anyone to see a warthog. Now warthogs and Uganda kob are plentiful, but some species, like Jackson’s Hartebeest, have been extirpated. Poaching is linked to poverty, and so the Trust is working on creating alternative ways for poachers to generate income. My side of the efforts, however, is projects with women and children.
My multifaceted projects included teaching conservation topics to primary school students and engaging them in caring for and appreciating the environment, building fuel efficient stoves to save trees and money, and equipping a Nature Center to be a community conservation resource. I joined forces with a Uganda Wildlife Authority community conservation ranger, Annah, and the Trust’s community liason, a guide named Daniel. We visited 12 different primary schools in five communities bordering the reserve, and used activities, games, and demonstrations to teach kids about living with wildlife, the value of trees and sustainable energy, and caring for the soil. We had between three and five visits to the various schools, and taught the three oldest levels of primary, so students were between the ages of 12 and 17.
The communities face certain conservation issues depending on their environment. One community is located right on the shores of Lake Albert. As their livelihood depends on fishing, we talked about the dangers of overfishing and the importance of properly disposing of rubbish because they live in a watershed. This community, Ntoroko, has a astronomical problem with litter, and we hosted a “Rubbish Collection Day.” All the students in the school, not just the three classes we had been meeting with, gathered together and started off the day by talking about rubbish. We said how most of it does not break down into new soil, how it pollutes the lake, causes disease, etc, and then the students broke off into groups. The students had made signs a few days before, and each group had at least two older students to be leaders, sign holders, and sack carriers. The students were very enthusiastic, and even though the grade seven students had ”graduated” a few days before, some of them came back to school to help. The students spent all morning walking around the community, collecting rubbish and educating the people we passed about properly disposing of rubbish. When the morning ended and we came back to the school, the six groups, dispersed throughout the village, had together collected a total of 80 sacks! As we announced the number of sacks each group collected, the students clapped and cheered for each other, progressively louder for groups that collected the most, and the wide smiles on the faces of the “winning” groups let me know that we all felt a sense of accomplishment for the day’s work. Hopefully the students will give a second thought about throwing litter, and the other members in the community will be inspired by the students’ example.
Other communities face different issues. One community, Rwebisengo, is very dry and most people survive by raising cattle, so we discussed cattle encroachment in the reserve and the effects that it has on plants and wildlife, like Uganda kob and lions. Another community, Karagutu, is very lush and most people are farmers. So talking about soil and deforestation was especially applicable here. Overall, our main points were to teach the students the concept of sustainability, and the idea that all living things are connected so thus our actions have consequences for the environment. At the close of the school term, we had video showings of Planet Earth and we took as many students as possible on field trips. Groups from most schools were able to come for a “game drive” around the reserve, and the students from Ntoroko also went for a forest walk. Even though they live so close to the reserve, many of them had never seen so much of the reserve, and they enjoyed seeing the wilderness and the different animals.
I learned how to build a “rocket stove,” which uses up to 60% less firewood than traditional three-stone fires, from the leaders of a conservation project in the communities around another national park in Uganda, Kibale Forest (www.newnaturefoundation.org). Daniel and I then began building the stoves here around Semliki. We have started in two communities so far, Karagutu and Ntoroko, and the stoves are catching on. By using less firewood, they enable people to cook without poaching wood from the reserve, encourage the use of wood over charcoal, and save money for struggling families. The stoves are also safer than three-stone fires. They emit less smoke, and with the fire enclosed and a flat, raised surface for pots to rest on, children and babies are more protected from burns. The stoves are made from mud and bricks, and are easily affordable even in these impoverished communities. Daniel and I have teamed up with some community members to teach more people how to make the stoves. In Karagutu, we are working with a brick-maker, who can generate money from these stoves. In Ntoroko, we have been teaching an interested teenager, the former wildlife club president from Ntoroko Primary School. As of the time I am writing this, we have built a total of 16 stoves and soon the stove building in these two communities will be able to take off without Daniel and me. In the future, we plan to distribute native-tree seedlings, Sesbania Sesban, to stove recipients so they can grow their own firewood.
I worked on the projects from September 2009 and I will finish in January 2010, though they will go on without me now that I have helped get them started. Since October we have been making preparations to open a Nature Center in Karagutu, in one of the Uganda Wildlife Authority’s old offices. The Nature Center is set to open during the first week in January, so my project is not yet complete, and I am currently finishing up displays. I enlisted the help of my hometown in Pennsylvania, which donated books and posters, and the carpenters here at the Semliki Safari Lodge are building tables and bookshelves. I am making displays on Semliki’s conservation threats, wildlife, and different habitats; a paper-machier topographic map of the reserve (with the help of the reserve’s chimpanzee researcher, a college student from Indiana); and a display about wildlife around the world. We will have nature artifacts like animal skulls, skins confiscated from poachers, birds’ nests, seashells, seed pods, etc, and there will be activities like games, puzzles, and coloring for kids. There will be video showings and a resource library for community members of all ages.
I have had such an incredible time working on these conservation projects. I have learned so much, especially about the environment and conservation. When teaching, I used the book Africa Our Home, from the Pan-African Conservation education pack distributed by the non-profit organizations Tusk Trust and Siren, and learned a lot through the studying the curriculum. I also gained experience teaching; planning and implementing lessons and activities for students and cooperating with principals and the regular primary school teachers. Organizing these projects taught me to plan ahead at a different level from the different projects I organized in high school with my student government and Key Club, where I was always in a bigger group. I also have gained so much knowledge from just working with people way more experienced than me, Daniel, Annah, and my uncle and aunt. I have met some truly inspiring people who are making a difference. I still have my youthful idealism, but I have realized that to change the world, we can’t depend just on governments and large organizations. We need to come together on the community level and change lives though relationships. By working in rural, impoverished communities my eyes were really opened to the realities, and solutions, of poverty. I witnessed firsthand the dependence people have on the environment, and the drastic consequences of not caring for our planet, like erosion and drought, that are already happening in the developing world. I have discovered that even if I am not taking another five months to devote all my time to conservation projects, my life and lives of those around me still need to be lived with an environmentally conscious attitude. I have fully realized that it is up to each and every one of us, from all walks of life, all over the globe, to work together to care for the environment with our lifestyle choices.
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