Baraza

It is my pleasure to introduce you to two new comers to WildlifeDirect

Samuel Maina who formerly was assistant editor of the East African Wildlife Society where he produced editorial material, newsletters and played a key role in SWARA. You may already know his name from The Water Hole. Sam will be helping us with publicity, media and communications. You’ll be hearing alot from him right there on Baraza!

Isaak Kahugu also joins us to manage our help desk. Isaak has considerable experience here in Kenya managing a help desk for a company called Mobile Planet. This year we’ve had our fair share of internet and website challenges - that will all change with Isaak at the desk!

Please join me in welcoming them to our family on WildlifeDirect!

Paula

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Hey everyone, we have new T-shirt designs at the WildlifeDirect shop

In response to public demand, we have designed this new T-shirt with our logo because so many of you wanted to feel as if you are part of WildlifeDirect! We never imagined this kind of interest and we fell so humbled and pleased. Do have a look at our new and older designs, and let us know what you think of them if you have bought one.

We love hearing from you , so let us know what you think of our products and what you would like us to be selling in this shop. Remember that all revenue generated through sales in the shop contribute to our core costs of supporting our bloggers. Thank you all.

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Tags: shop, T-shirts, wildlifedirect

Dear readers,

We are doing our strategic planning and would appreciate your views as an important part of this process. Click here or on the  graphic below to start taking the online survey.

Thank you.

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Tags: Online survey, strategic planning, survey, wildlifedirect

Dear readers,

You have probably noticed a few problems with the website lately. We sincerely regret the inconveniences it has caused to bloggers, visitors and donors. We hope you can bear with us for a few more days as we finalize the website upgrade.

Kind regards

The team at WildlifeDirect

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I have been in the USA for 3 weeks so far in New York, DC, Madison and now I’m in an internet cafe in Minnesota at the Minneapolis Airport waiting for a flight to Montana. I have been fund raising for wildlifedirect to try and raise core funds to enable the organization to expand and support more organizations across Africa, Asia and south America. Since we do not make any deductions from donations for this, we have to raise these funds independently.

It has been an extraordinary experience and some people and organizations who have made it possible for me to spend this much time in the country - I’m especially indebted to Nancy A, Turtle Pond Publications and many individuals who have hosted me or put me in touch with critical contacts. We haven’t raised enormous amounts of money yet but we do have a few possibilities in the pipeline. It has been 14 hour days for 3 weeks with one weekend in the country so far. Sleep deprivation is beginning to get to me but I only have 5 more days to go

I’ve learned how to live like a New Yorker…. using the subway is quite an experience, I love watching the bands play energetically for coins - I could just stay there and dance! America and her people always amaze me with their energy, creativity, generosity and love of life. These images of my trip and facts from Philanthropy statistics

New York is one of the busiest, most exciting places to be. It is rich in culture, art, intelligence, energy and money… beyond description.

Did you know that 89 percent of US households give to charities?

The average annual contribution of those who give is $1,620.

American giving reach a record high in 2006, with donations totaling $295-billion.

Giving to the arts and education saw donations rise more than 6 percent in 2006.

There was an overwhelming philanthropic outpouring to natural disasters in 2005.

The book I talked about previously Owen and Mzee did well because of the link to the Indian Ocean Tsunami. It is a best seller and is translated into 17 languages. I read it to 3rd graders at the John Muir school in Madison. What an exilirating experience! Two days later I received adorable letters with drawings and messages from each child.

One of the girls wrote

“thank you for reading your book. It was a great story. PS. You are a good friend”

another child wrote

“…after you left Ryan told me that you are staying with his family. He said you spend most of your time on your laptop. I wanted you to stay with me because Ryan is lucky that you are staying at his house”.

It’s not true! I sometimes get off my computer and do go out for a walk and here’s the evidence -Ryan introduced me to my first American predator ..a Cayote …here the evidence!

Books are a good way of raising awareness. The sequel to Owen and Mzee “the language of friendship” won a Christopher award last week. The award “salutes media that affirm the highest values of the human spirit. Their goal is to encourage men, women and children to pursue excellence in creative arenas that have the potential to influence a mass audience positively. Award winners encourage audiences to see the better side of human nature and motivate artists and the general public to use their best instincts on behalf of others.”

Here is our book on display with its flashy golden award sticker!

It was awarded to us by Caroll Spinney of Sesame street fame the puppeteer behind big bird and Oscar the Grouch seen here.

Why does Owen and Mzee matter in terms of charitable giving in USA? Because it inspires people to be kind and generous. We hope that our upcoming book “Miza” a true story of an orphaned baby mountain gorilla in Virunga, which is also published by Scholastic, will inspire the same sentiments and becomes a best seller because the funds raised will directly benefit mountain gorillas in Eastern Congo. As you can imagine, the situation there is absolutely critical, rebels control the gorilla sector and rangers are unable to protect the gorillas. We could lose these amazing animals if we fail to take action quickly. Rangers Diddy and Innocent are keeping us informed of the situation on the ground on the gorilla protection blog

Consider these facts.

Charitable giving accounted for 2.1% of gross domestic product in 2006.

Between $6.6 trillion and $27.4 trillion in charitable bequests will be made between 1998-2052.

^{However, only 3% of this will go to animals and nature}

Of that 3%, less than 3% will go to international programs. I cant understand why conservation in the worlds most biodiverse regions can rank at such low the priority on the agenda of charitable people. It is hard to imagine how we can save the most vulnerable species and conservation areas if they occur outside of the richest places of the world.

I wonder ambitiously, could we, you readers, and bloggers on WildlifeDirect turn this around and create awareness of the needs in Africa, Asia, latin America? Could we create a critical mass of information and change the giving behaviours of the richest, most generous people on earth?
The situation is urgent, multinational firms are beginning to greedily extract Africa’s rich natural resources taking oil, minerals, timber, crops and fish, ….we must ensure that the development of Africa does not leave it with a legacy of destruction that future generations of poor Africans have to pay for.

Can we prevent the destruction of the worlds heritage by creating a massive global network of caring people and organizations - before it is too late?

I took a walk at 10 pm one night past the Rockefeller Center and watched the skating with amazement. I sometimes think it would be easy to give up the tough task of conservation in Africa, and just get used to working and living in New York. But I know I’d miss home and Africa too much, because I could not fulfill our mission to save the gorillas, elephants, lions and trees - they need us in Africa.

While I’ll be sad to say goodbye to USA when I finally leave next week, I’ll be so glad to be going home with even more energy and blogs including snow leopards, sun bears, grizzlies, lemurs, …..to name a few.

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The last few days have really had us all on our feet at WildlifeDirect. There have been a lot of atrocities committed against Kenya’s wildlife who unfortunately are being used as a scapegoat for a much deeper rooted problem in Kenya: land.

Last week we found out through one of our partner organisations, the Lion Guardians that three lions were tragically killed. Such inhumane acts are becoming more and more common and whilst they are often the result of retaliation due to Pastoralists losing their livestock to an opportunistic carnivore, there is really no justification for taking revenge on an animal that is only following its basic nature. Reuters were quick to pick up the story and once a media house like them picks it, it often travels far and wide across the globe.

When this came out, we quickly got word that up to 14 elephants had been speared since february this year and 4 had died all within the same Amboseli region. We spoke with world renowned elephant specialist, Dr. Cynthia Moss who post a guest blog on Dr. Richard Leakey’s WildlifeDirect blog. It was only a matter of time before the media turned their panoptical gaze to this blog as well and in less than 48 hours the story had appeared on several leading papers and National Geographic had put a story on these unfortunate incidences.

With all the debate about the reintroduction of culling of elephants in South Africa, Dr. Leakey, renowned for bringing an end to elephant poaching in Kenya over twenty years ago most certainly had a thing or two to say about the highly controversial issue. I think much to everyone’s suprise, he stated that whilst he felt culling to be a repugnant practice, he also felt South Africa had little choice given the current circumstances. Once again, yet anothermajor media house, BBC picked up on his blog and ran it in their Green Room and it also made front page of the BBC Africa news section. And before I had time to read the article, several comments were flying into my inbox from all sorts of different angles. People have strong opinions about lots of things and the beauty of the internet is that you can voice them and it doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a physical fight!

Day 3: I get a phone call from the German Press Agency asking if we have any more information on the arrest of the Provincial Director of South Kivu and Chief of World Heritage of Kahuzi Biega National Parc who has been charged with the murder of ten gorillas mid last year. I had in fact not heard about this but information was at my fingertips through skype, gtalk and emailing. Yes, it was true and this was a huge breakthrough against corruption in the ICCN which work to protect thewildlife and environment in one of the most complicated areas in the world, DR Congo. Soon the blogs were up and more journalists calling and asking for statements. What was critical was to get accurate information for the journalists to report. I love the internet! I spoke to my colleague whom I can barely reach on phone using skype and was able to provide the BBC with reliable information right from the ground. Not even an hour later, the news was out on their front page!

It’s 7pm in Nairobi where the rains are just beginning. I am fortunate enough to have a roof under my head and so much more, and blessed to have the ability to reach the world through an online social network that continuously helps to bring about change…so let’s hope we can bring justice and equality to all living creatures once and for all…

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We’ve been preoccupied with the situation in the Masai Mara for a while but don’t for a second imagine we’ve forgotten the crisis facing gorillas. Today the situation in the Virunga National Park is worse than it has ever been, the rangers have not seen the gorillas for over six months. Last year I visited the Kabirizi family with Emmanuel, Diddy and Innocent.

Once you’ve looked a wild gorilla in the you are transformed forever.

It is almost unimaginable that the rangers have been unable to monitor this family for half a year due to the rebel activity and dangers. I was fortunate to spend three days in the area and visited the gorillas twice. Diddy and Innocent as well as Augustin gave me the most interesting guided tour of the park imaginable - I learned about what gorillas eat and where they sleep, how they move and communicate. But the most awe inspiring moment was when I realised that it was in fact me that was the subject of study.

Diddy was happy and relaxed at that time. We had long conversations about his life as a ranger in the Bukima camp. The camp was later dismantled to protect the equipment from encroaching rebels.

At the end of a seven hour trek up and then down mount Mikeno we had much to smile about despite the exhaustion.

Sadly, less than a month later all hell broke loose and things have not been the same since.

Emmanuel was there when the Rugendo family was attacked, he was amongst the first people to find the site of the massacre of seven individuals.

Today Emmanuel is in the USA raising funds and talking about the situation which is quite dire. We are hoping to raise funds for the re-establishment of the Bukima camp immediately it is safe enough to do so. This will ensure that the rangers have a forward operating base to patrol and do the gorilla monitoring from.

For those of you in Denver Colorado, Emmanuel de Merode will be speaking about the situation facing mountain gorillas from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Canyon Theater in the Boulder Public Library, an event sponsored by the Highlands City Club. On Thursday, he will speak at the Colorado History Museum from 7 to 9 p.m. If you can’t make it to the talk but want to make a donation, you can do so on the gorilla protection blog

You will find more information on this fund raising event in the Denver post

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Dear Readers,

I apologise for this late and I’m sure much too long post, but I’m sure you’re all wondering what the heck all the problem is with the WildilfeDirect site and our blogs?

I’ll try to explain it the best way I can…..

As I hope you know, we want to host the largest community of conservationists and donors/supporters for Africa and beyond Africa. We have grown tremendously fast in the last few months and have been planning an upgrade for some time to accommodate more bloggers and greater blogging functions. We needed to upgrade the website urgently, it’s critical to the success of all our bloggers in terms of increased visitors and donations.

How the upgrade was effected was a problem. Let me start by telling you more specifically what we are trying to achieve.

The overall purpose of this upgrading project is to move our website towards being much more useful and friendly to bloggers and visitors – afterall, first and foremost, we are a blogging platform supporting a community of bloggers and donors.

We aim to provide a completely integrated forum on the Word Press Multi User back-end. Word Press is the blogging platform that we use and the Multi-User facility basically allows us to replicate the number of blogs many many times. This allows us to expand easily and quickly and at the same time, gives the bloggers more tools and much greater flexibility in how the blogs can be used.

After the upgrade, the only difference that a visitor to the site would detect would be the changed URL’s – we did this so that the blog name is simpler, and is the focus of attention not WildlifeDirect. The change was done so that even if the old URL is entered erroneously, it will be redirected automatically. Eg. wildlifedirect.org/gorillaprotection is now the simple URL www.gorillaprotection.wildlifedirect.org

Most of the changes are happening at the back-end out of sight to visitors, where new tools will be available for bloggers to see and use in Word Press when logged in. Our goal is to expand the website platform and functions to manage and share our knowledge base more easily with our bloggers who are actually conservationists learning blogging from scratch.

Some of the developments will give bloggers full financial reports and visitation statistics on the word press back end live as it’s coming in. This is enormously important for any blogger.

This upgrade also aims to enable WildlifeDirect blogs to multiply very quickly – not just conservation blogs but campaign blogs. Campaign blogs are our way of facilitating all those website visitors who want to do more than leave a comment or make a donation. Now supporters can help an individual bloggers to be much more effective by promoting that blog and raising funds. If you have seen the end charcoal blog www.endcharcoal.wildlifedirect.org you will note that Robert is in USA but he’s raising funds for another blog in the Congo. Every blog probably has a few super supporters who will do anything, even stand on a corner with a tin can begging passers by for a few coins to ‘help’ a cause. We want to help these campaigners by giving them facilities on WildlifeDirect - we’re calling them campaign blogs that will raise funds directly for a specific blog and this can be tracked.

Hopefully, these developments will be make WildlifeDirect a space where the global community of supporters can be much more involved in conservation work on the ground in a very flexible and creative way. It will allow conservation bloggers to focus on conservation while campaign blogs will multiply every blog’s effect. Well, that’s our dream anyway – if this works we should see visitation and donations multiply over coming months, as well as global involvement in conservation across Africa and beyond.

The actual website developments required are simple and to achieve all this we are working with a world class firm that has an impeccable record in developing blog platforms. Together we developed a 6 week project that would improve the way the platform functions.

So you are probably wondering why are we having all these problems everywhere else on the site if we’re only touching the administrative part of the blog? Well, in the first stage of upgrading the website we encountered a crisis – the site crashed. We lost most of our functionalities and upset ourselves and a lot of other people. It was a stupid stupid mistake and we missed it. Don’t worry, we’re kicking ourselves really hard.

The good news is that we’re sorting it all out and full functionality is almost restored. There’s one outstanding problem with the donate button which was not specifying the blog which is really upsetting. We want to reassure you that we’ll track all donations made to WildlifeDirect to ensure that the do go to the relevant blog . The problem is actually about to be fixed.

You will notice that blog URL have changed to make blogs the center of attention, not WildlifeDirect. We did this to give greater visibility to the projects.

We are still upgrading but more carefully – by keeping all further developments off the site that is live. We’re working with some pretty amazing blogging experts and we believe we will have a fantastic result at the end. So, the upgrade which is continuing in a parallel site will be migrated only once it has been tested and is proved error free (I know, of course that’s what we should have done in the first place!).

Friends and fellow conservationists, although we have moved quickly to rectify the situation and we admit that its far from perfect and this shouldn’t have happened. We know you’re all quiet upset, and sometimes we respond slowly because our internet speed in Kenya is …well, sometimes it’s far from ideal. So on behalf of the entire WildlifeDirect team I can’t express our apologies strongly enough to all bloggers, visitors, donors and supporters. This upgrade has affected all of us and we are learning new things every single minute about how not to do certain things!

I hope you will bear with us for a few more weeks as we’re sure you will find that the upgraded site is a hundred times better, more functional, useful and more informative than what it was a few weeks ago.

I know that donors have been particularly upset and confused, if this explanation is inadequate, please don’t hesitate to ask any questions or inform us of any problems you are experiencing, we are working flat out to fix everything.

With kind regards

Paula Kahumbu (Conservation Partnership Director) on behalf of the entire team at WildlifeDirect

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I have had an interesting time monitoring all the new blogs and the variety of comments that are coming in. The amount of interest and the suggestions we’re getting on comments are enormously encouraging. I realise that there’s so much more we can do with the power of so many minds. Thank you all for your your contributions it’s so invigorating to hear from you.

Today is a sad but happy day for several reasons.

First, I had the pleasure of meeting Gwili from the Colobus Trust. It was a happy meeting - I discovered he’s Welsh and not from some as yet to be identified African tribe! Such a strange name! He updated me on the situation at the Colobus Trust where the tourism collapse has had a devastating impact on the income of this small charity - which I actually started in 1997! Yes, it was! And it was my brother who designed those crazy arboreal colobus bridges to enable these spectacular black and white monkeys to cross the highway safely. The good news is that the number of monkeys killed by vehicles is now negligible.

The sad news is that more than twenty colobus and fifty other primates are electrocuted every year on high voltage cables serving this touristic area. The Power company has promised to insulate the cables, but are demanding that the Colobus Trust pay for the materials. In my mind, that’s retarded and I think we should write to those guys and demand that they act a bit more responsibly.

The second bit of sad news was from a new blogger, the Maasai Wildlands - While training Douglas I was shown photos of children covered in flies. The flies were in the children’s noses, eyes and mouths. I cant imagine how they breathe without swallowing those dirty creatures! I could see the diseased eyes in at least one of the children. It made me realise just how lucky I am that I have a good clean supply of water at my home. I showed them the playpump system which is so brilliant! I hope that the funds raised through the Maasai Wildlands blog will help to bring clean water to the Maasai children.

And another piece of sad news, William Deed, our in house blogger who helped create the Gorilla Protection Blog, trained Atamato, Diddy and Innocent, has now left us. We will forever be indebted to Will for his amazing insight, expert online networking skills and his dry humour. Below is Will and Diddy checking out photos for the gorilla blog in December last year.

The good news is that he hasn’t gone far - he will be working from the Mara Triangle to help with the emergency fund raising campaign. As you all may know, we are trying to raise 150,000 dollars for the Mara Triangle to help them through this extraordinarily difficult period. Brian Heath, the CEO of the Mara Conservancy came in to pick up Will and to update Richard Leakey on the situation on the ground. They ended up recalling stories about an earlier discussion on the future of the Mara and about Brians Serval cat kitten!

It feels like a long day but we’re only just getting started. I am energized because more than 20 bloggers received donations last week (thank you everyone) and that means that things are looking up which is a great change for us living in Kenya where things have been so depressing lately. But for those who follow Kenyan politics the Koffi Annan mediated talks are progressing and despite some hiccups, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. “Harambee” as Kenyans say, “Lets pull together”.

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January was a great month. We raised a total of 29,433 dollars in 422 individual donations. That means we were getting almost a thousand dollars a day! Pretty impressive we think but what’s REALLY exciting for me is that we raised money for 29 blogs. We now have 61 blogs – that means that half of our bloggers are being successful in fund raising in January which is a far sight better than we were doing last year. Our average donation size was 70 dollars. We owe you all a big thank you. Remember that all your donations are recieved in the field net only of bank transfer fees.

This blog post is to thank Samantha Newport who leaves us today. Sadly her flight connection did not permit us in Nairobi to say ASANTE SANA - THANK YOU SAM and KWAHERI. In Kiswahili we say Kwaheri Kuonana meaning goodbye and see you again. As you all know Sam has been instrumental in WildlifeDirect going far beyond the call of duty and bringing enormous value to this young organization. We hope that even if you find fulfilling work out there in blizzardy England, you will stay close to us all here at WildlifeDirect in Kenya, Congo, and Italy.

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