Baraza

Category: Amazing facts | Date: Apr 30 2008 | By: admin

In a world of Information, Communications and Technology overdrive, it is very rare that a unique concept can survive for very long without being adopted, or adapted, replicated or cloned and in some cases corrupted. This imaginary space that so many of us have learnt to exist within and become incapable of living without has like everything else the ability to create and destroy. The embodiment of opposites is one of the oldest concepts known to humankind. Shiva is one such deity worshipped by millions in India and elsewhere as destroyer and benefactor. Despite him being considered a God, I can’t imagine anything more human.

In the same space, there is a thin and transparent line between what is real and what is not. Phantasmagoria - a concept invented in the 18th Century to project images on to a wall using a lantern which give you the illusion of a non-existent reality.

“The TV screen makes you feel small…no life at all…”

Picture this:

This is not a shark…

It’s a shark in captivity (for somebody’s pleasure).

And Picture this:

This is not a snake…

It’s a snake in captivity (for somebody’s survival).

And finally picture this:

These are not gorillas…

They are dead gorillas (for…)

FOR WHAT?

We are blasted with images like this all the time. Starving children, bombed villages, dead wildlife, dead people. In Kenya, we have recently become very complacent about the latter compliments of our politicians.

And then there are the living (or once were living) creatures behind those pictures, behind that image that is splashed across your screen. There is life there - tucked away in the matrix of atoms that blasts our sensories. This is the space which the blogger inhabits and the space which I truly believe WildlifeDirect is manifested itself through the vision of Emmanuel de Merode and Richard Leakey.

There are 72 million blogs and more coming each minute that passes by. Just about each one of those little cubicles below has a humanbeing reaching out to connect to some other living creature. We stumble upon one another and stumble upon something we care about and reach out in any way we can to touch that particular thing we care about.

What do you see below?

Yes, there’s a giraffe in the background and the silouette of a person in front. That is the person on the other end of the keyboard desperately trying to upload their blog before the electricity goes or crossing their legs in anxiety hoping the connection does not drop before the post is uploaded. These are the people that the vision of WildlifeDirect is built upon - rangers who get beaten, stoned, and often murdered. It’s in the line of duty - so nothing to be too sensationalist about but there is something just below the surface that deserves a mention; these are also people that have had shadows cast upon them by a brand just like so many in the west to have lost their identity to the corporate cogwheel of capitalism.

I bid you farewell from this particular word document editor but happy and proud to know that I am now also one of those 72 million bloggers…

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Category: WildlifeDirect news | Date: Feb 05 2008 | By: admin

Besides the politicians and hoodlums, I can’t help but think there are actually a lot of good and caring people in the world. Perhaps not enough, or maybe because we are all so scattered across the globe that, it is sometimes not easy to feel a common bond of humanity. However, when I started working with WildlifeDirect and began to really understand the power of online communities, I realised that we are now sitting on the most powerful and positive tool of all times.

Then, when my wife, Elodie and I created an emergency appeal blog, Sukuma Kenya (which literally means “push” Kenya but is also the name given to the staple vegetable eaten by all Kenyans as it literally helps to push you through the week), I trully felt that no matter how few people out there really do care, we can actually make a difference. All it took was one mass email to all our friends, and through the simple science of 7 degrees of seperation, Sukuma spread and within one month we had raised over $10,000/-! I can’t even begin to tell you how many people have been helped with this funding.

What was just as inspiring is that I realised just how many Kenyans and friends of Kenya there are out there. The blogs dealing with the crises just kept springing up and everyone has been linking to eachother to increase our networks and increase the outreach. People from all sectors are dealing with the crises at hand ranging from poets like Shailja Patel to Kenyan Harvard student Joseph Karoki to and of course the whole literary movement came together under a common banner of Concerned Writers and within weeks, literally a couple of books worth of material was public for everyone to read. A lot of this amazing writing can be found on the Kwani blog

Kenyans do care and we are in shock about what is going on. What I realise is now more than ever we see our country in it’s whole - the people, the environment, the wildlife, the economy. So much is at stake. As a conservation organisation we recognise that everything is intedependant and sometimes certain issues must take precedence over others for the sake of long term sustainability just as the Gorilla Protection blog has done with raising funds to buy fuelwood for all the displaced people in DR Congo.

And now in Kenya, WildlifeDirect must focus its energy of saving one of the greatest ecosystems in the world - the Trans Mara- which is coming under serious threat due to a lack of financial resources to continue security as there are no tourists paying entrance fees which the Mara Conservancy is entirely dependant upon.

My good friend Stephen Partington and a muse to many of us writers in Kenya lives a humble life teaching at a school in Machakos, recently wrote the following poem which says it all for me:

WONDER OF THE WORLD: A STUDY OF EXODUS
Kenya, February 2008

(NOTE: in 2007, Kenya’s wildebeest migration was declared The Seventh
Natural Wonder of the World)

Forget the wildebeest.
Forget the birds that flock abroad.
Forget safari ants,
those harsh, acidic hordes
that strip each leaf from the acacia tree.

Forget the spawning salmon
or the moulting northern caribou,
the nightly rise and bloom
of tiny plankton from the deep.
Forget the flock and mindless plodding-on
of fold-returning sheep.

Let’s venture lower, to inanimates:
forget the iron filings,
how they journey to the pole.
Forget specks of dust that quiver
with a Brownian lack of control.
Forget how photons in their millions
pulse rhythmically from lamps.
Forget the molecules of water
forced to tumble-stream from taps.
Forget the swarming of the sand from dunes,
the orbits of our planets’ moons…

Yet smaller, less substantial
than a mote, the lowest low:
evicted children
on the margins of the roadway,
who have nowhere left to go.

(Stephen Derwent Partington)

Technorati : Kenya, Masai Mara, Sukuma, WildlifeDirect fundraising crises, blogs, post-election crises

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Category: WildlifeDirect news | Date: Dec 14 2007 | By: admin

Hello everyone!

I thought I would do my colleague a favour and expose what a great writer he is to all our WildlifeDirect readers. Not just because he asked me to. He is the communications Manager here and has written a couple of the posts on this blog already. He writes a lot of articles for various local Kenyan Magazines like Wajibu and Awaaz.

So to celebrate Dipesh pabari’s creative genius with words, quite unlike my own, I thought I would give you all a little expose on his latest Pambazuka (Pan African online Journal) article featuring WildlifeDirect. I believe it is called the ‘Bush Bloggers’. A fitting title for all those hardy conservationists out there who are, as we call it here in Kenya ‘Bundu Bashing’. Another way of saying roughing it out in the wilderness.

Onto the article now…our dear ‘Atamato‘ blog, the smiling face of a Congolese ranger which graces our homepage from time to time, with his video posts, featuring panoramic views of the beautiful Ishango Park has been used as an example of how the life of one ranger was drastically changed and a National Park was able to function through the generous donations of our readers (give yourselves a pat on the back).

“Take the case of Atama-to Madrandele, a park warden who, in 2005, started working at the Ishango, sub-station of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He carried out his work in almost complete physical and financial isolation. In February 2007, Atamato began to blog on WildlifeDirect about his work. Through this blog he was able to raise some funds to help pay for patrol rations and equipment, as well as salary supplements for his five underpaid rangers (the official pay for a Congolese ranger is about three US dollars per month). From August this year, Ishango has become a fully functional park station, thanks to the donations received through his blog. His men are now fed and have enough fuel to be able to carry out regular patrols.”

Dipesh even managed to include a few quotes from Richard Leakey and feature them in the article. Here is a sneak preview…

“After spending many years struggling to improve wildlife conservation in Kenya, I decided to start WildlifeDirect to solve a very real problem in Africa, the lack of adequate funds to protect our wildlife heritage. Persuading individual donors to give support was not easy because most people are unaware of what is going on in conservation until there is a crisis. I needed to find another way to raise awareness and funds on a continuous basis.”

What more can I say except it is a really good and informative read about blogging and the effect it has on conservation and wordly issues in general.

So you going to read it now??? Off course you are…

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/44859

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