Baraza

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

Tags: 23, 33, 698, 710, 711, 768

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