Protect Our Trees.. Painting a Way to Conservation

Nkiloriti Primary Class One got their work off to a great start for the September art exhibition  ‘What Conservation Means to Me’ at Nanyuki's  Lily Pond Arts Centre.

 

After two initial lessons on ‘Conservation’ and some drawing work they chose to work on Trees  . The reasons given for the importance of trees in their initial drawings ranged from ‘We need trees to live’....'guests come to see trees and animals not cars’ to 'the wild animals need trees’.

So on ‘Painting and Creating’ Day it should not have been surprising, but was nevertheless inspiring, to have the 6-9 year olds rattling off their 8 most important reasons for protecting trees with no input from the teacher:

• Trees protect our grassland
• Trees bring rain
• Trees give shelter
• Trees give firewood
• Trees give fruit for us to eat
• Trees give us herbal remedies
• Trees give leaves and fruit for our animals
• Trees help us with fencing and house-building

Much hand-painting resulted in trees taking root  around the classroom and much cutting, sticking and drawing resulted in a great montage for the art exhibition: the first finished product...(Well, almost...)

Each of the Kenyan schools will choose a different focus and a variety of media for the exhibition: conservation of elephants being an important theme for some with Africa’s huge rise in poaching . Conservation of water, grassland, wild animals, rivers, and  Maasai and Samburu culture being other areas.

Our friends in Ireland and England are also preparing to join us in this display see  Becomeafriend.net  and we aim to create an exciting juxtaposition of European and African ideas of conservation. Watch this space as we paint/make/create  our conservation ideas...

Pancake Day Maasai style- Making friends across the world!

Give a child (or adult) of any age one pan, one pancake, and tell them to get tossing.... and defy them not to have riotous fun....

We certainly had an afternoon to remember at Kimanjo Primary School to celebrate Pancake Day. Our noble chefs Rebecca, Chris, Paulina and Rose cooked 620 pancakes.. enough for all children and staff with quite a few left over for the tossing competition... 

Enormous thanks to all our friends at Leamore Primary School in Birmingham who raised the money for all students here  to be able to have a very good   lunch... ...followed by pancakes for all. Leamore raised the money through their ‘pancake  and chapatti cafe’, which  gave all Leamore pupils a good deal of fun too... and thanks also to their own noble cooks...

Leamore are part of our Become a Friend network of schools who partner with Primary and nursery schools here.. always looking for creative and fun ways to make links. Food of course is near to everyone’s heart  and this was a great idea from Leamore to make an educational, fun sharing experience. Pupils here all know about Lent from their Religious Education lessons, but the idea of Pancakes and Mardi Gras was a new one. In addition Leamore pupils learnt how to make Kenyan chapattis.

 We began this learning experience two weeks ago with a  cooking session for the teachers and  senior pupils.. we made chapattis (Kenyan style )and sent the recipe and videos  to our Leamore friends, see   and pancakes (English style) following the Leamore recipe ...as an added bonus Leamore school got to see us taking photos and videos on their ‘old’ Leamore video cameras.. and we have been able to   display these on the  ‘old’ Leamore laptops for the Kimanjo pupils and teachers to view. 

 Become a Friend aims to  expose children to different cultures whilst focusing our learning on healthcare and conservation messages: but always remembering  that learning can be made as fun as possible.

Elephant Poaching- Stop the Ivory Market!!

It was a very sad day last week when a lone young male elephant was killed by poachers nearby.

The market price of ivory is at an all time high of over $700 per pound in China and Vietnam, the demand being fueled by the newly rich middle classes desiring ivory carvings. Kenya’s elephant population is estimated at between 32,000 and 35,000, but estimates for Africa remain vague  - between 400,000- 650,000. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) considers that as many as 100 elephants a day are being slaughtered across Africa - even if this number is exaggerated the problem is still massive.

Kenya banned hunting in 1977 and banned the selling of ivory, symbolically burning all its old ivory stock in 1989 and again last year, but the problem of poaching in neighbouring Tanzania where ‘controlled’ hunting is still legal is far greater, and it is from Tanzania and Zambia that most of the illegal ivory is shipped.

Until all ivory trading, legal and illegal, is stopped, there will continue to be an incentive for the poorest Africans to risk their lives shooting elephants to fuel  demand.  Priority now is to convince the older Chinese that they no longer want to buy ivory. Engaging constructively with Chinese people, who currently number over a million resident in Africa, with numbers fast rising, is clearly key.

Back to the dead elephant. The tracker dogs (bloodhounds) did a first class job of tracking the Samburu poachers to a distant village, but from here they are able to melt away. Even when this investigation is concluded and if they are apprehended, so long as there is a market and an order, there will be other poverty stricken Maasai and Samburu warriors ready to take their chances for the few dollars they can receive for two tusks. This time our Rangers were able to drive off the poachers and recover the tusks. These were passed to the Kenya Wildlife Service with a good deal of formal paper-work. They are then indelibly tattooed - taking them forever out of the market place.

So the radio network gets busy as security is increased across the whole area and the location of all herds and lone individual elephants is monitored ever more closely.

Meanwhile we treated this as a learning opportunity for all the local schools: environmental clubs and teachers from Ngabolo and Kimanjo Primary plus all the Kimanjo secondary students came to look at the now putrid carcass.  Vultures, tawny eagles, martial eagles and ravens are fast assisting the hyenas and jackals to dismember the carcass carcass. These Maasai kids have all been brought up to live alongside elephants. Despite their daily life being made hazardous by elephants they all value them as part of their landscape and heritage and they know that shooting elephants is not only illegal and dangerous but morally very out of kilter with their culture. They are taken back to school to consider how they can help to ensure the survival of elephants for their own children. 

Secondary Students on Safari

Only by stopping the market will these tusks be totally saved

Clean Cookstoves... Save Trees.. Save Lives

As a follow up to the May 17th blog, this blog is certainly somewhat overdue! With the huge support of Paradigm Stoves , we now have Institutional Stoves working in 9 schools, plus our own Staff Kitchen. This donation has been a resounding success, and no unintended consequences have so far been thrown up. The implementation of the project was bigger than either we, or Paradigm, could have imagined. In the first instance the smaller nursery schools had no kitchens... so step one was to erect simple secure, weather proof, structures.. only not so simple when we realised that we would have to make new roads to Rumate and Singa'un nurseries, before we had any hope of getting materials and stoves to them! Finding a route through the luggas, rocks and dense bush to Singa'un required a day on foot feeling rather Dr. Livingstone'ish, before we could hope to get a pick up through. The huge added advantage of this is that now we have a road that the mobile clinic can traverse once a month to this remote Samburu village. How people survive in this location in the dry season beggars belief.. the trip for water is a 6 hour round trip with donkeys that each household has to perform every two days.
Below is the new kitchen at Narasha Nursery school-

These stoves use a very minimal amount of wood... where children were collecting wood on a daily basis this is now reduced to once or twice per month. Paradigm also provided a training for all the school cooks who have been universally thrilled with the stoves.. where we could have foreseen some resistance to 'new' technology the benefits are all self evident.. virtually no smoke , much quicker cooking times and , an unforeseen benefit of much easier cleaning has led not only to happy cooks but also to a real pride in the cleanliness of the kitchens.

In addition we have given away 80 household stoves to the Ol Lentille employees, Conservancy Rangers and and Health Workers, and have sold another 100 at subsidised prices. We still have some 40 more to sell. This area of the donation has been enormously interesting- (if at times somewhat challenging!) showing how much research we still need to do to work with communities on the best fit of stove for them. Communities being made up of individuals, of course means that no one solution fits all: age , gender, education levels, family size, are just some of the variables we need to consider. This is still very much a work in progress that we will come back to as we collate our results...

Amazing Maasai Ultra Marathon ....2012

Entries opened today for the 2012 check it out and come and support Girls Education in Laikipia! Runners, volunteers and sponsors all needed!

The inspiration and support for the 2010 Kimanjo Community Marathon.. with the whole community running in support of the new Kimanjo Secondary school.. introduced Molly Fitzpatrick to the Group Ranch Community as the only ‘International’ runner.. (...we were expecting a Chinese girl... but found Molly to be most definitely American... at the time resident in China..) also Molly was the only ‘woman’ to complete the 42K!....as a result of this Molly bravely set up the Amazing Maasai Ultra Marathon 2011... in aid of girls secondary school sponsorships. 15 girls from community Primary schools will receive four years of secondary Boarding full bursaries from this achievement!
Race Director Solomon is pictured below with fellow Ol-Lentille work colleague and marathon running partner, Johnson.

As the first Kenyan Ultra Marathon the 2012 race should really fill a gap in the market and it will be great to introduce more of the Maasai community to these longer distances.. see last year’s winner below... Il Motiok school boy David Simpiri, many miles ahead of the rest of the field... he finished 75K without breaking a sweat...

Musul Group Ranch member Sapuk Safiri is here celebrating his 42K win.. Sapuk is a very useful Kenyan marathon runner and a popular local winner.

Friendship Day

Today is Friendship day for The Ol lentille Trust www.becomeafriend.net">Become a Friend group of schools here in Kenya, UK and Ireland.. and some new friends in the US too! All pupils are drawing their idea of what friendship means to them.... a sample of Kenyan ideas to date ranges from riding on an elephant with your friends to racing in a marathon with your American friends.. a little ways behind!The become a Friend vision is to promote friendship and understanding across cultures. Creativity is fostered through topics that centre on health-care and conservation... never forgetting that education should be fun!

The picture shows one of the winning drawings in the 'I've been brave as a lion ' competition... the winning drawings have been converted into stickers to be handed out to all the children receiving injections at the mobile clinics. The become a friend website is a great place to showcase the childrens artwork from all countries.