In a post a few days ago I tried to explain in more detail the direction the Sharpe’s Longclaw/Kinangop Grasslands campaign was heading, and highlight what the impact was of posting photos of communities that wouldn’t under everyday circumstances see themselves on the internet. I put online photographs of the members of the monitoring team I’d gone into the field with, and Dominic Kimani (the inspirational young man who is driving many of the education-based local initiatives to protect the Kinangop grasslands) almost immediately responded with a comment that included the words “the monitoring team are very excited, to us it is a reward, just to be on the internet is a great thing, this goes along way boosting our effort…”.
Forgive the preamble to this post, but it’s very easy for wired-up westerners to forget or under-estimate just how difficult it can be for small communities in less wealthy parts of the world to get an online presence. Even when they have dial-up connections, many small groups don’t have the skills or (basic) knowledge to get images and text uploaded to servers anyway. Being featured on an overseas blog or website (with the subsequent opportunities of connecting with a large audience) is something that local schools, community conservation organisations, and community leaders really do value.
Hence the post that follows, which while not immediately obviously about birds, could be just as important in the long run as photographs of Sharpe’s Longclaws etc themselves…
Mugumoini Primary School
Dominic spends much of his time taking his message of how important the Kinangop grasslands are into local schools. The children he speaks to are of course the next generation of landowners, and their attitude towards the land and the birds that live on it will probably determine whether species like the Sharpe’s Longclaw survive into the next century. Part of his talk is given over to explaining that the Kinangop grasslands are not only regionally unique but globally important, that people in countries around the world are interested in the grasslands and want to visit them. Which is where the jet-lagged birder with the big, expensive camera and the unusual glowing pink skin comes in…
On this trip Dominic took me to the Mugumoini Primary School, which sits on a rise overlooking the Rift Valley. The school is named after a sacred Fig tree which stands in the school grounds, and still provides shade in an otherwise arid and sunburnt region. The kids, there are about 500 of them, greeted me with excitement and curiosity (it’s not a school that many non-Kenyans visit apparently, and many of them wanted to touch my hand to see what it felt like!) and the friendliness that is typical of people here. It’s a cliche, of course, but true nonetheless: people who have very little are usually the most generous, and their welcome was extremely touching. I have to say, it’s hard to imagine that a visiting Kenyan would be greeted in quite the same enthusiastic way at some of the schools back home in the UK…
I gave the kids a very brief speech after they’d been rounded up (they speak English but with a thick Kenyan accent that makes my jabbering a little hard to understand), and the Headteacher, Eunice Wanjiku Githuku (a serious but very likeable lady with a gorgeous smile which after much cajoling she flashed at the camera) led them into a ‘greeting’ where they fluttered their hands like flowers to wish me luck – a scenario that descended into a pretty joyful melee of waving arms and huge smiles and one or two puzzled faces as the younger kids wondered who on earth I was…
Mugumoini Primary School Headteacher, Eunice Wanjiku Githuku
Dominic and some of the school-children…
Now to be honest I’m not known amongst family and friends as being particularly ‘taken’ with photos of kids or getting all teary-eyed about ‘communities’ and banging on about ‘what a beautiful world we live in’ (those that know me well consider me to be something of a grouch where humanity is concerned) but I’ll readily admit that I’m in a softening phase of life, and these kids have such an open-minded response to outsiders who they don’t know from Adam (is that a phrase used around the world?) that I’m being subtly undermined and turning into a nicer human being for it…which is one way of saying thanks to the Mugumoini Primary Schoolchildren for being so darn nice to me…
And the ‘niceties’ didn’t just stop with a crowd of young kids being wildly exuberant, oh no…next up was a spirited traditional Kikuyu song and dance given by some of the older students, which featured foliage, a young man dressed up as an ancestor, gales of laughter, and even more enthusiasm.
This post has probably rumbled on long enough though, and I’m running out of time before a flight back home to London from a freezing cold but beautifully sunny Newark, New Jersey, so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow…
All photos copyright Charlie Moores 2009.
