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Published: March 7th 2013
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‘In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught.’’
Baba Dioum, Senegalese poet
The words of this quote really ring true to me and it’s because of this message that I find myself volunteering in Sierra Leone. Many local and international organisations are working in various countries all over the world trying to conserve our remaining natural resources, areas of outstanding beauty, habitats that are biologically diverse and land that is home to threatened species. The work that they’re doing is brilliant; however I believe that this alone will never be enough. Unless the communities living alongside or even within these areas understand the importance of conservation the work will never be sustainable. Working in both schools and communities to educate the local people as to the importance of what they’ve always taken for granted on their doorstep is vital. I hope that over the next six months I can get education work for Gola Rainforest National Park established, and do enough capacity building of local staff so that the work is sustainable once I leave.
My first project with Gola Rainforest National Park (GRNP) has been to establish Nature Clubs in schools in the seven Chiefdoms around the National Park. These Nature Clubs will be run by a teacher from the school and will also have a student executive. I hope that by offering training and monitoring to the teachers involved we can make a difference to students all around the park. GRNP covers an area of approximately 71,000 ha so the communities are spread over a very large area (see map) and it would be impossible for us to regularly visit each of the schools individually. In the week before I arrived in Sierra Leone Eddie, the Education Officer working for GRNP, made contact with 34 teachers who were interested in setting up Nature Clubs.
During my first month I’ve spent the majority of my time based in the office doing the background work for this project; writing a Teacher’s Guide for Nature Clubs, a Student’s Guide for Nature Clubs, Annual Operation Plans, budgets, training workshop plans and a questionnaire to assess the level of knowledge of students and teachers which will be repeated each year to monitor the impact of GRNP
involvement. This sounds like quite straight forward work but there has been a lot of capacity building of local staff to get this far and I feel like this is a good achievement and I’m proud that something I’ve written will be used in the schools here for years to come (hopefully!).
With the resources finally printed and the contact teachers secured we headed out into the field to deliver two training workshops for the teachers. The first took place in Joru for the teachers from Gaura, Malema, Nomo and Koya, the second in Zimmi for the teachers from Makpele, Barri and Tunkia.
Before the workshop I wasn’t at all sure if the teachers would even turn up as our only correspondence had been a letter of invitation, apparently that was enough though and all 34 teachers turned up to participate. I was also concerned that the level of English spoken by the teachers might not be good enough to understand me and to understand the Teacher’s Guide, thankfully this was also a needless concern and there was only a couple of occasions where Mende was spoken to further explain something complicated. I really enjoyed delivering the workshops
with Eddie; it felt really good to be out teaching again and to be inspiring others to pass on the message of conservation. The workshop was a good mixture of group discussion, explaining information, and practical demonstration of example activities from the guide. This last section was my favourite and it was basically an opportunity to get the teachers to play games to learn in a new way – a fun interactive way, which I think is the best sort of learning. The teachers all interacted well and got involved and from the feedback evaluation I think the workshop was well received.
The workshops also provided me with an opportunity to spend a night away from Kenema as we travelled straight from Joru to Zimmi and spent the night in Zimmi. Compared to many of the small villages we passed through Zimmi is actually quite a big town as it is the Chiefdom Headquarters. My accommodation for the night was a local guesthouse which cost a grand total of 20,000 Le which is about £3. For this I had a comfortable bed, water for a ‘shower’, a toilet and even generator power for a couple of hours. Once the
generator had been turned off I headed out into the open courtyard area outside my room and was rewarded with a beautiful start studded sky. As we start to do more work out in the community I hope there will be a few more occasions to spend the night out in the villages.
The journey back from Zimmi took a little over three hours and we took a different route from the previous day, this time passing through Barri. Between Kenema and the communities runs the longest river in Sierra Leone, the river Moa. On the road between Kenema and Joru you pass over the river on a bridge, but on the road through Barri I was rewarded with quite a different experience. We reached the point where I could see the river and there were a few cars stopped and waiting in a line. Eddie told me that this was the river crossing and that we could walk down to the water edge while we waited. What we were waiting for I had no idea at the time but when we reached the waters edge I got my answer. To cross this stretch of water, cars, bikes and passengers have to travel on a floating barge. The barge has a ramp on either end, it is only long enough for two cars to fit on at a time, and it is PULLED across the river! It must be hard work for the guys that have to work on the barge every day but for me it was a very enjoyable experience.
With the initial training now complete, the next work project will be to visit a selection of the schools that are going to form Nature Clubs. We will be checking that the teacher is using the guide correctly and also conducting baseline questionnaires with the students. Overall we will visit 14 schools, due to the distances and the roads we need to travel to get there this will be a full weeks worth of work! Over the coming months we will also be getting the Nature Clubs involved in presenting art and drama to their communities and organising field trips for the students to visit GRNP or an area of local community forest.
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