Blogs from Moa River, Sierra Leone, Africa

As this is a travel blog website I feel like I should take some time to talk about the occasions when I have been a tourist in Sierra Leone and not only the work that I am doing here. I was lucky enough to be able to take two weeks off work to travel around the country with my boyfriend who flew over to visit me. Sierra Leone has endless hidden treasures and massive potential for tourism in the future. Some places that we went to were difficult to reach but every where we went was well worth the effort to get there. Our first stop was Banana Island which is south along the peninsula from Freetown. A private car organized by the hotel we were staying in offered to drive us there for $100 plus ... read more

Forest Schools is a growing initiative in the UK and a number of other countries. I was lucky enough to go through the Forest Schools Level 3 Practitioner training in 2010 when I was working for the RSPB in Essex. The programme is an inspiring one and really highlights the importance of natural stimulus in childhood development and the need to get children learning outside of the classroom. While with the RSPB I worked with a wide audience from tiny tots and teenagers to adults and saw first hand the benefits experienced by those individuals. The number of children in the UK getting regular and meaningful interactions with nature has reduced greatly over the years; however the importance of this interaction is gradually being recognised so hopefully this will improve. The situation in Sierra Leone in ... read more

One of my main projects since coming to Sierra Leone has been to organise an educational roadshow to forest edge communities around Gola Rainforest National Park (GRNP). We’re now half way through the programme and so far the events have proven to be a really good way to bring the community together to deliver some important messages in an engaging and interactive way. I’ve been working with the support of a great team in GRNP including the education officer Eddie, a park ranger, our media and publicity officer, a community development relations officer, one of the research technicians and one of the drivers. It’s really good to have people from a range of departments coming together so the community can see the breadth of the work that we do and get questions answered by the appropriate ... read more

It was a glorious sunny morning (as it is pretty much every day) and myself and five expat friends packed up the car ready for a long weekend away over the Easter holiday. Our destination was Tiwai Island (said T-Y) which is a wildlife sanctuary and one of the few reasonably well known tourist destinations in Sierra Leone. We set off early to make the most of the day and it was a good job that we did as the journey there took rather longer than expected. The first reason for our delay was that Meredith, who was driving, had been given directions to take a route that passed via Bo rather than going directly south. The second reason was that the car we had borrowed from her organisation broke down when we reached Bo. The ... read more

I have now visited all of the seven Chiefdoms that border Gola Rainforest National Park. I have driven through countless villages, have discovered that all of the roads are a varying degree of terrible, and have met hundreds of students who have all been very excited to see a white person turning up at their school. Each of the 34 schools that we are working with has a teacher who attended the training workshop who will run the Nature Club using a Teacher’s Guide which we have produced. One school from each Chiefdom has also been provided with 20 Student Workbooks, these schools are our pilot schools and if successful all the Nature Clubs will get the Workbooks next year. Eddie and I have now visited two schools in each Chiefdoms – one pilot school and ... read more