Stories from the field of conservation

Stories from the field of conservation

Monday, May 10, 2010

About Lewa Wildlife Conservancy

To do Lewa full justice, their website is www.lewa.org. This is where I'm headed for the 3 months in Kenya!

In short, Lewa Widlife Conservancy is a unique place originally established as a wildlife sanctuary, but today is much more in terms of community involvement and organization. Hence this is how its possible to send 5 adventurous, crazy, (insert other adjective of your liking here) students with different roles to the same place.

Questions I have received so far about Lewa include:
"where/how are you living?"
"do you know the other people?"
"are you scared?"
"are there snakes?"
"are there rats?"

Answers to those questions that I have come up with include:
"I'll be living in a tent!"

"I have met the other interns - pretty cool bunch of people if I do say so myself!!!"

"Hmmm scared...that's a relative term - to which I can only reply 'no' based on the one time in my life when I think I was truly scared. That one time was when I was in the Philippines doing some underwater (via scuba) work checking out seahorse habitat in a marine protected area. There were dynamite fishers at the boundary of the marine protected area. They were blasting the area to kill the fish - its a quick and dirty collection method. I felt these blasts as if they were right beside me. At one point, I thought the fishermen were targeting my bubbles on the surface, as if I was a giant fish below. By the way - dynamite fishing is illegal, yet along with cyanide fishing (using cyanide to paralyze the animals), its still quite popular in some tropical regions."

"Snakes!!!! I hope so!!!"

"Rats!!!!!!!! As long as they are not the ones I see on the Toronto subway system!!"
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