Born Free Foundation - Keep Wildlife in the Wild

April 2011

Our Education program has been a bit slow this month due to 10 days of school holidays followed by another 11 days of Public Holidays weekends and days off in between. But the days that schools were open were put to good use!

General

Schools

This month we had 286 learners visit our centre which is surprisingly well considering that we were closed for most of the month due to school holidays.

Eastern Cape Forum for Environmental Education and Sustainability

This month it was our turn to host the bimonthly forum meeting. It was quite a productive meeting as always are we are planning some big events for the Eastern Cape Province this year such as another Youth Summit (see September 2010 blog) and Environmental Education Conference for teachers. We were very fortunate to have Mantis Security Manager Rodney Visser come and do a talk on rhino poaching. It is a very relevant and serious  conservation issue affecting us here in the Eastern Cape and in South Africa so it was very appropriate that Rodney give us more information. Everyone on the forum is involved in environmental education so it is crucial that we stay up-to-date with current environmental issues as it is our job to make sure that this information gets given to the schools and communities we all work with.

World Wide Experience (WWE) Volunteer Program

This month I gave the WWE volunteers some presentations as a few of them   are from universities and colleges and need information on various conservation topics. I used to be a student co-ordinator for WWE before I moved to Born Free and I really enjoy doing presentations with them as I do with the school children. I did a presentation on lion social behaviour (a great interest of mine) and how to manage predators on a small wildlife reserve in terms of how many you can stock and effective predator control measures where the animals is not harmed in situations where you don’t want predators (e.g. reserves breeding endangered and rare species).

Global Friends

The Sandisulwazi library project is progressing well especially now that we have the container!!! We managed to source funding to purchase and after some renovations it is finally ready we are now making arrangements for its delivery. We purchased burglar bars and security gates at a huge discount which we will have mounted as soon as the container arrives. The project will speed up very quickly as all we need to do then is put in shelves, purchase equipment, source more books and put it all together! I am really excited about this project as it is going to benefit all the schools in Paterson and make a huge difference as learners will have access to internet and quality books! Good thing I have the WWE volunteers to help me with all the shelving they are always ready and happy to assist me with my projects.

Eco-schools

This month we really focussed a lot on vegetable gardening. On 19-04-2011 we were invited to Canzibe Primary’s Seed Planting Ceremony. They are an award winning International Eco-School that has a very successful veggie garden. Their speciality is orange fleshed sweet potatoes. At the ceremony we shown by experts how to propagate seeds and grow vegetables organically. I took with teachers from each of our Eco-Schools and they were all very inspired to start a veggie garden and those schools that already had one learnt some very useful tips.

The very next day Sandisulwazi High School decided that they wanted to start their garden straight away. So with the help of the WWE volunteers we put their vision into action.

The volunteers together with the newly elected gardening committee of learners tackled the project by clearing an area and putting up a fence to prevent domestic animals such as cows, pigs and goats getting in. Paterson is a very rural area and people’s livestock roam around the town and a veggie garden makes for a very scrumptious feast and destroys months of hard work! But the volunteers did a very good job by putting up a very sturdy fence. The fencing was donated by the Shamwari Wildlife Department and we purchased the seeds and gardening equipment form our Global Friends Grant.

After an afternoon and morning of hard work Sandisulwazi is now the proud owner of an organic vegetable garden and we planted the first vegetables there in the schools history! Now not only will learners have healthy and nutritious vegetables to eat but they will learn the very valuable skill of growing your own food and it is something they can be (and already are) proud of.

FGASA Workshops

Workshops are coming along really well. We are now officially halfway through all the work and the students will be writing their first internal halfway exam in May. On 28/04/2011 we took the students on their first game drive which they thoroughly enjoyed even though the weather was really cold and rainy and we hardly saw much game but they appreciated being out in nature and putting some of their theoretical knowledge into practice. We however very fortunate to see two white rhino which was a really nice for the students to see.