Rare’s Vice President of Asia Pacific, Nigel Sizer, sends this post after attending the Singapore Environment Council annual dinner and fundraising gala. 

Singapore is one of the smallest countries in the world, but has one of the biggest per capita environmental footprints! So it was great to attend the annual dinner of the Singapore Environment Council on November 8 to see more of how they are tackling this challenge. The country’s leaders have been acutely aware of the need to address environmental issues for many years. Singapore lacks supplies of its own of just about all natural materials, including water and land. They are pioneers in land reclamation, water recycling and desalination. Highlight of the dinner (aside from the fashion show which was a nice contrast to the over-dressed bird watchers in the audience) was Tony Blair, in direct from Beijing, in his new role as roving climate change ambassador. He gave an alternately hilarious and serious after-dinner speech about the need to turn down the heat. Rare friend and supporter, Ruth Yeoh, and I plucked up the courage to have a chat with Tony. We asked him to help out by coming to speak at Ruth’s next big production in Kuala Lumpur, her annual Climate Week event, which is pretty unique and huge fun – we’ve just heard from his office that indeed he might just be able to come!

Ruth Yeoh photographed with Tony Blair

Special thanks to Rare supporter Tim Dattels, from San Francisco, who invited Rare to join this event, along with friends Ed Norton and his wife Ann. Tim has done a great job of helping Rare meet a new suite of supporters across Asia and the United States and, with his wife Kristine, is supporting Rare’s Pride campaign in Wakatobi, Indonesia. This site, where we are partnering with The Nature Conservancy, is home to a stunning two thirds of all the world’s hard coral species!

As Rare consolidates its program, hiring new staff and building new partnerships, relationships with Singapore will be key to sustaining growth. The city is a global hub of wealth management, innovative finance, and creativity. Rare is already in discussion with the Asia regional offices in Singapore of several major firms about support for Pride campaigns in China, Indonesia and beyond. Next week we’ll even be exploring possibilities for a Pride campaign on the island itself when we meet with Singapore Environment Council staff.

Nigel Sizer, Rare’s VP of Asia Pacific, with Tony Blair

Jason Houston’s 8th, and last, post from his travels to Kenya and the Seychelles in Africa.

We’re nearing the end of this near-three weeks of travel. We’ve covered a lot of ground—literally day’s worth of hours on airplanes, hundreds of kidney-bruising kilometers on rough, rocky, rutted, and sometimes muddy dirt roads, boats in the rain, and here in the Seychelles on an island where only a few cars are allowed, a week on foot with all my gear on my back. It’s been dusty, humid, often rainy, and always hot (we were never more than about 4 degrees from the equator). I’m 8—or maybe it’s now 9—hours ahead of my own time zone. I’ve lost luggage, found it again, lost a lens, found it again, had food poisoning (not from the goat’s blood, but one of its kin in stew a few days later), and been jabbed in the arm by one of those evil looking acacias as we drove by at a good clip. I’m sun burnt, insect bitten (though not as bad as Rosemary is), sleep deprived, surrounded by languages I don’t understand, and I’m out of clean clothes. And I miss my family.

But I wouldn’t trade opportunities like this for anything.

Jason Houston’s “office” in the Seychelles (taken by Rosemary Godfrey)

As Rosemary, Terence, and Rachel work on more project details, I’m sitting here looking over the coral sand beach to a chunk of the Indian Ocean with (as usual) a little rain and (for once) an on-shore cooling breeze in my face. Kenya was a great adventure and here in the Seychelles it is paradise (literally, perhaps… Some here, admitting a little geographic license, say that the Garden of Eden was here in the Seychelles before the continents split). But all that’s not what’s the most impressive. This trip makes for my third and fourth visits to document Rare Pride in action and seeing the work of individuals like Titus and Terence (and María Ignacia Galeano in Nicaragua and Albino Parra in Mexico) is inspiring. Each location has been completely different—different issues and threats, different riches to protect, different challenges, different possibilities, and different degrees of success. Each adapted to its own community and culture. Each adapting the expertise that only someone who lives there could have.

In a world where we’re taught to see ‘developing’ countries as ‘in need’, it’s really important to see how capable they really are to do the work themselves. Yes, Rare brings some resources to bare that are not normally available in some of these places, but they don’t need aid, just opportunity. Rare’s most important function, as I can tell, is simply to kick start the campaign managers’ confidence and help them believe they themselves can do what is needed. Though it does many good things on its own, it’s not the 18-month program of social marketing tools that really matters. It’s the perspective it gives them to see their work as part of a global but decentralized, growing, grassroots movement to develop long-term, sustainable, conservation-based attitudes and behavior in some of the most critically threatened, important places in the world. Rare just recently passed the 100th campaign milestone. What would the world look like with 1,000 of these out there?

Jason Houston’s 7th post from Africa- and 3rd from Terence Vel’s Pride campaign in the Seychelles. 

Over the last two days we spent time at the school on La Digue Island doing several different programs with the students. Terence gave a basic conservation biology lecture to one class and started another in on making puppets for a puppet show about the Seychelles Paradise Black Flycatcher.

 
Terence gives a conservation biology lecture to school children

As has been the case with most of the community, the students here are well aware of the situation: They have a rare and special bird, they perceive its value, and they understand how various threats, such as destruction of the habitat, effect it. Knowledge for and appreciation of the bird is not the problem.

The effort here with the kids—again as with the rest of the community—is focused on the conservation science so that when critical decisions need to be made by the community (such as approval for translocation) they can be made consistent with our best scientific knowledge on how to save this species.

School children design a backdrop for their puppet show

…a unique species, with a tiny population of around 250 individuals, on a faraway remote island, in a community that sometimes seems as though they might just as well see it go extinct than share it with another island…why bother? Just so the bird watchers can ogle?

Islands are special places for biodiversity and deserve special attention. Consider these statistics (thanks to Rachel Bristol):

• Only about 3% of Earth’s land mass is islands
• 10% of Earth’s population are islanders
• 17% of Earth’s species are restricted to islands
• 61% of all animal species extinctions have occurred on islands
• 85% of all bird species extinctions since the 1600’s and 90% of all known bird species extinctions have happened on islands…

Just like how the islands show us the extremes of resource competition between people and wildlife, islands are important ecosystems that tend to concentrate biodiversity and even experiment with evolution. While islands tend to be low in total number of species, they are typically rich in endemic species, especially on the older continental islands where species have been able to evolve in isolation (and divergently) for literally sometimes millions of years. The Seychelles specifically are small and isolated, making them species poor, but parts of the island group have been around (and continuously above water) for over 65 million years, making them proportionally very high in endemic species: Of the 67 regular breeding bird species on the island, 23 are endemic, 40% of the approximately 200 native plant species are endemic, and an astonishing 11 of the 12 amphibian species here are endemic. Even the non-scientific can recognize that these are very high ratios.

So, even though we’re looking at a lot of effort going into a small population of a single species, the amount of uniqueness at stake, and then standing to benefit with any improvement of the Seychelles’s environment, is huge. And as part of a global effort to protect biodiversity on our planet, no one instance swings the tide, but every single success gets us one step closer to that goal. (And this is a great opportunity for those of you working more regularly in conservation biology to comment on the various ways of quantifying endangered species preservation—please do.)

Jason Houston’s 6th blog post from Africa- and 2nd post from Terence Vel’s Pride campaign in the Seychelles. 

Today we spent most of the day on a tour around La Digue (on foot as there are only a few cars, all for commercial use, on the island) looking for the Seychelles Paradise Flycatcher and its habitat and the various threats facing their survival. These birds live almost exclusively in the low-land plateau, which is also where almost all the people on the island live. The birds are territorial, requiring about one hectare of mixed woodland per breeding pair, and the island is in a housing boom. The set up is obvious. It’s an island (and a small one at that) and there’s simply not enough space for development to continue and at the same time for the Flycatchers’ population to continue to grow. The Flycatcher population is currently at its carrying capacity—literally all of the viable territories are full—and any development necessarily reduces those viable territories by one lot at a time.

Seychelles Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone corvine)

If space was not limiting, a number of other variables might come into play: Introduced species preying on them, like cats, rats, and barn owls (introduced to control rats), human/bird conflicts like kids with slingshots or nests being built too close to roads that bisect territory, etc. But space is limiting and so the threats are simple and (1) direct and immediate (the further reduction of habitat) or (2) somewhere in the future but imminent (a natural disaster like fire or tsunami that could wipe out the entire population in a single event).

As a result, Terence’s Pride campaign here on La Digue is focused on two distinct goals. The first is about translocation for securing the species for the long-term. With cooperation from scientists at his own Nature Seychelles and partners like biologist Rachel Bristol working with the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent in the U.K., the plan is to relocate breeding pairs to a nearby island to establish a second viable population. As I mentioned on the first day, the main concern with regards to translocation is to convince the people that they are not losing the status of having a ‘unique endemic species’ but are securing the future of their bird. In a few days we’ll sit in on one of the meetings with the community where they try and help the community come to some consensus on this point. Most of the community has come around to accepting this plan, but it’s still not for certain that it will be approved.

Habitat loss from human development

The second goal is to affect the attitudes and behavior of the Diguois to reduce the threats here on La Digue. Specifically, Terence is trying to encourage less habitat destruction, restoration of damaged habitat, and preservation of more land as natural habitat. This is a big challenge. Development for housing and tourism is a primary income source for the island (and even a national mandate for all of the Seychelles). Some creative ideas for trying to combine all these agendas into one, collaborative approach include stepping up ecotourism (which increases the measurable value of the wildlife to offset against other valuations of tourism) and encouraging natural gardens (which could be set up to restore viable habitat for the various species used to living in the plateau). It’s less that people don’t care—most do—it’s more that there are just no simple solutions here.

It’s not clear how this will work out. It’s not clear what really can be done if people are pitted against birds (and if that’s even possible to avoid). But this will be an important experiment and learning experience for how to deal with these common issues in endangered species conservation: you have one of the world’s most beautiful places to visit or live, trying to preserve the environmental needs of some of the world’s rarest animals, in the context of completely finite (and exhausted?) resources. Not to be grandiose, but I believe it’s true: How projects like this work out will be indicators for what we can expect conservation to look more and more like in the future as resources become more limited, populations become larger, and more and more species are added to the critically endangered list.

 Jason Houston’s 5th post from Africa as he transitions from Kenya to the Republic of Seychelles – the site of Terence Vel’s Pride campaign.

Our second location on this two-part trip to eastern Africa is to the remote Republic of Seychelles. This eden look-a-like, widely-scattered collection of islands located just a few degrees south of the equator, far out in the Indian Ocean is a global tourist destination (names of celebrity visitors are dropped with too much frequency—but, shhh, don’t tell anyone). The water’s warm and clear, and palms and other broad-, thick-leafed trees lean out over the powder-soft, white sand beaches. In the mornings you can see the fishermen headed out to sea, in the evening the flying foxes return to their roosts flying higher, slower and lumbering with more effort than one would expect of a flier that size, and at night you see stars in both the northern and southern hemispheres in the same glance. At times like this I don’t think my job sucks too badly…

 
A beautiful view from the beach

But the Seychelles is more than just an elite tourist destination. It’s a remote, small, tropical island with matching tropical biodiversity and a number of indigenous (native here by their own means) and endemic (found no where else) species, including the world’s largest nut, the coco-de-mer, and maybe most notably, some of the most amazing bird life in the world. When Chip Blake, Orion’s Editor in Chief, my boss, and an expert birder, found out I was going he looked at me with a seriousness that was almost scary and more or less ordered me to get a bird book for the islands. A light traveler and not one prone to keep lists, I didn’t, but I’ll be with others who know these islands well and will count on that…

This campaign is distinctly different from the three other Pride locations that I have visited in the past two years (Nicaragua, Mexico, and just last week Kenya) in that it is focused on a much more traditional conservation effort designed specifically to help restore the critically endangered (IUCN Red Listed) Seychelles Black Paradise Flycatcher (Terpsiphone corvina). The main cause leading to its status is habitat loss due to development. This is the rarest bird in the Seychelles- extinct now on all but one small island, La Digue, where it maintains a dangerously low population of only about 250 birds. While the current conservation effort on behalf of these birds has been going on for nearly 10 years, it has struggled with a lack of appropriate community support. Diguois love their unique bird and that’s part of the problem. They don’t want to share it. For Diguois it’s part of what defines their island. But with such a low population on a small island that’s already at carrying capacity for this species, the Flycatcher is at serious risk for even a single natural disaster (fire, tsunami, etc.) completing wiping it out in one event.

Nature Seychelles, the organization Terence Vel (this site’s campaign manager) works for wants to translocate a small number of breeding pairs to another (and the most) suitable island about 50km away in hopes that they can establish a second viable population. Nature Seychelles has a good track record with such projects and has recently helped to move three other bird species (the Seychelles Magpie Robin, the Seychelles Fody, and the Seychelles Warbler) off the critically endangered list. But each of those instances were working with bird populations on privately owned islands—a situation generally unusual, but common in the Seychelles—and so they did not require community support.

 
A local town in La Digue

At about 10 square kilometers and with a population of about 2,500, La Digue is the fourth largest and third most populated island in the Seychelles. Terence’s father was born here and Terence also now lives here with the other permanent residents. What we plan to see this week and to share with you all via this blog is where Rare Pride’s social marketing techniques can work in concert with the ecological, social, and political dynamics of more typical conservation work to help educate a community on how to guarantee the preservation of some of it’s own most valuable resources.

Jason Houston’s 4th post from Africa- this is Jason’s last post from the site of Titus Letaapo’s Pride campaign- click here to view a slideshow of his experience in Kenya. 

We drank goat’s blood last night, from a fold in the skin on the neck that filled as the jugular was pierced. And there are bats flying about in the pit in the outhouse.

The Samburu are an old, distinct, and proud culture. Though some are college educated and world-wise (seeing a moran—an adolescent warrior—in full dress with a cell phone is not uncommon), the beads and wraps, the singing and dancing, the warrior training (as recently as 10 years ago here, they were defending themselves from Somali tribes from the north) and the goat’s blood, are not shows for the tourists (there are no tourists out here) and are not just ceremonial nods to the elders. It is all still part of a daily life that is still more focused on providing the basic necessities for survival than anything else. Many still shun materialism, which works well when your primary livelihood is your own livestock, and they’ve had little need of a currency based trading system, which wouldn’t work well if you were not directly providing the basic needs for yourself and your family.

Titus with local Samburu warriors.

How does one reconcile this? How do you resolve the question of cultural identity and the fact that present environmental scenarios often force what basically is a simple, sustainable, naturally rhythmic lifestyle, out of sync to the point that they now also threaten biodiversity and environmental balance not to mention their own on-going vitality? What change do you look for that won’t disassemble the culture, but that will allow it to survive in this modern day and age?

The fact that there is so much less land to go around, and that there are so many fewer of the iconic African wildlife is not the fault of the Samburu. But who’s to blame is besides the point. What is important is that the Samburu are in a position to help make the situation better for themselves and the environment. Titus (a Samburu himself, born and still living in this same community) along with the Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust where he works, is working directly with his community to address the concerns, then find solutions and build alternatives.

Jason Houston’s 3rd post from Africa as he travels in Wamba, Kenya– the site of Titus Letaapo’s Pride campaign. 

My bag didn’t come on the flight it was supposed to. Turns out the flight wasn’t running this morning a usual. The system managing this all was low-tech—the misrouting of my bag was noted only on a piece of scratch paper pulled from the pocket of the baggage handler on the runway, and then friends of friends were calling each other to try and get it delivered (helps to have been connected with Titus). But in the end, that wonderful personal attention so absent in our world of bar-code scanners and computers pulled through and my bag was delivered by the pilot of another plane with another airline only an hour after we expected it.

So we made it to Wamba today and got the first look at some of the work Titus and his community has been doing with a visit to a small Samburu village called Milimani located just outside of Wamba. Though not directly a part of his Pride campaign (aspects of this particular program were started before Titus started with Rare), it does address many of the threats detailed in his agenda. The program is a great example of how when peoples’ attitudes towards their land changes, their behavior and then the condition of the environment around them will follow in ways that can go far beyond the Pride objectives. And as a point in fact, Ruben Lekaldero, Titus’s supervisor where he works at the Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust, commented that the Pride effort has helped directly to make the community more open to all the changes and alternatives they’ve been proposing.

 
Titus Letaapo and Ruben Lekaldero at a community vegetable plot. 

The Samburu people are traditionally herders living almost exclusively off their livestock. And the age old story of domesticated v. wild animals is true here as well: as populations grow and available land becomes less, conflicts between livestock, wildlife, and then conservation objectives such as an ongoing sustainable relationship between people and the natural world around them increase. The challenge is to address these concerns in ways that do not simply gut a culture or leave them without reasonable alternatives for making their living the way they want to live.

The program we visited today was an effort to both address unsustainable ecologically damaging practices, such as methods in wild honey harvesting and charcoal production, as well as to provide viable alternatives like controlled beekeeping techniques, growing vegetables, crossbreeding livestock for increased productivity per/animal, and related value added products, like beeswax candles. The entire community is involved in the learning, designing, implementing, and today, the sharing of all these efforts.

Local honey harvesters.  

Titus and Ruben noted the improved health and vitality of the community members, and as a result many of Titus’s related Pride objectives on attitude and behavior (like reducing forest fires due to wild honey harvesting or pressure on the land due to over grazing) have also been met or exceeded.  More importantly, the community itself is excited about the new directions. At the end of the day they sang for us about the benefits of a conservation mindset and thanked, in that beautifully musical African way, those helping them. When we have a better internet connection (in Nairobi on the 10th) I will send a full slideshow with an audio recording of singing.

Jason Houston’s 2nd post from Africa as he enters Kenya– the site of Titus Letaapo’s Pride campaign.

Today was another travel day. As with many of the locations Rare works, the project site is remote. In this case, after getting to Kenya, it’s a half-day’s drive or a little over an hours flight on a small plane straight out into central Kenya. While driving is my personally preferred method for travel like this, maximizing our time on-site is our first priority and so we fly.

Flying gives a different sense of transition. While walking or driving or using other human scale modes provide for a gradual blending of where you’ve been with where you’re going, flying shows you the big picture. In this case, we rose up out of dirty, urban Nairobi, over a maze of factory-like buildings, warehouses, pit mines, and scrapyards scattered among the neighborhoods, shopping areas, and business districts. The landscape quickly transitioned through the suburbs to a rural agricultural patchwork of small fields—a quilted landscape of varying levels of productivity. This order slowly gave way to the more natural patterns the result of seasonal rains, veins of dry washes connected by a mixture of human and animal tracks, and as it did I finally felt like I was entering that literary Africa all we who have never seen it before dream it might be like. I say finally, but within literally less than an hour’s time from snaking through the traffic of Nairobi’s city center, I’d made it to the bush and already seen giraffe, buffalo, and elephant. The trip ended abruptly, literally, as the small plane sped to a stop on a narrow, short dirt runway cleared between acacias and the brush.

Preparing to head out on safari.   

My luggage on the other hand, had not made it. Somehow, while boarding the 9 people on our plane, my bag went in the opposite direction to the Maasai Mara with another similarly sized group. I found myself on safari in the famously remote Samburu park with only my camera gear (luckily), but no clothes, no tooth brush, no extra laptop batteries, no hat, no malaria medicine…a cell signal…but no phone. The pilot, who had a phone, assured me (in as much as the emotionless broken english so common in these parts can assure me) that it could be here tomorrow.

We were supposed to go to Wamba today, Titus Letaapo’s home town and the home base for the campaign, but that was another several hour’s drive still and the next plane that might possibly deliver my bag comes at 8am. Instead he found us a place to stay at a friend’s safari lodge (his friend manages the Intrepid Safari Camp and they incredibly generously treated us to their accommodations) and so we took another transit day. Rosemary Godfrey, Rare Pride’s Senior Course Manager for the Kent University program and my travel partner, worked through some follow up business with Titus and I enjoyed the view across the river, before we all reevaluated the new schedule.

 
Campaign manager Titus Letaapo talks with Rosemary Godfrey. 

The Samburu National Park is in the heart of Kenyan safari country. Samburu is famous for its wildlife and during just one short evening tour that Titus took us on we saw giraffe, leopard, buffalo, baboon, monkeys, crocodile, countless birds, and scores of the various antelope including impala, kudu, oryx, and dik-dik (means “jump-jump” in Afrikaans). It’s a landscape of rolling foothills cut by the Uaso Nyiro River, a wide brick-red course where wildlife—and that means also all the safari tours—congregate. In fact, the Samburu region is such a wonder that it’s too popular for its own good. Other than the pure exoticism and undeniable remoteness, its not a nature experience. We’re told not to get out of the trucks (I was informed quickly as I hopped out to photograph a fine termite mound in great light), partly for our safety, but also to minimize the stress on the wildlife. Still, and especially when rare animals like leopard were spotted, the trucks appear out of nowhere to completely encircle the area. Titus tells us it’s a problem, and that along with all the other pressures on these animals, safari tourism interferes with their natural cycles to a measurable degree. He also tells us that there’s a difference between the impulses and impacts of the government run parks versus the community-based conservation areas he’s helping to set up and that we’ll be visiting later in the week.

As the battery on my laptop runs low, I hope for luck with my bag tomorrow. Outside the tent large winged insects bounce off the taught sides and something’s (that sounds much larger) has taken up hiding in the folds where the tarp cover has been draw back. I’ll leave it open and with just the screen tonight.

Jason Houston is picture editor for Orion magazine and a freelance documentary photographer. This is his third trip photographing the Rare Pride program, its activists, and the related conservation issues inspiring these campaigns.  For the next three weeks he will be in eastern Africa in Kenya and the Seychelles visiting two separate sites and sharing his experiences on this blog. 

My first and only other trip to Africa was in 2002 when I traveled to South Africa to photograph in the townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg. Like literally everyone I’ve met who’s traveled to this continent, I quickly fell in love, and I have long anticipated a chance to return. It’s hard to articulate exactly its appeal. It’s no one thing. It’s a paradigm and approach. An attitude and a simplicity of living in the present in the context of a history as old as our species. There’s a perseverance towards something fundamental that thrives in spite of the often bleak, nearly hopeless future so many of its people seem to face. We in the west are conditioned to feel sympathy, but I saw a raw humanity one can only admire. If you’ve been to Africa, you might know what I mean. If not, I don’t pretend my images will bring you there—they’re but one interpretation—but perhaps they will begin to share my perspective through some stories of some of it’s people and their work to save a place where they live.

Travel this time is to Kenya and our project site among the rural villages and wild areas at the southeastern edge of the Samburu District in the Rift Valley Provence, barely a degree north of the equator. I arrive in Nairobi, one of Kenya’s largest cities (and its capital), after 18 hours of travel for a layover day before we head north into the bush. Nairobi is a large sprawling city with a reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in Africa (an honor, incidentally, shared also with Johannesburg). I’m sure bad things happen here, however, as was my experience in Johannesburg, I am immediately struck by the fact that the way we come to know Africa—the way we’re made to think of Africa through the mainstream media and stereotypical entertainment—is far from a fair representation of what Africa really is.

A view of the African landscape from the plane.

Kenya is in the bottom several percent of the world’s economies, and in poor countries like this the poorest and most desperate often head towards the cities. Nairobi, again like Johannesburg, is one of these destinations. There are large and ever multiplying slums, areas of old tin and scrap wood sided shacks where AIDS, TB, crime, and other afflictions are all too common. But this time I have not come to photograph urban poverty or the socioeconomic struggles of those left behind in the ‘developing world’ as our global economy develops on. For the next 10 days I will be visiting with Titus Letaapo, a Rare Pride campaign leader, his project’s partner organizations, and the communities in and around the 100,000 hectares in central Kenya where he works.

This campaign site, the Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust and surrounding areas, was chosen for its diversity of wild flora and fauna including endangered and threatened animal species such as the African Wild Dog, Grevy Zebra, Pancake Tortoise, Somali Ostrich, Beisa Oryx, Gerenuk, Reticulated Giraffe, buffalo, African Elephant, a variety of species of the cat family including lions, cheetah, caracals and leopards and the threatened Greater Kudu, which is the flagship species for Titus’s Pride Campaign. Also important in this diverse ecosystem (the region ranges from the low-lying Sarara valley and shrubby acacia woodlands to evergreen forests rising to nearly 2,700m/9,000′ ) are significant and unique plant species including cycads, cedar, podos, crotons, and a variety of aloe species and seasonal wild flowers. Threats to the well-being and sustainability of this region’s plant, animal, and human inhabitants include issues involving grazing and agriculture, population growth, human caused wildfire, poaching for animal products and as a result of human/livestock/wildlife conflict, and a general lack of awareness of the value of the wildlife and/or more sustainable alternatives.

Tomorrow we head north by small plane to Wamba, our home base for most of the time while at the project site. While I will continue producing my daily posts, uncertain internet access may prevent me from getting them online immediately.