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.

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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?

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