Gishwati team an ecletic group
LEAD SCIENTIST: WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO CHIMPANZEES?
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Rebecca Chancellor knows a lot about Gishwati Forest's 14 remaining chimps. She knows they won't survive unless other chimps join the group to boost their numbers and prevent massive inbreeding.
She knows where they hang out, what they eat, and, on a good day, roughly where they are. She knows what comes out of their backsides and the importance of the scientific evidence gleaned from hours of sorting through chimp poop. The task tells scientists what the chimps eat and how they change their eating habits as weather and tree-productivity change. That will inform how scientists plant new forest tracts.
Chancellor hired 15 part-timers to clear trail in a forest that had only two footpaths before.
Still, the science requires that she and her assistants climb the hills in a straight line, with no trail at times, to scientifically track tree productivity. The climb can be steep, thorny and full of ants and snakes. She's up at 4:30 a.m. daily.
Chancellor holds a doctorate from the University of California-Davis and studied relationships among female monkeys in Uganda's Kibale National Park for her dissertation. Her husband, Aaron Rundus, working on animal communication research through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, helps out with the Gishwati project, often accompanying the crew in the forest.
She's trying to answer the question: "What is important to chimpanzees and how useful is the forest?"
"When we first got here, we saw a lot of activities such as cattle grazing," which damages the forest, Chancellor said. "Saplings were removed for bean poles and handicrafts. Now, (forest raiding) has virtually stopped in the middle of the forest. Grazing around the forest continues."
PROJECT DIRECTOR: PRIMATOLOGIST, PROBLEM-SOLVER
Benjamin Beck, conservation director at the Great Ape Trust, is assembling items to build a wind generator at his Des Moines home for less than $200 from materials widely available in Rwanda.
Why? He's a problem-solver.
Beck is the ape trust's premier voice on conservation issues and a key player in the Gishwati Area Conservation Project. Quick with a smile, a joke or a helping hand, Beck is a widely known primatologist. He was the No. 3 guy at National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and, with ape trust colleague Robert Shumaker, is known for making the zoo's research understandable to the public.
In Rwanda, Beck is clearly in his element. He strides in to see local elected officials near Kinihira wearing a big grin and dust from watching soccer games that Gishwati colleague Marshall Banamwana arranged among local eco-clubs.
In characteristic fashion, Beck dishes out a compliment and a reality check in one sentence:
"The children of today, tomorrow, they will have your job," Beck said after greeting local Mayor John Ndimubahire. "If they study like they play football, they will do very well."
Beck knows that much of the challenge lies in changing centuries of tradition based on using the forest, not living with it in economic harmony. And it starts with the kids.
Beck is a realist, too. He passes along to me a scientific paper that questions the biological value of restored forests. He acknowledges lingering doubts among villagers. He understands the political tensions, but leaves them to the politicians.
More than anything, Beck is a practical man looking for practical solutions, like the wind turbine he's building. The idea: to see whether small-scale wind turbines could help wire Rwandan villages.
TRUST ANIMAL CARETAKER: COUNTRY HAS CHANGED WITH TIME
Peter Clay, now a senior animal caretaker at Great Ape Trust, has experienced harrowing moments in Rwanda, and just missed others.
In 1985, he took a break from his Lincoln Park Zoo job to help study the eating habits of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains. Six months after he left, the most famous person studying gorillas in the area "” Dian Fossey, of "Gorillas in the Mist" fame "” was killed.
He returned in 1992 for a year of working on studies with the Karisoke Research Center, Fossey's base, and managed to get in the middle of the war that, after he left, morphed into the 1994 genocide.
When he returned seven months after the genocide ended, he found a nation largely in ruins. Families were reeling in the pain of so many lost loved ones. Security was more wish than reality.
"Access to the park and forest to even verify that the gorillas were OK was really difficult, especially for non-Rwandans," he said.
In '97, after he left, tensions heated up again, and the gorilla visits that are the backbone of ecotourism stopped for a time.
On a visit this year, he found the country safe and modernizing.
Still, he found it split even more clearly between traditional grow-your-own farming, often on steep slopes, and urbanized Kigali.
"There is kind of a disconnect between the overwhelmingly rural population, which remained basically subsistence cultivators struggling to stay alive on increasingly smaller plots of land, and the urban population in Kigali, who are increasingly sophisticated and going to Internet cafes and upscale coffee places."
In Gishwati, the challenge is how to create new livelihoods in the face of evidence that things need to change, Clay said.
"One of the reasons why Gishwati is important is because of the environmental consequences of trying to cultivate land that is just too steep," he said.
TRUST ANIMAL CARETAKER: COUNTRY HAS CHANGED WITH TIME
Peter Clay, now a senior animal caretaker at Great Ape Trust, has experienced harrowing moments in Rwanda, and just missed others.
In 1985, he took a break from his Lincoln Park Zoo job to help study the eating habits of mountain gorillas in the Virunga Mountains. Six months after he left, the most famous person studying gorillas in the area "” Dian Fossey, of "Gorillas in the Mist" fame "” was killed.
He returned in 1992 for a year of working on studies with the Karisoke Research Center, Fossey's base, and managed to get in the middle of the war that, after he left, morphed into the 1994 genocide.
When he returned seven months after the genocide ended, he found a nation largely in ruins. Families were reeling in the pain of so many lost loved ones. Security was more wish than reality.
"Access to the park and forest to even verify that the gorillas were OK was really difficult, especially for non-Rwandans," he said.
In '97, after he left, tensions heated up again, and the gorilla visits that are the backbone of ecotourism stopped for a time.
On a visit this year, he found the country safe and modernizing.
Still, he found it split even more clearly between traditional grow-your-own farming, often on steep slopes, and urbanized Kigali.
"There is kind of a disconnect between the overwhelmingly rural population, which remained basically subsistence cultivators struggling to stay alive on increasingly smaller plots of land, and the urban population in Kigali, who are increasingly sophisticated and going to Internet cafes and upscale coffee places."
In Gishwati, the challenge is how to create new livelihoods in the face of evidence that things need to change, Clay said.
"One of the reasons why Gishwati is important is because of the environmental consequences of trying to cultivate land that is just too steep," he said.
VILLAGERS: LAND TO GROW THEIR FOOD
2.5 ACRES FEED FAMILY OF 10: Like most of the villagers in Kinihira, just outside the Gishwati Forest, Mitali Francois returned to Rwanda from a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The government gave the family a hectare of land. "Only one," Mitali said in Kinyarwanda, raising an index finger for emphasis. That's about 2.5 acres on which to grown beans and maize.
He doesn't sell any. "It's just enough to feed my family" of 10, said Mitali, 50.
Mitali thinks he'll be able to keep his land as the reforestation project progresses, but he worries about those with plots closer to the forest.
"It's important to have the forest, but there will always be conflict," Mitali said. "It's not really something you can be happy about if someone loses land."
"˜WE ARE THINKING WHAT WE WILL EAT TOMORROW': A hailstorm some residents said was the strongest they'd seen in decades ripped through Kavumu village Oct. 3.
Jean d'Amour Bizimungu had lived in his house for 15years before the storm ripped off the roof. He'll look to build a smaller home because he can't afford the approximately $700 "” more than a year's income for most Rwandans "” to replace the corrugated steel roof.
Runoff destroyed 72 homes and 740 acres of crops, but spared the lives of villagers.
Madeleine Nyiratuza, coordinator of the Gishwati Area Conservation Program, said the storm is consistent with a shift in weather she considers a sign of climate change. A few years ago, a drought decreased crop yields, the government said. This year, dry weather delayed fall planting.
Bizimungu, 22, lost his potato and bean crops in the hailstorm. His neighbors lost corn, potatoes, onions and bananas.
"It was heavy rain followed by ice for four hours without stopping. I don't know why," he said in his native Kinyarwanda language. "We are thinking what we will eat tomorrow."
OUTREACH COORDINATORS:HELPING VILLAGERS CONNECT WITH CONSERVATION
OVERCOMING LONG-HELD TRADITIONS: Marshall Banamwana spends his days getting the word out on conservation. He teaches farmers how to plant their crops out of the reach of the grain- and fruit-raiding chimpanzees. And he works with local farm co-ops to increase markets for their crops.
The government wants many Rwandans to shift to nonfarm jobs, to take pressure off the land, but it's difficult to change a way of life. Villagers in nearby Kinyenkanda uprooted tens of thousands of newly planted trees in protest over the relocation and compensation terms. The government has arranged for new homes, but word of replacement farmland has lagged, according to news reports.
Banamwana teaches children that the forest is essential to their future. He set up a tournament among 13 eco-clubs at area schools. One team's players walked miles, some barefoot, over rocky roads. One player sported a black shoe "” and a white one.
"The competition between schools is an entertaining way to spread the message," Banamwana said. "Football helps cooperation."
REACHING OUT THROUGH ART: Des Moines native and Drake University graduate Julie Ghrist wants to save Rwandans, and rare mountain gorillas, by spreading a message of conservation, hygiene and personal responsibility in the schools surrounding her home community of Musanze.
Ghrist runs Art of Conservation Inc., made possible in part because of her willingness to spend her own money to teach children about conservation.
A resident of Rwanda for four years, Ghrist previously worked in Kenya on water issues and in Zambia helping orphans. She eventually met people working to protect the world's remaining mountain gorillas, many of them living in Rwanda's stretch of the Virunga Mountains.
Ghrist took a circuitous route to Africa and conservation work. After she picked up a degree in general education and art at Drake, she moved to New York and Boston. She lived in Crete.
"It's been quite a journey," Ghrist said. Especially considering this: "I don't have a science background."
She teaches 150 kids a year with the help of a staff of four. Each student gets 80 hours of instruction. This can involve dramas with homemade masks, art lessons and hygiene tips.
"How can a child learn or want to learn if they are hungry and they are dirty?" Ghrist asked. "They don't have water much of the time. What a challenge it is to wash your hands, to wash your body, to drink healthful water."
SHARING, TEACHING THROUGH SONG: Virginia Croskery, a noted soprano and assistant professor of music at Simpson College, found herself helping sort chimpanzee poop in Rwanda in May, her fourth trip to Africa.
She and eight students pitched in with the ape-diet research at Gishwati. The group also learned a mini-opera in Kinyarwanda and taught it to students. And they choreographed and taught Rwandans a song for one of the biggest deals on their calendar "” Kwita Izina "” the ceremony naming the baby mountain gorillas. Julie Ghrist of Art of Conservation Inc. commissioned music for the event.
The continent touches your soul, she said. "The people have an appreciation for what they have. We suffer from higher, faster, louder disease. We want instant gratification."
Perry Beeman spent five weeks reporting in Rwanda as part of a grant from the International Reporting Project (IRP).
Click here for the full multimedia package as it appears on The Des Moines Register web site.
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