Monthly Update from the Field - July 2017
Anti-Poaching
Several operations have been carried out by our scouts together with a DNPW officer. For every patrol day, one of the scouts has to fill in a sheet in order to keep track of what they have done, found and seen (e.g. poachers, ivory, snares, animal sightings) that day.
What happened last month:
- One poached impala found, together with shoes, clothes and other personal items of the poachers as well as two bikes and a shotgun (that was recovered after using the detection dogs from Conservation South Luangwa (CSL)). A remark made by the scouts was that the torches they are using do not work well enough on patrols. We believe that equipping our scouts with decent torches should be a priority. It is unacceptable that our scouts fail to follow poachers at night just because of the flash lights they are using. Mike Veale has recommended a torch they use for gearing up the teams in the field (costs are about $ 13 each);
- Illegal fishing nets recovered and game meat found;
- Five people arrested for illegal cutting of trees and four bicycles confiscated;
- Attempts made to localize two elephant dealers that are active in the area;
- A gun confiscated and buffalo meat found;
- One poached elephant found near the village. Our team made the initial follow-up, but DNPW told the team to pull out for them to take over the investigations.
Furthermore, the team of scouts has participated in several joint operations with DNPW and CSL.
The furniture for the ranger station should be ready soon, hopefully in a few days. The plumber has started working on the showers and the outside toilet for the ranger station.
Community Projects
Sewing Project
Nsefu.org has created a logo for this project and will be discussed with the different parties involved on this side. In order to speed up things (since we might lose the building), I have asked another electrician to take a look at the building for wiring it. We have decided to postpone connecting the building to the well in order to have running water since that would not be a real necessity for now and it would be very expensive. We will build two or three pit-latrines to begin with. Next week, together with Graph Evans and Steven Zulu we will visit the District Commissioner and the Chief in order to inform them about our plans, which is a necessity in order to proceed with this project.
Chabwera Community School
We will visit the school next week. We have received some great things to give to the school (pencils, markers, sketch pad, football) from Tad and his family who stayed at Zikomo Safari. We will hand these out to the pupils, together with some other items we got for them. Furthermore, during the last meeting the teachers once more addressed the importance of building the classroom(s) before the beginning of the rainy season. Together with them, and the other parties involved, we will make a plan on how to proceed on this.
