The Great Primate Handshake – Volunteer in Africa, working to conserve monkeys and apes through film and educational content production

Today, after an early breakfast, we started our journey to Kibale National Park for a wildlife walk. Mixed feelings and expectations were raised by many of the volunteers, as it was going to be their first experience in an African National Park. At the park, we were divided in to two groups with different tour guides. We then commenced our walk.

At we started the walk a relaxing feeling grew amongst the volunteers that accompanied us. The aroma of nature and the different sounds produced by birds, primates, reptiles and insects merged into a sonata for our ears. The fascination of the rainforest and its beauty left us without words. To walk beside the footprints of elephants made the whole experience unforgettable.

After an hour and a half walking into the floral paradise, our serene walk was interrupted by huge biting ants that attacked us without mercy. They were crawling up our legs, getting into our socks, and even our shoes! This turned our relaxing time into a vivid nightmare for a short while.

In the afternoon we had the fantastic opportunity to visit Kasiisi School. We had the chance to join one of their special lessons using “One Laptop per Child (OLPC)” laptops.

Kasiisi school joined the OLPC programme a year ago and have been using laptops to aid their lessons. The Handshake covered their work last year (see our YouTube channel for video coverage). It was very interesting to see how happy the kids were in class and it also amazed us how much the children enjoyed school when they got to use the laptops. The school in general has many an interesting programme for the children, including extra curricular activities and a well utilised library.

After interacting with the children and getting a better understanding of their needs, another highlight of our visit to Kasiisi was meeting an American volunteer who is currently creating additional programs for the laptop. This is great for the Primate Handshake as his skills and experience will help us install conservation games and activities onto the XO laptop – produced by previous and current volunteers, and will also help the Handshake put in practise the many educational classroom activities produced during expeditions over the past few years.

We all left the school hoping to collaborate with them in a number of different ways and are excited about sharing our content with them.