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

After our interesting visit to the JGI and local community projects, today we also had the opportunity to visit another community project in Hoima. The local community’s concern for their environment doesn’t cease to amaze me. Their concern is mainly deforestation and the necessity of wild animals to have access to fresh water – that they are currently sharing with village residents. Deforestation has caused a number of problems, with resident’s developing skin and stomach diseases (children are the most affected) due to poor water quality, fuelled by the removal of riverine forest.

Charles, the JGI field manager, walked around the area with us and explained in detail the work done so far and noted how urgent the problem was – including a need to found a solution quickly. We visited a tree nursery first, escorted by the head of the community group. We were introduced to their constitution, plans and objectives. Their main objective is for them to one day be able to show to the government achievements made through their re-forestation scheme, and for them to preserve their land for communal interests. At the moment they are running the tree nursery project on state-owned property, and need to register their scheme to ensure its integrity in the future.

After viewing the tree nursery we walked to the river where the local people get their every day water. We were all stunned to see how contaminated it was, but what shocked me the most was to see the amount of children approaching the river. We spent 30 minutes there, filming and observing the dark muddy water. You could see abundant floating animal feaces float past the pots and bottles of children collecting the water to both drink and cook with. I was evident that we needed to support their project and do whatever we could do help re-forest the riverbank and provide them with clean water.

After the video team gathered footage and held interviews with the local people we went back to the truck to start our journey back. It was impossible to take out of my mind the faces of all the children collecting water to survive and probably not realizing that that water its killing them.