The education centre at Kyamaleera.
We are into week 3 of our trip to Uganda. The last week has been challenging again and I am continually learning new things and enjoying travelling to different and exciting places.
This weekend we visited a wildlife education centre. It was quite an inspiring way to spend the afternoon as the centre really shows the importance of teaching the younger generation about the chimpanzees and baboons that are their permanent neighbours. They performed songs and a play about protecting the primates to some of the adults of the village. Because learning about conservation is a relatively new project in Uganda, the adults may have different views and less knowledge about the primates so this is something special that the children can teach them. It would be nice to come back here in a couple of years time to see how much of a difference this centre is making and how the children who are growing up, can use the information they have learned to help protect the primates in the forests around them.
This weekend we also embarked on a trek to see if we could find some chimpanzees. This was hugely exciting and involved getting up at 6am so that we could be in the middle of the forest when the sun rose. And it really was special. It almost felt like we had stepped into the centre of a film or wildlife documentary. The noises of the animals, particularly the birds, as they woke were just mesmerising and I felt like I could have stood there for hours taking in our surroundings. One major downside to the trip was the insane amount of water there was due to the tropical thunderstorm we had endured the night before. This meant walking through streams and (what felt like) small lakes, with water almost up to our knees! It was a shame that we didn’t actually see any chimps, but it was a pretty awesome experience!
