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

Another early morning, waking to the forest orchestral harmonies.

Today was a busy work day for the teams as they sat in front of their laptops writing up and editing the backlog of necessary refining work from Diani and the Colobus Trust, and from Ol Pejeta and the Sweetwaters Sanctuary. So…can’t report many interesting or funny events. Sorry.

Mike, Jamie, Lisa and a few others followed a school group around a shorter trail this morning. The children were nursery aged between 3 and 6 and so, were interested in different things to yesterdays nearly adult group.

Apart from this video team activity, everyone else stayed in camp, heads down. Someone had organised a team of “ladies wot do” to come and do our laundry. Oh there were hundreds of bags of dusty smelly embarrassments that these ladies turned into bright clean clothes.

In the afternoon, a short promotional video about the Kakamega forest was played by the KEEP staff. After this they gave a demonstration of a simple yet effective machine for making briquettes to retrain the local population from making and using charcoal….thus reducing further, the pressures of deforestation as a way of life. We filmed the making of briquettes…such a simple process. The basic mix is dried forest leaves, shredded paper and sawdust, mixed into a paste. The paste is pushed into a tube and tamped down into the thickness of a briquette. Using spacers, several briquettes can be made. The tube is then placed under a press to extract the water, leaving a dryish chunk that looks and feels like a Weetabix biscuit. The press is made of a very hard wood, and the pressure is applied manually, needing two people to make it work optimally. These biscuits are lit very easily and burn slowly, giving off very little smoke. Three small biscuits will be enough to cook a single meal for a large family. They are the ultimate effective recycling of waste products such as newspapers and office waste paper, and sawdust from the local mills. Leaves are collected from the abundance on the forest floor. The impact a wide distribution of these machines would make to local villages in this area, and others in Kenya, where charcoal burning worsens deforestation is immeasurable.

Currently there is only this one such machine thought to be in Kenya. The original design was produced by an American engineer a few years ago, and he made up some machines in Uganda where they are gaining popularity. Some of the KEEP staff visiting Uganda saw the machine in action and with the best principles of “technology transfer” in mind, brought measurements and drawings back to Kenya, to Kakamega. The cost of producing this one machine was KSh 50,000 which equates to about £450. The machine was made in 2007 and no others have since been made because there are no funds available. The costs of producing more machines will fall as more are ordered, but present lack of funds halts current expansion plans. The next planned step is to make three more, so that each KEEP office around the Kakamega forest can have one to use for small scale manufacture and education. No time frame exists because the funds don’t yet exist.

The skies gave us another thunder storm this afternoon, around 5pm. It lasted about an hour…which is quite short, but it gave us back the mud pools we had last night, which dried out today. This cycle of morning sun and afternoon rain is very typical of this time of year. So is Jamie’s love of paddling in the mud.

Dinner this evening was designed by Steve, a delicious spaghetti with grilled aubergine Bolognese, with a pumpkin and potato mash, and French beans. There were seconds, wolfed down.

Night fell, people didn’t feel in the mood for work, and an atmosphere of listlessness led to Steve making up a birthday celebration drink for Rosie who was 23 today. The birthday celebrations continued with a neighbouring team of volunteers…until bed time.