We just hung around all day, reading, writing letters, and enjoying the quiet. Around noon, the local kids began arriving for Lawrence and Jerome’s “Sunday school” reading program and they quickly decided we were more interesting than the books. A group surrounded Connie who gave them an English lesson – body parts, colors, and numbers and finally the animals on the mural at the center.
I wouldn’t normally make an entry on a day as uneventful as today but I want to record a passage from “The Tree Where Man was Born” by Peter Mathiessen. It was written in the late ‘60s but is still true today.
“African school children are now taught to appreciate their wild animals and the land, but public attitudes may not change in time to spare the wildlife in the next decades, when the world must deal with the worst consequences of over-population and pollution. And a stubborn fight for animal preservation in disregard of people and their famine-haunted future would only be the culminating failure of the western civilization, that through its blind administration of vaccines and quinine, has upset the ecologies of a whole continent. Thus wildlife must be treated in terms of resource management in this new Africa which includes, besides gazelles, a growing horde of tattered humans who squat for days and weeks and months and years on end, in a seeming trance, awaiting hope.”
Thirty-five years later and little has changed. 