Dispatches from the Field & Project Summaries
Mihingo Lodge – Uganda, Part I: High style, low impact – everybody wins
March 19, 2008
From Nile Safari Lodge, we caught a lift back into Kampala for the night. We were met the next morning by Mihingo Lodge proprietor, Ralph Schenk, who spirited us westward toward the lodge and Lake Mburo National Park.
Conversation in the car was lively and Ralph, who is also co-owner of Banana Boat craft stores with his partner Suni, is an incredible source of information and opinions about many issues challenging Africa. His upbringing was a mix of influences of Africa, where he was born, and Europe, where his parents were raised and he was educated. At age 19, Ralph took an epic road trip over the whole of Africa, an odyssey that galvanized his passion for the continent. He focused his collegiate + graduate studies along with volunteer endeavors on economics, agriculture, conservation and alternative energy, mindful of what education would best serve the environment, community as well as his entrepreneurial interests in Africa.
We uneventfully crossed from the north to the south side of the equator (we opted to spare Ralph our tourist glee as he’d made the journey countless times). In the town of Lyantonde, we turned onto a dirt road toward Nshara Gate into Lake Mburo National Park and our hotel shuttle turned into a game drive as zebra, African buffalo and warthogs seemed to spring up from the ether across the park’s grassland.
Situated on a hilltop adjacent to Lake Mburo National Park, Mihingo Lodge’s commanding views of the park and nearby lakes are a feast to the eyes. Ralph and Suni came up with an initial design that embraced high end safari lodge style and services with environmentally smart design. They created lodge facilities and bungalows that optimize the site’s natural attributes for both aesthetic beauty and ease of harnessing and harvesting solar power and rainwater to fuel lodge operations.
Guest quarters have been crafted with the seemingly improbable combination of spectacular vistas and supreme privacy. In décor, a tasteful minimalism prevails, yielding to the visual draw of the natural surroundings. Bedrooms and bathrooms are almost imperceptibly screened, providing unprecedented views of everything except the neighbors (as lovely as they might be).
Mihingo Lodge established a program, initially fueled by retail sales of local honey, to serve the community just outside the park gates. The Honey Fund benefits the Akashenshero area, providing an educational resource fund for the Rurambira primary school, offering volunteer-run environmental education and adult literacy programs. The fund has recently assisted in tending to major medical issues that have faced community residents including reconstructive surgery to child’s cleft palate and an operation to repair a local girl’s bowed leg.
The afternoon of our arrival, Ralph took us on a trip to nearby Kazumi Lookout for a visual tour and history of the surrounding area and that evening, we convened in the lodge’s open air dining room overlooking a watering hole in Lake Mburo National Park. With impala and eland as our inspiration, we too sought refreshment. Over bottles of Nile Special, the boys and I determined that we’d spend the following morning tracking hyenas in the park and spend the afternoon checking out Honey Fund projects at the local primary school – opportunities to see how all the lodge’s neighbors are faring.
Nile Safari Lodge – Uganda: Take me to the river
March 19, 2008
We loaded up Rhino Fund Uganda’s seasoned Land Cruiser, strapped our gear to the roof rack + headed to Nile Safari Lodge. We relished a few stretches of tarmac, though our path was primarily hard-packed dirt as we passed through small towns and herds of massive-horned Ugandan cattle on our drive toward Masindi.
Our route traversed a portion of Murchison National Park and, for the first several kilometers, scores of baboons filled the roads, chastening our noisy advance by loping into the woods, offering only their bright red primate butts as they disappeared into thick foliage of the park.
Approaching the lodge, we caught glimpses of Lake Albert before turning north toward the Victoria Nile. A final dusty lumber brought us to reception at the Nile Safari Lodge where we were met by friendly faces bearing cool white towels with a hint of eucalyptus. The volume of dirt peeled from arms and faces?
Oh my.
Sorry about your towels…
A short walk from reception leads to a magnetic location just out front of the dining room: a vista across The River Nile into Murchison National Park from a comfortably appointed platform shaded by a massive cluster fig tree teeming with vervet monkeys – a nice spot for a cool drink, if I do say so myself.
GeoLodges, the parent company of Nile Safari Lodge, utilizes local materials to build their properties whenever possible, so the timber, stones for masonry, thatching materials and skilled labor are all sourced from the community. Nile Safari Lodge collects solar power for electricity; other lodges in the GeoLodge family leverage water catchment systems and use even more substantial alternative energy programs on more recently built properties.
GeoLodges also has a community outreach program called Earthworks that assists local residents with vocational training including a project that assists women from Mubaku and other villages adjacent to Nile Safari Lodge in earning an income that allows them to work from their homes, allowing them to care for their children and tend household responsibilities while earning an outside income. Bead for Life is an environment/community friendly program that sources used magazines as materials that local women craft into colorful beads. These beads are strung into jewelry and sold at retail outlets (including the lodge). Profits benefit the bead makers and help sustain the Earthworks program supporting further community development.
Earthworks also assists a local farm collective that promotes the sale of village produce to the greater community and the Nile Safari Lodge where the menus are primarily locally sourced. The results are multifold – money for supplies go back into the community while minimizing fossil fuels expended in bringing outside supplies to the lodge property.
We took a boat tour of the fabled Nile the following morning. A light mist rose off the river and the lodge’s low profile bungalows blended cohesively into the papyrus-addled riparian landscape. The portion of the Nile adjacent to Murchison National Park is wildlife rich: hippopotamus, kingfisher, crocodiles, water buck appeared in profusion and we counted ourselves fortunate to linger a few minutes in the presence of the endangered, elusive shoe bill stork.
Upon our return, I bee-lined to the cool open air of my bungalow’s private outdoor shower, retiring to the porch with a cup of coffee as an African elephant trolled the marshes of Murchison Park with a few white-feathered hitchhikers perched atop its back.
Both the birds and I had found fine landing spots, indeed.
Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary – Uganda (Rhino Fund Uganda): Becoming okay with the AK…47, that is
March 7, 2008
We headed north on the Kampala/Gulu road toward the Ziwa Ranch Rhino Sanctuary.
The day was moving to dusk and as we drove toward park headquarters. The day patrol rangers bike toward us as they close their shifts. Charged with protecting the rhinos from poachers, rangers must have equal footing in confrontations – explaining the AK-47s slung over their shoulders as they slowly pedaled toward the main gate – they smile and wave as we motor past.
Head ranger Godfried gave us a tour of the headquarters and a quick history of the property. Formerly a cattle ranch, a local rancher donated 35 square kilometers to the Rhino Fund Uganda to establish the sanctuary. A sizeable gift from the European Union allowed them to install a solar-powered electric fence around the perimeter of the site and 4 white rhinos from Kenya were then brought to the property. More recently, Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida donated an additional pair of white rhinos.
That evening, we met Rhino Fund Uganda executive director Heidi Cragg – a plucky, sun burnished South African woman with a passion for wildlife conservation.
Her projects include a rhinoceros breeding project (their first calf is due in weeks), community education + outreach programs along with sourcing the local community for rangers and sanctuary support staff.
In Africa, rhinos are hunted by poachers for the exceptional price they can get for their horns, valued for their perceived medicinal power. Remarkably, rhino horn is actually made of hair attached to the skin of the rhino, not the bone, so it can be harvested without killing the rhino. Bullets, however, are cheaper than rhinoceros tranquilizers. Rhino advocates had taken to the practice of removing the horn before it was discovered that poachers would kill hornless rhinos to spite conservationists. The message is simple – you deprive me of my bounty, I’ll kill the animal anyway. Bush meat poachers ply the edges of the electric fence, running snares underneath onto the sanctuary property to capture bushbuck, diker and wild pig. Farmers quietly maneuver their cattle onto the property’s edge to graze illegally – rangers “arrest” cows on a regular basis and she’s discovered that recent interloping herds have been the property of local public officials making enforcement a frustrating affair, to say the least.
Supported solely by donation, the Rhino Fund’s budget is unpredictable at best. A recent spate of dried up coffers forced Heidi to give up 24 hour ranger patrols, leaving the rhinos unprotected from poachers during the evenings, incurring a series of dread-filled, sleepless nights before the Uganda Wildlife Authority donated 4 rangers so Rhino Fund could resume 24 hour patrols.
Heidi shared her plans to make the sanctuary less reliant on donor funding through ecotourism, attracting more visitors by expanding and improving guest facilities with the construction of a restaurant, bar and swimming pool along with more overnight accommodations. She’s working to increase her white rhino count, introducing black rhinos along with broad grazing, non-cattle mammals, such as zebra, to manage grassland overgrowth and offer more variety in wildlife viewing.
Room and board are available to visitors and volunteers and the predominantly solar powered facilities offered presently are clean and simple – with the menagerie of wildlife, visitors spend of their waking hours viewing rhinos, hippos, bushbuck, vervit monkeys and marveling at the prolific birdlife on the property.
A tireless champion of the sanctuary, natural resource and wildlife conservation, Heidi sees daily challenges, both planned + unexpected (flat tires and bush fires, anyone?), as a shot of adrenaline, the stuff that makes life interesting, announcing, unprompted, “I just love it here”.
Paper Craft – Uganda: Some call it rubbish; we call it renewal
March 6, 2008
Harriet turns the car from the paved main road onto hard-packed dirt. Driving toward the workshop, Harriet waves at a man carrying an empty canvas bag that smiles and nods back at her. “That man, he supplies us with the banana leaves we use for the paper.”
Paper Craft is an employee-owned recycled + natural papermaking business that promotes self-sufficiency for its employees, many of whom are women who are given training and employment in an environmentally gentle trade.
A simple brick structure with a corrugated roof built on a slope. Harriet walks us through the paper-making process – they use elephant grass, banana + pineapple fibers – cleverly repurposing offal from other trades that would have otherwise wound up in the landfill. The materials make for paper with a hearty, textured, organic quality. They source shredded ledger and business paper from a local bank to make their recycled paper and these have a smoother, finished look.
Once dried, the paper is turned into a number of finished products that the shop employees create – picture frames, stationary, decorative boxes, tags, photo albums. These products are then sold to retail outlets including Banana Boat African Craft stores.
Back in Kampala, we visited a Banana Boat African Craft store and met Ralph and Suni (pronounced “shoe-knee”), owners of the Kampala-based retail operation. This progressively-minded, entrepreneurial couple provide many services to their employees + suppliers beyond the traditional exchange of goods and services. Unlike many other craft retailers, they pay their suppliers in cash, not consignment.
Banana Boat stores promote sustainable + renewable materials and are particularly supportive of businesses such as Paper Craft who actively train and educate community members toward self sufficiency. Banana Boat, in fact, provided a microloan to the employees at Paper Craft so that they could buy their business. Bank-funded loans can charge small businesses 25-40% interest, while the funds from Banana Boat to Papercraft are no interest loans that Ralph and Suni offer to employees and suppliers with the understanding that they are simply paid back in agreed installments every month.
A compliment to their successful retail business, Ralph and Suni invest in the potential in people. The loans they’ve offered through Banana Boat catalyze profound changes in the local community – employees can buy a business, fueling their self sufficiency and confidence without sacrificing the environment or accepting undue financial risks. In turn, Paper Craft employee/owners provide their village with positive examples of previously untrained community members who have transformed into contributors to commerce through craft.