On a morning so cold the air felt as if it should contain flecks of glitter as it crackled against our skin, we stood in the bleak beauty at the bottom of Mount Kenya and looked at tiny saplings, bowed against the wind in their field of tough grass turned yellow-brown by the cold. We trudged uphill, tripping on the uneven ground and breathing in the dizzyingly clean air as the clouds skated across the mountain's summit in glaring white. Bending over holes chipped and crunched out of the dry earth, we put thin new trees reverently in their place, and stood back to water them as everyone sang.
We walked on until we found a water tower and green as far as we could see, shivering as we took it in and smiled. We returned through fields of potatoes that huddled at the base of shrubs, where cattle were allowed to graze overlooked by the trees as they grew nearby, protected by the need to reforest this place. As we left, we ate small fruits picked up from the ground, struggling with waxy skins and covering our hands in juice as we bounced along the track. The day got hotter and we tumbled out of the car on a track lined with trees older than any of us could comprehend. We drank strong, sugary coffee with Lydia and her daughter, our shyness wearing off as they told us why we were there, and why they were there too. They led us to their house, up a steep path where the loose stones hiding in the terracotta earth made us slip and grab each other, laughing as we tried to keep up. Walking turned to dancing as singing floated over on the still air and we shook off our reserve in a circle of joyful, uncoordinated stamping. After lunch, we followed Lydia and her friends through a warren of plots; avocados, yams, bee hives and flowers flourishing as they reclaimed every bit of soil fortified by the trees that spread a pattern of green across the sky. The day ended at a long-established project, reached by mountain roads where the sheer drop to our right made our stomachs drop even as we laughed with glee. The fading sun brought mist down with it, and the top of the forest wore a shroud of white which matched the river far below. Half-running, half-falling down an almost vertical slope, we spotted a waterfall and stopped to listen to its roar, punctuated by the high pitched birds still busy with their day. Ants found their way into our shoes and clothes, but we knew there were leopards and monkeys nearby and, enthralled, we didn't mind their bites. We were surrounded by green as we said our goodbyes, and knew how different the day would have been if the green was grey instead. Lydia's words made sense: trees are not enemies, trees are friends. The people and projects described above are all members of The Green Belt Movement, which supports human and environmental health through initiatives based on tree-planting.
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When I was 22, I went to a bar in Bristol to meet the people who would change my life. I was nervous and shy, and I stumbled over my words and felt awkward talking to all the people I didn't know, but I did know that I wanted to volunteer for this project I'd heard so much about, gazing open-mouthed at the videos and pictures that made me want to buy a plane ticket and forget that I was scared of anything.
When I was 23, I flew to Uganda and went to an animal sanctuary in Entebbe and forgot how to worry about things as flies from the lake filled my nose and mouth and vervet monkeys hunched over their tiny babies, bathed in the last of a day's sun. Over 28 days of wind tangling my hair into impossible knots on muddy roads with cracks like seams into the earth, lions roaring in the night, storms in the rainforest and a soaking wet tent, warm honeycomb in a field of pineapples and laughter that threatened to stop me breathing, I cried as we made our last journey through the streets of Kampala, the marabou stork silhouettes looking down at us as they stalked the tops of buildings and waited for the markets to close. When I was 24, I almost didn't go to Kenya, but after encouragement for which I am eternally grateful, I found myself drinking Ethiopian coffee so strong it made my eyelids twitch and listening to the whine of mosquitoes in a room in Nairobi with fifteen more ready-made friends. For the first time, I heard the sound of colobus monkeys waking up as it ricocheted around a forest, shivered in the grey of a day in the city and revelled in the contrast when the heat of the coast made walking feel like swimming and cooked the remaining rainforest mud firmly on to everything I owned. On a difficult day in the middle, when it rained as if it would never stop and bad news from home made me cry, I sat in front of a fire with new friends that felt like old friends, and still didn't want to be anywhere else. When I was 25, I got a phone call that made me jump up and down on the spot. I went to Cardiff and helped to make plans and contacts and tried to get my head around the fact that I was actually doing this. Then, suddenly, I was 26 and in the midst of a crisis of confidence, and it seemed the last thing in the world I could succeed at was helping to run the project I loved so much, but the tickets were booked and I found myself in Kenya and then Uganda again, and everything about the ten weeks that followed flew in the face of my fears and made certain that I would never again doubt that conservation is what I should do for the rest of my life. The life-affirming moments are too many to list, but I remember a quiet walk along a windy, moonlit beach and the washed up turtle that stunned us into silence; the singing and dancing as we planted trees on a bitterly cold morning under Mount Kenya; the distant, eerie hoot of chimpanzees before a storm broke near Hoima, and everything in between. Last year, I was 27 and determined to get back to Kenya and to go to Cameroon, and happier than I knew how to process when it became clear it would happen. Some of it was harder than I expected, and I was more tired than I had ever been, but there were still wild monkeys watching me quizzically everywhere I went, long nights of stars and cicadas, people so inspiring I had to turn away to hide my tears, and friends that made it all better, just with a smile. I grew up on the Handshake. It taught me what I could do, and showed me that continuing to care and strive can change everything. It made me laugh, cry and tear my hair out, and it made me fall in love with everything a thousand times over. I met friends I will keep forever, and learnt that human nature can be the best and most beautiful thing. So, thank you, Handshake - thank you to the people you are and the places you go, and the animals that made it all happen in the first place. Thank you for making me who I am. After a year in which we hardly dared imagine how it might be outside our imagination in case plans didn't come to fruition, we went to Cameroon. With six weeks of the pace and vivid colour and lessons of Kenya in our minds, and so tired that everything was moving in slow motion, our first glimpse of the country, rushing at us through the clouds over Yaoundé, was an impression of green that settled somewhere above our stomachs and stayed there.
We drove away from the town and the trees got taller, the biggest rising like sentinels, stark against the loaded white of a sky ready for rain. As the road turned into mud, everything human shrank and everything green got larger, and when we stopped in the forest it was incredibly noisy and incredibly peaceful, all at the same time. Over the chimpanzees and gorillas, the monkeys in the distance, and the ever-present cicadas, we shook off the mantle of sleep and remembered our smiles as we met the people who would become our friends. After a few days, we knew that the sound of gorillas chest-beating stops you in your tracks, and that watching chimpanzees playing turns minutes into happy hours. We knew that every insect wanted to bite us and our clothes would never dry, but that none of that mattered. We knew that a baby chimpanzee, like a baby human, will carry out the same activity until everyone else has long lost interest, happy in her own world and oblivious to the fact that she is melting your heart. After a couple of weeks, we knew that a six month old mandrill previously kept as a pet would cling to any human with heartbreaking desperation, and that to say his eyes were anxious did not feel like anthropomorphism. We knew that sometimes, gorillas lose the will to live and that all you can do is watch them give up, and we felt the quiet, abiding hurt that caused in those who'd seen it happen. We knew that chimpanzees, though they may not give up, sometimes take their trauma and turn it on themselves, carrying it to adulthood. Above all this, though, we knew that there was hope, because we saw it in the groups of chimpanzees or gorillas playing normally together, and in the way the animals melted into the forest to carry on without us. When we had to leave, we knew we had been privileged and that goodbye was going to stick in our throats. We had met some of the very best kinds of people, and had seen what caring can do. We carried away with us stories of days and nights spent nursing apes through unimaginable traumas, of families seldom visited, and of simply not knowing this is a special thing to do, because why would you do anything else? We took the serious expressions of school children learning about forests, and the shriek of chimpanzees excited about everything because it just is, and the image of primates in a forest out of harm's way, and put it carefully away where it could continue to inspire. We knew we had seen something special in those peaceful, challenging, heartening and heartbreaking weeks, hidden in the green space that felt like home. This post is dedicated to Ape Action Africa, whose people and animals inspired it. www.apeactionafrica.org. 2013 has been challenging, hectic, tiring and emotionally charged. It has made me examine things in ways I'd never previously thought of, and I've learned so much that I begin to wonder if I knew anything before. It has also been the best year of my life so far. This is because the things that tire me out and make me think until I can feel my brain wearing out are the same things that make me feel sick with excitement and determinedly alive.
To write in detail about everything that has touched me this year would be to write a book, not a blog post, but there are moments, perfectly preserved in memory, that in many ways sum up the whole. An evening in Kenya, in a village where all that can be seen for miles is dramatically orange earth and the jagged forms of rocks and thorny trees, and every step I take on the sandy ground crushes herbs that perfume the air with something viscerally affecting. It was dark in a soft, inky way that drew all the anxiety from my body, and momentary silhouettes of bats appeared against the glow drifting from a dying fire. There were tiny, unsteady camping stools and a big, shallow dish of ugali which caked my hand in sticky, floury residue as I got distracted from eating by murmured conversation with people I'd known for hours who already felt as comfortable as friends. It was a moment so painfully perfect that I had to breathe even deeper on the beautiful, smoke-smelling air to keep myself present and dry-eyed. Around six in the morning on the coast, standing in companionable silence with three friends as the sky changed from pink to freshly washed blue and the fishing boats gliding with only the slightest of oar sounds came into ever sharper focus with the light. We dug our toes into the sand and peered at the cartoon-perfect sea life through the warm, shallow water as the heat started to press down on our skin and the first of the day's camels passed by with their odd, lilting walk and glanced at us with disdain. As we walked slowly away from the sea, a troop of vervet monkeys straggled across our path, spindly babies chasing each other back and forth while sensible adults looked us up and down for a fraction of a second before walking smartly on their way. Driving slowly through an oak forest in Morocco, in the expectant cool of an early summer morning, straining my eyes for a glimpse of beige hair against the bewildering, countless greens and greys and finally, finally, seeing my first wild Barbary macaques as they picked through the leaf litter in the weak sunlight. Then, later that day, in a cool dark classroom overlooking the mountains, painstakingly cutting out monkey masks for wide-eyed and faintly amused children who giggled and jostled and proudly wore them home. Standing in a forest in Cameroon and feeling the strange peace that stills everything slightly before a storm. Watching and waiting and wondering whether to run inside yet as leaves started to swirl from the trees, eddying to the ground faster and faster until the first fat drops of rain hit the backs of our necks and we broke into a run, laughing and tripping over our own feet as the path turned into a river around our ankles and the thunder cracked above our heads. As we huddled under the veranda, dripping, shivering and marvelling at the buckets of rain, gorillas chest-beating behind us reminded us where we were, and all we could do was grin. These are the moments that I think about when it’s cold and grey and I begin to suspect I imagined my favourite places - that they can’t possibly exist. They are the moments that make me want to sob when I consider the possibility that some people and places are at risk, but also make my heart race and make it impossible to sit still when I realise how much hope there still is, because I wouldn't have experienced them were it not for the people that care. They are the moments that make the prospect of a new year dizzyingly exciting, because I know I am in love with these places and projects, and that will never change. |