|
Volunteers
Kate Peden, 38, Education Consultant, UK Tony Hepworth, 67, City Councillor & Educator, Australia Josie, Artist, France Ludovic Gomez, 30, Staff at Old Folks Home, France Sangita Talati, 34, Holland Sunil Talati, 41, IT Consultant, Holland Doug Kington, 28, UK Jackie McGeough, 39, Ireland Carol Bryson, 57, Retired Teacher, UK Mike Carrol, 57, Retired Aviation Engineer, UK Louise Sullivan, 36, UK Zoltan Nemes-Nagy, 40, Official Photographer, Hungary This being a very international group didn’t put any challenge on group dynamics. In fact, they got along fabulously. All duties were shared and distributed equally. Nobody took time off as long as there was work to be done and in fact, they would chase us for more work! Each evening, some would sit around our “WOX table” and play games with rounds of drinks (the girls were hooked on gin & tonic). Others would quietly spend time reading and writing.  Wildlife Population Density Data Collection We continued documenting the GPS locations of various endangered wildlife.  The group saw 5 wild orang-utans, one of which was a dominant male eating a durian, and a mother and baby pair.  There were 2 groups of pygmy elephants, a small group of 3 and a larger group of 15;  seven of the eight species of hornbills were seen as well as host of other animals: the mangrove cat snake, green pit viper, pygmy squirrel, various insects, kingfishers, storm’s stork, red leaf langur, silver leaf langurs… We also saw a Samba dear, something that the guide has only seen once in his previous 4 years.  This data was then entered into a larger database, a consolidation of all the previous and future data, which will be used to tell the change in population density of the wildlife on the river and tributaries that we cruise on. Other wildlife protection and research organisations would also use them for their analysis, research and documentation purposes. Education Programme Primary school students of the Sukau Primary School (S.K. Sukau) participated in the first module of our education programme that will continue till end of next year. This module emphasised the fact that the students’ entire life revolves around the river. They were asked to demonstrate how they use the river and the activities that they do around the river.
Kate led the session, supported by Tony, Mike, Sunil, Sangita, Ludo, Doug & Jackie. The children played games and sang songs. They were also cajoled into drawing and colouring the scenes where they use the river in their daily lives. It was a very good morning at the school which ended with kids singing the newly learnt song way into the afternoon!   Community Project Our volunteers did a fantastic job of painting the mural. Louise, Carol and Josie led in the designing of the mural. They took several days to copy images out of books and transferring them to larger pieces of paper. They then practised several times before the “big day” and drew the outlines of the animals on the wall. All of us chipped in and painted the animals and the landscape. It was very satisfying to see the completed mural.  Tree Planting Our group did a fantastic job at cleaning up the weed choked area where trees were planted by the previous group. It took a whole day just to clean up the bulk of the climbers and tall grasses. We also collected a lot of dried leaves from around the resort as well as water hyacinth floating in the river to use as mulch. We did a good round of maintaining what the previous group planted before we moved on to plant our own trees. It was very satisfying to know that we have contributed to the plants of the previous group and comforting to know that the next group that comes in would be looking after the trees that we have planted.  Labels: community development, conservation, Habitat Restoration, Kinabatangan, Orang-utan, pygmy elephant, Sukau, Volunteer |
posted by Fareea @ 8:26 AM
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home