By Sonya Kahlenberg, Ph.D. | Executive Director
In terms of experiences that bring a smile to your face, it's hard to top watching kids seeing elephants in the wild for the first time! In March, we were thrilled to take a group of 24 students and teacher chaperones from 6 of our partner schools on a field trip to see elephants at Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda, which is nearby our home forest, Kibale National Park. These students were selected to participate in an immersive elephant educational experience, which included a workshop about elephant natural history and conservation, a training about how to talk to peers about elephants and human-elephant conflict, and this field trip. At Queen Elizabeth, students spent the day observing elephants and other wildlife in the Mweya and Kazinga Channel sectors of the park. Minds were blown and it was a day that the kids will never forget! This initiative is part of our research project mentioned in our last report investigating the most effective way to deliver conservation education messaging. The aim is for students who experienced the field trip and workshop to share their new-found knowledge and excitement about elephants with their peers. We are looking forward to results from that study later this year.
A new project started this year is our Conservation Career Days series! The program's goal is to introduce students to different careers in conservation and to Ugandan conservationists to inspire them to enter these fields. For Earth Day in April, we welcomed the Environment Officer for our district, Kanyiginya Eunice, to talk to students about her government work and about preventing plastics pollution. We are now planning for Africa's first female Ph.D. primatologist, Dr. Emily Otali, to visit students in July on World Chimpanzee Day to talk about studying and protecting Uganda's chimpanzees. The children are loving this series and we hope it will inspire many future conservationists!
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