Author Archives: soysambu-guest-blogger

Maji

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Sarah Chamblis of Princeton University spent five days studying community conservation at Soysambu.  Apart from mothering a rescued baby ostrich she also wrote a couple of guest posts for us.

Enjoy and please encourage her with your comments.

Maji

During our stay at Soysambu, we left the ranch to interview some of the surrounding communities about their feelings about the newly developed conservancy.  They all seemed positive, although they listed many problems they were currently facing, hoping the conservancy would somehow help them with.  One topic came up with nearly every group we talked to: water.

Kenya is well into the dry season, and the landscape in the Rift Valley certainly looks like it is running low on water.  In conserved areas, the grass is dry and yellow, as is the somewhat sparse vegetation in the overgrazed areas outside of the protected lands.  The dirt is bone dry– you can tell a car is driving 30 km away by the plume of dust billowing up and rising behind it.  Parks are affected as well.  At Lake Nakuru National Park, our planned lunch by Makalia waterfall turned out to be a lunch by Makalia cliffs; all that was left of the water flow was a small muddy puddle at the base of the rocks.

Drought here is a huge problem, and it is not easy to see what the answers could be.  When I grew up in California we had droughts, but the sacrifices that entailed for me were using the same bathwater as my sibling* and my family not watering the lawn. Those solutions seem ludicrous here, where some women walk 20 km or more each day to gather 20 or 40 liters of (dirty) water for their whole family, less than a quarter of the water my sister and I used for a bath.  Apart from the climatic differences between central California and the Rift Valley, there is a huge difference in infrastructure: there, we have dams and reservoirs, and just about everyone has easy access to clean water.  California’s Central Valley is currently facing a serious drought, but I’m sure conditions there are not nearly as bad as those in Kenya now.

The question is, what are workable solutions?  We were told that the groundwater in the area has dangerously high levels of fluorine, so simply drilling a borehole for a well would not provide safe drinking water.  At one of the tourist lodges being built in Soysambu, they were constructing a large rainwater catchment.

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Catchment Area

Basically, they covered a slope about half the size of a soccer field with cement, and dug a ditch below it leading to a large reservoir.  During the heavy rains of spring and fall, the reservoir will fill with enough water to serve the lodge’s guests all year. I don’t know what the cost of construction and maintenance of a similar catchment would be for the villages outside of Soysambu, but if they could find the funds and organize a cooperative effort to keep it operating, I think it would make a significant difference in their day-to-day lives.  I do wonder, however, what the long-term environmental impacts of these rainwater catchments would be.  What do you think?

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Sarah with the baby ostrich

*so you know, now, with low-flow shower heads, taking a short shower (less than 5 minutes) is much more water efficient than bathing.

Eco-Tourism and Poverty

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This is a guest post from Sam Borchard of Princeton University who has been studying community conservation at Soysambu for 5 days as part of an undergraduate conservation course taught by Paula Kahumbu

Enjoy and please feel free to comment.

Eco-Tourism and Poverty

On our first day at the Soysambu Ranch we were given a tour of a brand new ecotourism resort being built on one of the hills of the conservancy.  A series of thatched roof private cottages already dot the hillside, and more are currently under construction.

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Huts

Although this resort is still a ways away from completion, some idea of what the final product may look like can be seen in a similar ecotourism area just down the road.  Here the same thatched huts are filled with stunningly beautiful furniture, and are surrounded by luxury facilities including a pool, restaurant, and bar.

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Eco-Hut

Ecotourism is often touted as a way to bring money in to an area and improve the lives of local people.  Visitors to these resorts pay 11,000 shillings ($140) per night, money which ideally would trickle down to those in the lowest depths of poverty.  Later that afternoon we had a chance to visit and speak with just such a community – a group of Maasai women and children living on a small patch of land outside the conservancy.  The men in the group had left to find better grazing land for their cattle, and would likely be gone for a month or more, leaving the women with no animals and no source of income while they were gone.

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Maasai Kids

The bare degraded landscape and uneven, ramshackle homes stood in stark contrast to the beautiful cottages on the hillside we saw earlier that morning.  None of the Maasai women spoke English, and only one spoke Swahili.  Of the thirty children we saw only three were enrolled in school, the others having been forbidden by their fathers.  One of the women said to us, through a translator, that without education they would be nothing.

I began to wonder how on earth these people could be helped by the creation of the lodge – breaking from their pastoralist culture to work at the lodge would be difficult, and the chance of them getting a job there without knowing English or Swahili is almost zero.  Capitalizing on tourism opportunities by selling beadwork and other goods is also impractical – although they live only a few kilometers from the resort their settlement isn’t easily accessible by car, and most tourists don’t enjoy going out of their way to look poverty in the face.

The unfortunate truth is that the problems facing these communities are far too complex to have easy solutions, and the hope that ecotourism alone can lift them out of poverty is fanciful.  However there is some good news – with a mindful focus on community improvement, outfits like the future ecotourism resort can be a piece of the solution.  One of the last things to come up during our discussion with the Maasai women was the fact that the resort, even though it has yet to generate any income, is paying for six of their children – four girls and two boys –  to attend a boarding school.  It may be a small start but at least it’s a move in the right direction.