Great Ape Trust and Earthpark founder Ted Townsend shakes the hand of a student at the Kinihira Primary School, which will receive improvements as part of the Gishwati Area Conservation Program. Great Ape Trust photo.

Great Ape Trust’s conservation initiative also brings together school kids in Rwanda and Iowa

Des Moines, Iowa – June 18, 2009 – If they listen closely from their classroom near the edge of Rwanda’s Gishwati Forest, the children at Kinihira Primary School can hear the vocalizations of a small population of chimpanzees – the cries, screams and the pant-hoots, the latter calls that are as distinct and individualized as the chimpanzees themselves – as they go about their daily lives. And if they listen very closely, the students may hear the whimper of a newly identified infant chimpanzee, a hopeful signal that despite decades of careless use, the remaining 2,500 acres of the Gishwati Forest are a place where an adult female chimpanzee can raise a baby.

The futures of the students and the chimpanzees are closely tied, according to Dr. Benjamin Beck, director of conservation at Great Ape Trust, a partner with Earthpark and the Rwandan government in the Gishwati Area Conservation Program, an ambitious reforestation project and ecological research effort in what was once Rwanda’s second-largest forest. Gishwati once extended 1,000 square kilometers (approximately a quarter of a million acres, or 100,000 hectacres), but was reduced to about one-fourth that size by the late 1980s due to human encroachment, deforestation and small-scale farming. Further encroachment resulted with the resettlement of refugees after the civil war and genocide of the mid-1990s.

Kinihira Primary School students offered a traditional Rwandan dance at the same time they presented Ted Townsend with a letter to be delivered to students at an Ankeny, Iowa elementary school that has extended an international hand of friendship to students at Kinihira. Great Ape Trust photo.

The Gishwati program’s aim is to protect and preserve the forest resources and, thus, the chimpanzees, now numbering 14, living there, as well as provide for sustainable use by the people living near the forest’s edge.

“We cannot save the chimpanzees and their habitat without also helping the local people living near the forests,” Beck said. “If we can show these kids that conservation has value in their lives, their interest in conservation will be sustainable. That will make us obsolete in 10 years; they will save the forest.”

Toward that goal, the Kinihira students already have developed positive relationships with Dr. Rebecca Chancellor and her field staff. Chancellor, “Dr. Rebecca” to the students, is principal investigator of a chimpanzee behavioral ecology study for the Gishwati project. “She has become a heroine, a role model, and some of the students have said they want to be her assistants,” Beck said.

Rwanda is known for its handicrafts, including this basket presented to Ted Townsend during a recent trip to Kinihira Primary School. Great Ape Trust photo.

One of the field assistants, Thomas Safari, attended school in the Kinihira village from early 1995 to 2000, providing an important connection to the students as they begin to embrace conservation ethics. He worked as a volunteer ecoguard in the Gishwati Forest Reserve before the Gishwati Area Conservation Program was formalized. “I realize how being environmental is very important to our everyday life, and the disturbance of our natural resources can have a negative impact on the biodiversity of the climate and our future generations,” he said in a recent conversation with Great Ape Trust officials.

The alliance with the Kinihira school is an outcome of community conversations, an overarching principle in deploying the goals of the Gishwati Area Conservation Program. The school is nestled in an area of Rwanda described by the teachers as “a country of a thousand hills, just in the Gishwati area.” Located near the equator, Rwanda is “breathtakingly beautiful,” Beck said. The Gishwati Forest yields views of Lake Kivu, one of Great Lakes of Africa and the largest of numerous freshwater bodies in the valleys of Rwanda, and the mountains of Democratic Republic of Congo.

The school’s needs – modest by American standards – include creating 12 classrooms in the long, narrow building housing the 650 Kinihira Primary School students, building two blocks of bathrooms, installing two rainwater collection systems, and developing one basketball and one volleyball playground. Equipment needs include 350 desks for students and 18 tables for teachers.

Ted Townsend and Madeleine Nyiratuza, Gishwati Area Conservation Program coordinator, were guests of the 650 Kinihira Primary School students during a recent trip to Rwanda. Great Ape Trust photo.

Meeting the needs will cost about $250,000, expenses that were neither anticipated nor budgeted, Beck said. Great Ape Trust is seeking partners to assist in the school project, Beck emphasized.

Some help is already on the way. An elementary school in Ankeny, Iowa, has donated about $600 worth of textbooks, educational posters and school supplies that were shipped to Rwanda earlier this month. The informal relationship between Ankeny’s Northwood Elementary School began this spring when Great Ape Trust’s Peter Clay, a senior orangutan caretaker and adviser to the Gishwati program, spoke to Northwood second graders about his experiences at the Kinihira school.

The Ankeny students wrote a letter to the Kinihira students that Beck and Ted Townsend, founder of Great Ape Trust and Earthpark, also a partner along with the Rwandan government in the Gishwati Area Conservation Program, hand-delivered during a recent two-week trip to Rwanda to further the project’s goals. Beck and Townsend brought back to Iowa letters to the Ankeny students and teachers expressing interest in solidifying the bonds of an international friendship.

Their return letter illuminated some of the cultural differences between students in Rwanda and Iowa. While some activities are the same – the Rwanda students play football (soccer) and volleyball in their leisure time, just as Iowa students might – others point to a rigorous life that includes going to “draw water,” planting vegetables, cultivating gardens (or “fighting with bushes,” as the teachers put it in their letter), “fighting with erosion,” planting trees, and collecting firewood from “artificial forests” (fast-growing exotic trees planted to harvest wood).

In discussing the differences, “the students just focused on the similarities in their lives and read about each other with interest and fascination,” Beck said. “It’s easy for adults to make more of the dramatic cultural contrasts than the kids do. For them, it’s kids communicating with kids, with no value judgments or aspirations to become westernized.”

The relationship between the schools in Iowa and Rwanda is still informal, but Beck said there are many similarities that make a formal friendship between the schools possibility. Rwanda has adopted English as its official language, and the students speak English in the classroom and elsewhere, except for some use of the mother tongue, Kinya Rwanda, in casual conversations. The students are in class for 10 and one-half hours each day, Monday through Friday.

“The big question is,” Beck said, “where do we go from here?”

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a scientific research facility in southeast Des Moines dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence. When completed, Great Ape Trust will be the largest great ape facility in North America and one of the first worldwide to include all four types of great ape – bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – for noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of their cognitive and communicative capabilities.

Great Ape Trust is dedicated to providing sanctuary and an honorable life for great apes, studying the intelligence of great apes, advancing conservation of great apes and providing unique educational experiences about great apes. Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization and is certified by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA).