Gorillas remain the single most important item on Uganda’s tourism menu according to the Uganda Tourism Board. With conservation taking the mountain gorilla off the edge of extinction, the mantle is still left to the country to keep things from slipping back. This was part of the launch of the book “walking with Gorillas” authored by Dr. Gladys Kalema a renown Gorilla conservationist.
The number of wild mountain gorillas, who are at risk from humans, is increasing for the first time in years. This is thanks to the efforts of conservationists like Uganda’s first-ever wildlife veterinarian, Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who says they are truly gentle giants. There are just over a thousand mountain gorillas left, mostly high in the mountains in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kalema-Zikusoka has also written a book, “Walking with Gorillas”, charting her life from young enthusiast to wildlife campaigner.
In a patch of isolated forest on the edge of east Africa’s Albertine Rift valley, creatures slink between the shadows of towering trees disappearing into a tangle of knotted vines. From dainty sunbirds to hulking primates, an astonishing array of species hide in the deep, dark depths of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.
In her memoir Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet, published this month, the primatologist Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka recalls revelling in the beauty of the green terraced hills of Buhoma, southwest Uganda. She first visited the region as a researcher in the mid-1990s and would later become the east African country’s first wildlife vet.
“When I finally arrived, the evening mist was rising,” Kalema-Zikusoka writes. “I felt like I had reached the ends of the earth.”
It has been 30 years since tourists first trekked to see mountain gorillas in Bwindi, a former reserve designated as a national park in 1991.
Researchers and government officials looked to neighbouring Rwanda for help against poachers. There, since 1979, gorillas had been habituated so they wouldn’t be startled by the sight of humans.
In the early 1990s the global population of mountain gorillas had dwindled to 600. Three decades later that figure has risen to more than a thousand, with over 50 per cent in Uganda. The remainder are spread between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which lies to the west. The increase was proof that tourism can play a role in saving a species from the brink of extinction.
The Buhoma I encounter when I arrive on a soggy April afternoon is in many ways not so different to the raw, red-earthed settlement Kalema-Zikusoka describes in her book: smoke coils from mud brick kilns, women buckle beneath bundles of firewood and men strike heavy scythes into the fertile soil. In contrast to Rwanda, development here has been slow. There are fewer luxury hotels and infrastructure remains clunky. Kihihi, the nearest airstrip, is a 70-minute drive, accessible via a short flight from Entebbe.
Things are changing, though. Chinese money has smoothed over potholed dirt tracks with tarmac roads; the national carrier, Uganda Airlines, is poised to start direct flights between Entebbe and London this year.
Kalema-Zikusoka has also been busy making improvements to the lodge at the research centre she founded, Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), where tourists can book full-board, en suite accommodation for less than £100 a night. There are four rooms available on an elevated wooden terrace with views of the mist-veiled forest, all named after gorilla troops.
My room is Mubare, named after the first family of primates habituated for tourism; I’m hoping to meet them during my stay.
During a tour of the laboratory where most of her work for the NGO takes place, Kalema-Zikusoka shares fond memories of Mubare’s well-loved silverback Ruhondeza, who died aged about 50 in 2012.
“He would deliberately set out to frighten tourists to see their reaction,” she says. “It was his idea of humour.”
Revealing more anecdotes, she lifts the lid of a chest freezer to reveal hundreds of test tubes containing faecal samples collected from the nests of all habituated gorillas. Each one is analysed under a microscope to check for microbes passed from humans, part of the conservationist’s work in establishing links between the health of gorillas and communities.
As well as improving community education about personal hygiene, her achievements include setting up HuGo, a human and wildlife conflict resolution team, and founding the fair-trade initiative Gorilla Conservation Coffee. In front of the research centre several farmers sift through beans ready for roasting. The finished product is sold in packets featuring an illustration of Kanyonyi, another superstar silverback from the Mubare line. In the near future Kalema-Zikusoka hopes to open a café in an open-air dining room above the research centre. Set at eye level with peaks veiled in mist, it has one of the best views in Buhoma.
So far 44 gorilla troops have been habituated for tourism — although not all are tracked daily — but many more wild apes, chimps and monkeys live in the forest. In 1996 no more than 12 tourists would be trekking in one day; now 160 tourists may be in the park at the same time.
Medad Tumugabirwe, who was a ranger in the park even before Kalema-Zikusoka arrived, was involved in habituating the Mubare group and has experienced the growth of tourism first-hand.
“At first the silverback Ruhondeza was attacking us,” he says, when we meet at the office for his Retired Rangers organisation, where he sits behind an empty desk below pages of hand-scribbled conservation commandments. “But slowly, slowly, week by week, month by month, he got used to us. Eventually he would send the babies towards us when he could see we were friends and not enemies.”
Initially gorilla permits cost only £121, but there was no guarantee the rangers could locate the animals so that tourists could see them.
“Communication was a very big problem,” explains Tumugabirwe, who retired last year. Without any radio equipment, gumboots or rain jacket, he would trek barefoot through stinging nettles and ants’ nests, occasionally staying out past midnight to check on the gorillas’ location.
Despite the hardships he endured, 30 years later the agile 60-year-old still feels young. Currently seeking funds through a Kickstarter campaign, he hopes his NGO will provide an emotional and financial support network for retired men and women with plenty of energy still left in their tanks. “I dream about gorillas,” he confesses, his voice trembling with mixed emotions of pride and sadness. “My life was — and still is — gorillas.”
Mubare’s original members have either died or joined other families, but I plan to meet a new generation — Mubare’s nine descendants — the following morning. In contrast to Tumugabirwe’s early days, gorilla trekking is now a far smoother, carefully orchestrated experience: a maximum of eight tourists is assigned to each troop, who will have been closely monitored by trackers since first light.
“They’re not shy,” warns Amos Nduhukire, our ranger, as he shows us a family tree of Mubare’s current members during a briefing at the park’s headquarters. “They’ll run between your legs.”
After a short drive to reach the unmapped village of Kanyerere, we begin our trek through farmland. Mud brick houses peek from behind the fanning leaves of banana plants on a crush of hilltops. Women dressed in bright kitenge fabrics are bent double sowing potato seeds for harvest. On pathways children have laid out sketches of gorillas for sale. A revenue-sharing scheme means 20 per cent of all park fees are invested in surrounding communities, along with an additional £8 of every £565 permit going to those living close to Bwindi.
A couple of hours after slipping and sliding on steep forest trails matted with tree roots, we mask up (a new rule introduced during the pandemic) and prepare for our one-hour audience with the gorillas.
Tumbling from the bushes, juveniles roll past our feet, making it tricky to keep the required 10m distance. Staring at his reflection in my camera lens, one toddler points a thick, stubby digit in my direction. But he’s soon distracted by a sibling pouncing playfully on his back. More interested in foraging for fresh leaves, his mother scales a fig tree.
Submerged in nettles, the silverback Maraya is indifferent to his human visitors. Barely lifting an eyelid, the alpha ape fiddles with his belly button before mounting a female and grunting pornographically.
“I told you they weren’t shy,” sniggers Nduhukire, as the big daddy lets rip an explosive fart.
Without doubt habituation has altered the behaviour of these animals, making them less wild. One of the biggest contentions between leaders in conservation and tourism is whether more gorillas should be habituated. Nelson Guma, Bwindi’s chief park warden, says there are no plans for further habituation. Splits in existing families are creating enough groups to meet demands. He also hints at a possible increase of permit prices to “harmonise” with Rwanda’s £1,210 fee.
When we meet at his office next to the park gates in Buhoma, he admits Uganda’s success has also brought challenges, including increasing pressure on space as both gorilla and human communities grow.
“When you remove the fear of humans from gorillas, they go to where people are,” he says, outlining plans to clear thick areas of vegetation within the forest to make them more accessible to gorillas. Forcibly moving villages to create a buffer zone would be a last resort.
Understandably it’s a sensitive topic. Controversially evicted from Bwindi in the early 1990s, the Batwa hunter-gatherer community has never fully adapted to a new world. Groups continue to campaign for rights to re-enter the forest and perform traditional ceremonies, but the risk of transmitting diseases to the animals, who are genetically close to humans, is too great.
And here lies the great contradiction of habituation efforts: despite years of trying to bring people and gorillas together, it’s imperative they stay apart.
Yet Kalema-Zikusoka thinks the necessary evil of tourism isn’t quite the demon it’s made out to be. Weighing up the pros and cons back at the CTPH’s scenic dining area, she admits all arguments boil down to the same conclusion: mountain gorillas are the only gorilla subspecies whose population is growing.
Nodding in agreement, I watch the peaks of extinct volcanoes ghost into the horizon and listen to the fading calls of roosting colobus monkeys as dusk falls. Bwindi is derived from the word Mubwindi, which means “place of darkness” in the local language Runyakitara. But the thriving forest I see below me has evolved into a sanctuary penetrated by rays of light.
Sarah Marshall was a guest of Great Lakes Safaris, which has five nights’ B&B from £1,873pp, including domestic flights, one gorilla trek permit and some extra meals (greatlakessafaris.com). Fly to Entebbe
Growing human populations in communities neighbouring protected areas have continued to become a major threat to the rising number of wildlife populations across Uganda. The continued habitat loss on the side of protected areas frustrate wildlife conservation efforts.
Human activities such as agriculture and industrialisation have forced hundreds of animal species into migration and facilitated human-wildlife conflict because activities exert more pressure on natural resources, which serve as natural habitats for animals.
In the past, people living around Queen Elizabeth National Park and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park would go into the parks for poaching and timber cutting as sources of food and livelihood.
These daily struggles caused mayhem because many members of the public lost their lives after they were killed by law enforcement teams and animals. In Rubirizi district, a number of family heads died guarding their crops against elephant raids
“Most of us are widows because our husbands were shot dead by rangers. They were found hunting in the park. Elephants destroyed our gardens and we felt like killing them in order to compensate ourselves with ivory. But we were aware that this was illegal,” Birungi Mwanje, a member of Kataara Women’s Poverty Alleviation Group (KWPAG), a group running projects that minimise environmental impacts on Queen Elizabeth National Park shares.
Coffee growing
To address this conservation challenge, communities in south western Uganda, have been organised into Arabica coffee growing and value addition groups. The two strands of growing and value addition have proven to be alternative sources of livelihood.
According to Moses Agaba, the group coordinator of KWPAG, women have since actively participated in growing of coffee and value addition.
“Most of these are widows whose husbands died in the park. They used to sell meat obtained from the park as a source of livelihood. Today, they are now busy processing coffee and they are earning a living. A woman who is busy roasting coffee cannot send her son to the park for meat,” says Agaba.
The group known as Kataara Women’s Roasted Coffee Beans, collects red coffee berries from their own gardens and out growers, process it into roasted berries or powder and sell it to tourists or hotels, where they get more yields.
“From out growers, we buy one basin of red coffee at Shs2,000 and after processing it, a basin goes for up to Shs 374,429 and to us, this is a profitable business. We cannot go back to the park,” women coffee farmers say.
During the peak season, the group fetches up to Shs2 to 3 million per month, whereas during off season, they get Shs600,000-Shs800,000. Immaculate Nyangoma Tumwebaze, the group chairperson, says they chose coffee growing after they found out that coffee cannot be eaten by elephants. Aside from coffee farming, do they do other activities such as turning elephant dung into paper and art objects, which they sell to earn money. Coffee growing also helps the residents protect their soil from erosion
Supporting community tourism
When tourists visit the Kicwamba community, where KWPAG is located, they support community tourism by visiting coffee gardens, processing centres, where they pay to see value addition activities and also end up supporting different interventions that protect the park.
In Rubirizi District, coffee contributes 68-70 percent to the economy, according to Habib Kaparaga, the district secretary for finance and administration. Areas engaged in coffee growing include Kicwamba, Katerera, Ryeru, Kirugu and Kyabakara.
Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, where 1,063 mountain gorillas live today, is surrounded by isolated and impoverished communities. In the past, due to their close proximity both inside and outside the national park, preventable infectious diseases would spread between humans, gorillas and livestock.
This along with habitat encroachment, poaching and economic instability threatened the existence of the mountain gorillas, until Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, the first Wildlife Veterinary Officer of the Uganda Wildlife Authority Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) came and established Gorilla Conservation Coffee as a social enterprise for neighbouring communities.
CTPH promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people, gorillas and other wildlife to coexist through improving their health and livelihoods in and around protected areas and wildlife rich habitats.
Need for livelihood
Dr Zikusoka discovered that coffee farmers in Kanungu District were not being given a fair price for their coffee and were struggling to survive, forcing them into national parks to meet their basic family needs, specifically food and fuel wood.
Gorilla Conservation Coffee pays a premium of Shs1,872 per kilogramme, above the market price, according to Edward Sekandi, the CTPH operations manager.
“These are mainly former poachers, now reformed. They are converted into coffee growing. It is an intensive, engaging and profitable activity that they no longer want to go back to the park,” says Sekandi.
GCC prevents residents from practicing deforestation for charcoal and rallies them into shade tree planting in their coffee gardens in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
Sekandi says farmers are encouraged to use organic manure in their coffee gardens instead of artificial inputs, which he says spoil the soil structure.
Reformed poachers, who are now great farmers are supported through training in sustainable coffee farming and processing. This helps them to improve the coffee quality, increase production yield and protect the endangered gorillas and their habitat.
“When you are tracking gorillas, you tour coffee farms. We buy coffee from farmers and sell it to traders, roasters and retailers and the donations from every bag sold, goes to the work of CTPH,” says Dr Zikusoka.
Markets
The coffee is 100 percent premium Arabica, which is selectively harvested for only red ripe cherries, handpicked, wet processed and dried under shade. This coffee is tested for quality at every level. The coffee is roasted and packed to quality standards.
Each cup has a unique aroma with hints of caramel, butter notes and almond, with a citrus taste and a sweet finish. The group’s first blend is named after Kanyonyi, the former lead silverback of the Mubare gorilla group, located in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.
The coffee is majorly sold in the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand, France and South Africa. GCC makes a special effort to support women coffee farmers, helping to provide opportunities for economic empowerment, disrupt male financial dominance and break and stereotypes.
“When I first started working with gorillas, there were no women at all working in conservation in Uganda, there were no female rangers at all. Now we have female rangers, trackers, and porters. More women are getting involved in conservation in that way. I’m pretty happy about that,” says Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka.
Over time Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka, known as ‘The Gorilla Doctor’ has shifted her focus to also working in public health because it turns out community health and gorillas go hand in hand. In Uganda’s forest communities inside Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, there’s tension between humans and wildlife. People are living in very close proximity to the gorillas, and Dr. Kalema-Zikusoka has made it part of her life’s work to educate locals on the importance of health and hygiene for both themselves and for the conservation and future of Uganda’s mountain gorilla population. She does this through her NGO, Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH). And, Gorilla Conservation Coffee is a social enterprise that’s part of CTPH was launched after Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka visited farmers living adjacent to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. Here she learned that the farmers were not being given a fair price for their coffee and were struggling hard to survive, forcing them to use the national park to meet their basic family needs for food and fuel wood.
COVID-19 helped people to understand just how devastating the effects of human-to-gorilla transmission of a virus can be, but this is something the pioneering wildlife veterinarian has been working on for many years prior to the pandemic. Today she continues to work, day in and day out, to protect the health of gorillas, as well as that of the communities with whom they co-exist—with a strong focus on empowering women by improving their livelihoods through access to healthcare.
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “I always wanted to be a vet since—I grew up with lots of pets at home. I started a wildlife club in high school, and it took off from there. We took kids to the national parks and I thought, I want to be a vet who works with wildlife. Someone at the wildlife club offices told me about the mountain gorillas and I was so excited to hear about them but they told me we couldn’t visit them because they weren’t yet habituated for tourism. That was in the late eighties. Later when I went to the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom, I got to choose an animal to work with during training and I chose Uganda’s mountain gorillas.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “It took a few years. Between the time I heard the gorillas weren’t yet habituated to the time that I was in vet school, they had habituated two families for tourism. A doctor who worked in mountain gorilla conservation in Rwanda came to set up the International Gorilla Conservation Programme office, an NGO, in Uganda. She was my supervisor and mentor, and she was very instrumental in ensuring that healthy, safe practices were set up to ensure that people weren’t making gorillas sick with human illnesses. I was looking at that closely, seeing how tourism was affecting gorillas by looking at their fecal samples, which I was given permission to do by the director of Uganda’s National Parks. Eventually, I was hired as the first-ever veterinarian for the Uganda Wildlife Authority.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “It’s been a journey. It was a really exciting time as they had only been working with them for about a year, so the gorillas were not as habituated as they are now, they were quite a bit shyer. It was just an amazing time to be there and there were very few tourists. Not that I don’t like tourists, but it was quite nice to have so few people there and the locals are so charming, friendly, and hospitable.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “The first disease that came to gorillas from people was scabies, a skin disease that came from people living around the park who had very little access to healthcare. That’s when we knew that we needed to improve community healthcare. I made it an imperative part of my work, improving the health of people who interact with the wildlife and live in close contact with them.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “With CTPH, We realized that we also needed to look at people’s livelihoods because many people are unhealthy because they were poor. So now we have an active wildlife health program and an actual community health program. We treat the livestock as well and strengthen community-based healthcare for people and get them to also do conservation outreach. We’re integrating human health and animal health together and meanwhile, we’re also integrating wildlife conservation or everything together.
The fact that now people know that COVID-19 can spread from people back to the wildlife, especially the closely related wildlife, like the gorillas and chimps, and even onto cats and other species.
So that got everyone thinking about what we’ve been talking about for so many years: The impact of genetic disease on conservation and on public health. Finally, people really started to understand what CTPH has been trying to do all these years and advocating for. When the pandemic began I was getting calls from people saying or emails saying, ‘Oh, we understand what you’re trying to do now you know, human health equals wildlife health.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “My husband Lawrence thought it would be a good idea to help coffee farmers around Uganda. We noticed that a lot of the coffee farmers were not being hired and so they weren’t benefiting from being close to gorillas like other community members who could get jobs as rangers or porters who carry tourists and luggage, sell crops for meals, or work at different accommodations. The coffee farmers were being left out and were still going into the forest to poach and collect firewood just to survive.
So, we started to engage them as well. That also became a tourist activity because tourists could now go to coffee safaris and visit the coffee farmers. The tourists ended up being the main people who were buying the coffee. Not only the ones visiting Bwindi, but also in other parks because it was being sold in lodges all over Uganda, even the shops in Kampala, and Entebbe Duty-Free.
When we started the Gorilla Conservation Coffee enterprise, we thought most of the sales were going to be outside Uganda, because Ugandans don’t really drink coffee that much, we mainly drink tea.
So it’s all been part of sustainable tourism because we give the farmers better prices than the market price. But the coffee has to be very good so that we get repeat customers. Some people will buy the coffee to say, ‘Oh, let’s help the poor people living next to the gorillas. And then they’ll just buy once because it doesn’t really taste good, thinking they’ve just done something good for the gorillas, but what brings them back is that the coffee tastes really good.”
It’s like even if you can’t come to visit the gorillas, you can support them by buying Gorilla Conservation Coffee because then we’re able to provide an income for people who would otherwise be poaching during the pandemic. So, because of gorilla conservation, it meant that some people got an income during the pandemic during lockdown—the coffee farmers.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We have a camp in Buhoma called the Gorilla Conservation Camp with the best views of the forest. Our office is based right in the park! It’s where pre-pandemic we hosted students and researchers who are studying the gorillas. They get an immersion when they’re with us because we work with the gorillas and they also learn about the community issues and get more involved in our work.
It’s rustic, it’s not like the high-end accommodation you find in Bwindi, but to me, it has the best view in Bwindi of the forest—it’s amazing. People can also go to the Gorilla Health Center and learn about the community work we’re doing. That’s something that we offer to tourists and also the students and volunteers who come to visit. Some come and stay at the camp, but even if they don’t stay at the camp, they can still come to meet me, see the health center and we do a presentation or a seminar.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We have become much more intensive about it since the pandemic. There wasn’t much poaching in Bwindi before COVID-19 because there was so much tourism. But when the pandemic began and tourism had to be suspended for six months, not only because of the global lockdowns and preventing people from making each other sick but to prevent people from making the gorillas sick. During that time poaching went up drastically and that’s what led to the spearing of Rafiki. It was very sad, but after Rafiki was speared, we realized that we now needed to address hunger.
Rafiki’s killer was given 11 years in jail, which is the longest anyone has ever been given for killing a wild animal in Uganda. It was a very strong message, but as long as people are hungry and desperate because tourists stop coming, it will keep happening. Their whole livelihood was focused on tourism. People were very hungry and the money from tourism that was helping them to buy food wasn’t there. People had stopped doing things like farming since tourism came along, and took jobs as porters instead because in one day you could make what someone farming could make in one month or one week.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We realized that we needed to address hunger immediately so we started to provide them with fast-growing seedlings. We first went to the most vulnerable—the people from the village where the poacher came from, the Nkuringo Sector. We selected about 1000 homes there together with the Uganda Wildlife Authority, wardens, rangers, and village conservation team to identify the people who were the poorest. Of course, that included the poacher’s wife, a young woman in her early twenties. She’s the poorest of the poor, everyone there has a piece of land, and she doesn’t even have that. She’s living on her grandfather’s land in a small hut with three children under the age of three. When we gave her the seedlings she created a garden to put her crops in.
But those are the kind of people who find it worth it to go into the forest to poach for food, during covid, because they were hungry and could feed their families, or because they could sell the meat they poached at the local market.
We’ve done a small survey and we have our volunteers following up on them to see how they are growing. One thing that came out of the survey is that the biggest impact COVID has had on them is hunger.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “Well, that was part of the reason also where we provided them the fast-growing seedlings—we gave them 10 different types to plant. It wasn’t just emergency food relief for them to have something to eat today. But it was also for them to get back into sustainable farming, which they used to do before tourism began, that was the only way they survived. So that when tourists come back, the money from tourism doesn’t go to feed their stomachs as they’ll have their own food source. Instead, that money can go towards other things, like paying school fees. Hunger is the most basic human need followed by other things. If the only way that they can feed themselves is through money from tourists, then that’s a dangerous situation to be in. This way they will always have food, and the money from tourism does other things to support their work.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “I think it’s important to engage women in conservation and Ride for Women in Bwindi is a shining example of that. We need to remember that women are half of the equation. If we’re only engaging the men, like the reformed poachers, which is another group we started to engage a lot more after Rafiki was killed, we’re missing the mark. When we approached them, the wives said, ‘Look, we tell our husbands to go and poach because we need the food for our home.’ So, we know we really need to engage the women because they are the ones who their husbands will listen to when they say don’t go back to poach.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “There wasn’t but Ride for a Women provided that. During the pandemic, a lot of them were about to be laid off but we got them to make masks for the rangers and everyone else instead of the traditional Kitenge clothing and tablecloths that were being sold to tourists pre-pandemic.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “There are many rangers who are women, but the majority are men. When I first started out working with gorillas, there were no female rangers at all. It was not the job for them; the mindset was a female ranger or tracker doesn’t take people to the gorillas. Now there are more female rangers, and we even have female trackers and porters.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “They used to say women can’t go to the gorillas, but I did. And other women are doing it now so I’m really pleased about that.
I was so excited about being with the gorillas and the work I was doing for conservation. That it didn’t bother me too much, but. And the men were very kind, you know, they would walk slowly so that I don’t get tired because they’re not necessarily fitter than women. I have to say. So that’s just how we were made.
It’s good that we’re having more women getting involved in conservation in that way— I’m pretty happy about that. When I first started out like twenty-five years ago, there were no women working here working in conservation. But eventually, I’m glad that I inspired other women.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We realized that if the gorillas could catch diseases from humans they could also catch it from other things. Like if people don’t cover their rubbish heaps or they defecate in their gardens, or if they leave dirty clothing, or scarecrows, and the gorillas come into contact with it, they are going to pick up other diseases. So, I was tasked with that job to hold these health education workshops about this issue—and that was my first time working in public health. And that was a turning point in my life.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “We selected the villages where gorillas were coming out of the forest and going into the human communities. Together with the district health authority, we were talking to the communities talking about hygiene, community conservation, and how their health and hygiene affect conservation. Talking about why this was a problem, helping them understand. I was about to say this is the solution until the warden touched my arm and said, let them come up with the solution.
They came up with much more varied and better solutions than I was proposing for them, which was a big eye-opener for me as a vet trained to solve people’s problems. I wasn’t trained to listen to what people have to do to solve their own problems.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “One thing that they said to me that I didn’t expect to hear is that they wanted health services to be brought closer to them—and that was not among my solutions, mine was to be more hygienic, don’t defecate in the gardens.
And I just thought, wow, that’s amazing—I just didn’t realize that they didn’t get health care. I knew that the further away you go from the capital city, there are fewer services but I didn’t realize that they had no health services at all.
They were like, look, you need to continue to give us this education, it shouldn’t just be a one-off that you come today, you should be continuous.
And then also they said that we needed to strengthen the human gorilla conflict team and get them gumboots and make sure that they’re motivated.”
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka: “The women were whispering to each other saying wow, we must educate our girls. Look at her, you know, she’s standing up in the communities and talking to us. She’s leading a team of men. They really liked that. Girls there get pregnant at 15, and become a wife of someone, there was hardly any girl’s education. And that’s important because once the girls are educated, they influence their families a lot. You know, when you live in a home, few women are educated.”