Rumble: Aid Work with a Different Flair....

One of the advantages of being an aid worker, is to come in areas where few people go. [Tine says that the places I go to, nobody in his right mind would want to go anyway! :-) ]
When I worked in Goma in a country then called Zaire, we once drove to the Virunga National Park to see the mountain gorillas. You remember, from the movie 'Gorillas in the Mist'. At that time, just after the Rwanda genocide, the whole area was off-limits for tourists, so we had the park rangers and the primates 'all to ourselves'. We sat for hours in the dense jungle surrounded by gorillas.
Last night, I tried to find the link to the Virunga Park, and stumbled onto a wonderful blogsite from Wild Life Direct, titled "Blogs from the Wild". It is the 'mother' site to dozens of others blogsites, all with one common team: wild life and nature preservation in Africa. From blogs by park rangers to blogs of people working with communities in protected areas. From blogs about habitat conservation to the field blog of a Congolese warden working in the Virunga Park.

All blogs are really high quality, very well written and with masses of pictures and videos. Worth a look. It is a different read from what I normally write about. But it shows aid and development work comes in different flairs and flavours...

Pictures courtesy wildlifedirect.org