Miroslav Bobek appeared as a guest in Czech Radio Leonardo's talk show 'Vstupte!' (Come in!). In an interview with Robert Tamchyna, he talked about the circumstances that led to a revision of the project's goals as well as about its activities in the Year of Gorilla 2009. He also told many interesting stories from the Revealed team's recent month-long expedition to Central Africa.
Since the very beginning, the Revealed project has been gathering funds to support protection of western lowland gorillas in Central Africa. However, it wasn't until the first visit to the Limbe Wildlidfe Centre (LWC) in Cameroon in 2006 that serious support efforts started to shape up. It became obvious that profound knowledge of the environment and living conditions of local people was necessary for any initiative to be effective.
LWC is not only a rescue facility for abandoned young animals and handicapped primates but also a centre for environmental education focusing on children and youth. This inspired the publication of a fairy-tale book about gorillas with Moja as the main heroine in English and French and its distribution to schools as a teaching aid helping to shape children's attitudes towards the unique African nature.
As an unintended consequence, the publication of the book helped start cooperation between the Revealed project and international organizations that highly appreciated the book as the first such project aimed at protection of gorillas and the environment in Central Africa. The Revealed became a partner of the UN-sponsored Year of Gorilla and of the WildlifeDirect organisation and started to develop further plans.
Thanks to the recent expedition to Africa, all those who follow the Revealed project could learn first-hand about the local environment, about initiatives supported from the Revealed fund, how difficult life is for local people as well as about the challenges that local wildlife protection authorities have to face. Our live webcasts showed the praiseworthy work of animal keepers at LWC; we found that distribution of the book works well, and that the fairy tales were enthusiastically accepted by Cameroonian children and have met their purpose. We visited the most remote places of the Central African Republic, met gorillas in the wild, and experienced darker sides of living in the forest.
You can hear about all that and more from Miroslav Bobek, the author of the Revealed project. The interview is available in audio here (in Czech).
16.11.2009 Twiggs was born in the wild in Cameroon around the year 1997. She and another female gorilla, Brighter, was smuggled across the border to Nigeria as infants to be sold as pets on the locale pet marked.
09.11.2009 When Pitchou was very small, she was brought to Hotel Ilomba in Kribi to be sold, after her mother had been killed by hunters. She stayed there for three days, until the hotel owners could no longer bare to watch her suffer. The family donated her to the LWC.
02.11.2009 Chella came to Limbe Wildlife Centre when he was only two years old. He was found in the back of a bush-taxi sitting on his dead mother. Wildlife officials confiscated him and kept him three weeks before bringing him to the Wildlife Centre.
21.09.2009 Adjibolo came to Limbe Wildlife Centre when she was only about 6 months old. She was confiscated by senior civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Adjibolo, from a hunter who tried to sell her.
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