Jo Roberts - CEO Wilderness Foundation UKI have just returned from South Africa working on a variety of our initiatives over a few days. All have struck a very serious and disturbing chord:  the need for humans to be sorted out in terms of basic needs like food, employment, health, shelter – before we can even start to expect an  interest by local people in protecting wild nature.   The most shocking stats for me at this time, was the fact that 74% of South Africans between the age of 17 and 25 are unemployed with no hope for  jobs in the future.  Protecting wild landscape and nature is not on the forefront of their minds. Finding sustainability is – and sadly we know from experience if you are not able to be part of the employable classes, you are vulnerable to joining the ranks of an underclass linked very often to crime and drugs.
Survival of the species, for most of the world,  has a human agenda as number one on the list whether we like it or not..
Visiting a very poor community on the fence line of the Imfolozi Game Reserve brings this rudely  home. On the side of fence where the park lies, the grass grows tall and yellow, waving in the bush wind. There are large trees and thick bush cover. On the other side of the fence, in the Hlabisa community, the soil is red and dry, tree cover is limited, there is almost no water, and the incidence of HIV/Aids is high, with bill boards offering reminders for health care. Children gather in excitement at strangers in their midst, and kick soccer balls made of rolled up plastic bags.
School buildings as you pass through the town  look melancholy and abandoned, with not a single window pane intact – all shattered – not a blade of grass in the courtyard, and no tree for children to sit in the shade at breaktime. Asking our Zulu friend and guide why the windows don’t get fixed, he shrugs, and says that when you have more pressing issues you don’t focus on aesthetics.
Members of the community get on with their daily chores and life goes on.
A horrifying statistic in the school that we are building support for with a UK school based in Birmingham (they will support  capacity building and sponsor  local youth on wilderness trails) is that out of their 350 scholars, 30% are orphans…in other words, one in three of the young people we talk to have no parents.  Looked after by the community, the school and the government school fees programme, and daily meal provision, they survive.  With all the talk of poverty and lack of opportunity – there was no poverty of community ethic and spirit – people were helping and providing and sharing with each other. Traditional values and stoicism prevailing –something we all admire and may have lost in our more affluent, socially isolated lifestyles.
But still that doesn’t bring jobs or training or a future.
The good news is that we can do small things. Rodney, as one of our Zulu lead trail guides, is inspirational and has orchestrated for this UK school to support his small community school with teaching, capacity building, equipment and moral support. He has initiated communityleader wilderness trails with members of the town and region and inspired them to experience this ‘wilderness over the fence’ for the first time. This trail programme initiates understanding and collective cultural and emotional ownership of the rich natural resource so close to hand.
We talked with an ex-trailist and  local councillor about healthy environment- healthy people…our need for wild nature and ecological balances for safe water, clean air, invigorated spirit. He was there and viscerally understands that the two are inexorably linked…but also he has to think of hungry mouths in his community and a government that is hard to engage and doesn’t deliver much without a struggle. But he definitely had been inspired by his wilderness trail and the experience.
Seven youth from the school, chosen for their leadership and hard work, will now go on trail with seven UK students who also come from an area in the UK that has endemic poverty and  unemployment, lack of aspiration and opportunity.  The comparisons will be fascinating.
The sharing of a wild experience together will be remarkable and enlightening. We need to follow up on the longer term impact of the wilderness trail on the social learning that takes place, but vitally on the  thinking, learning and consciousness of why it is so import to preserve what we have. …. what do these young people carry home in their hearts when their back packs empty? What did they learn about each other? What did they learn about themselves? What next?
At the University of Cape Town, a fellow anthropologist wrote an article on Education for Frustration – the build up of knowledge in rural black communities and the dashing of hope as jobs are as distant as the evening star in the dusky night.
Our responsibility is to support the school and students with practical sustainability programmes, such as  vegetable plots, chicken and poultry enterprise, an orchard, goats as a micro finance project. The idea is for UK teachers to visit and support the local teachers, help with revision for final year students, provide necessary equipment where possible, and to visit the wilderness on their doorstep.  We hope to create a school that can become a centre for hope in the community where they see real things happening, lead by their young people.
We also need to build a mutual understanding that the fact that people travel the earth (and therein lies a contradiction) to visit the last remaining true wildernesses, brings the benefits that we talk about to their school. We need to make the link that it is the wilderness that is the source of all this life.
All this can be mixed in with acute poverty without contradiction but it still needs care and forethought.  There needs to be a clear link with the wilderness trails programme bringing extra capacity to the community because of it. Bringing on these wonderful, bright young people is critical and their connections to the park and nature that result from this activity will be essential, as otherwise , I think the long grass waving in the wind over the fence is surely doomed.