On Feb 21st, I have given USD 19,000 to Mara Conservancy.

The total donation from Japan now reached USD 24,350 (as of Feb 23).

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Apology for my prolonged silence. I have been quite busy with fund raising for Mara Conservancy since my return from Tanzania. We now got Will (former Wildlifedirect blogger) to do the Mara fundraising and he will be responsible for English and French speaking countries. My responsibility is with my own country, Japan. Besides from Wildlifedirect, I have my personal homepage written in Japanese since 2004. This site has average daily hits of 700 and readers have been wonderfully supportive in donation towards Mara. In addition, I started writing to weekly mail magazine called Japan Media Mail (owned by famous Japanese novelist and filmmaker Ryu Murakami and has 130,000 subscribers), helped Brian with interview article for newspaper -Japan Daily and several other magazine articles, etc. Anyway, in two weeks I managed to raise USD 13,190 for Mara Triangle!

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Thank you Dana J $100 and THERESA S $25 for your generous donation! Here is amount of money which I have managed to collect for project vehicle fund during the last couple of months.

$5,000 -Disney Conservation Fund
$4,600 -Personal Donation from Japan
$6,500 -Media Work (dozens of media interviews I did for FREE, but they had to “DONATE” towards project vehicle in return)
$1,965 -Personal Donation from Wildlifedirect

The total amount comes to $18,065

The project vehicle costs $22,857 (with lots and lots of discount!), which leaves me to raise an additional amount of $4,792. I am very close to getting the means to get back to my vaccination work, but I still need help in reaching my goal!

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Asante sana (Thank you very much) Dana J for your donation of $55 towards the project vehicle!

I am very close to reaching my target for vehicle purhcase, but it would be another three weeks till I get the vehicle. I cannot wait to get back to vaccination work!

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I thought I would answer Pippa’s comment on my new entry as many people wonder about the same thing.

The so-called “Masai Mara” is sub-divided into three sections. Narok, Mara Triangle and Koiyaki-Lemek. Narok and Koiyaki are both in Narok district, while Mara Triangle is in Trans Mara district. The Trans Mara side of wildlife reserve is administered by a private company called “Mara Conservancy”. Mara Conservancy’s work is supported 100% from tourist park fee (they have been operating without donor support and government support since 2001). Total number of lodges in Narok and Koiyaki is over 60, where as lodges in Mara Triangle supporting Mara Conservationy’s work is only 5. Out of USD40 park fee, 55% goes to Trans Mara county council for district work (road, school, hospital, etc) and 45% goes towards wildlife adminstration work.

Please refer to this map on the administrative partitioning of the Maasai Mara. The pink area is the Koiyaki wildlife area (Maasai Group Ranch), green area is the Mara Triangle (Mara Conservancy) and blue area is Narok side of Mara (administered by Narok CC). The dark blue line shows the boundary of the area people often refer to as “Masai Mara National Reserve”. Beige area is Maasai land where I do my dog vaccination against Rabies and Canine Distemper Virus which came to halt due to current unrest and lack of car.

I was not exactly sure what it means when Pippa mentioned “another USD40” has to be paid to Triangle”, but I am guessing it is problem of double park fee that came about in last couple of years. When clients staying in Triangle went on extended game drive on Koiyaki side, they were charged extra park fee and the same happened when client went to Narok side. Thus, now same thing happens when clients from Narok or Lemek’s side enter into Triangle. If you stay in Narok side, you pay USD10 (agreed price by Narok and Triangle). If you stay in Koiyaki side, you pay USD40 (Koiyaki insisted that they will charge full park fee in their reserve so Koiyaki client have to do the same to Triangle). Offcourse, when you stay in Triangle, you pay “additional park fee” to enter Narok or Koiyaki. You will only pay USD40 if you stay in one part of Mara. They have been trying to come up with one-time park fee for entire Mara, but no agreement has reached up to this date.

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For those of you who are concerned about the sate of Mara, please read the January report by Mara Conservancy.

January 2008
There was widespread unrest after the elections at the end of December, started because of allegations of vote rigging in the Presidential election. The international community was very quick to speak out and try and resolve the issue – fearing that the situation could degenerate into Rwanda style ethnic violence focused against the Kikuyu, the President’s tribe – they quickly appointed senior representatives to visit the country and finally Mr Koffi Annan, the recently retired Secretary General of the United Nations, was selected to assist in resolving the crisis. 250,000 people were displaced from the Rift Valley and several hundred people killed in the initial violence. For a few days in the middle of the month there seemed to be a glimmer of hope; things calmed down, Koffi Annan was going to mediate, and the situation started to return to normal. This was all shattered in the last week of the month, when violence returned – this time with a very strong ethnic bias that was only partly linked to the elections. This is a very dangerous situation because it breeds an increasing spiral of violence and retaliation. There is little doubt that that the initial trouble was, in part, fueled by politicians who felt that they had been cheated out of the Presidency. The problem is that they then lost control of the “genie” they had let out of the bottle. This brought to the fore long pent-up pressure on land and resources, as well as perceived injustices in the distribution of land before and after independence. Unless the security situation is very firmly dealt with, and the political impasse broken, we can expect a protracted period of civil unrest and ethnic clashes. This spells disaster for tourism, conservation, the economy – and of course for the country as a whole.

Revenue and Accounts
We have witnessed a major decline in revenue, brought about by the election fiasco and its aftermath. We had originally anticipated a 50% decline in tourist numbers but in fact the decline has been closer to 80% in January. We have had to institute major cut-backs and cost cutting measures in order to survive the next few months. Some of the measures taken to reduce expenditure include:

-Stopping all capital purchases
-Limiting all new development
-Stopping the grader
-Stopping one tractor
-Stopping compensation for cattle killed
-Reducing payments to community scouts
-Stopping two of the three anti-harassment vehicles
-Stopping all night ambushes
-Laying-off all casuals
-Severely restricting our patrol area
-Restricting all out-of-park travel and reducing staff food shopping trips to twice per month
-Limiting rations

This cannot be happening!!

The total number of bushmeat poachers Mara Conservancy rangers arrested since 2001 has now reached 1,003. Before these hard working rangers dedicated themselves in conserving the wildlife of the Mara, this area was experiencing heavy antelope poaching by bushmeat traders. The estimated number of animals killed per year ranged somewhere between 1,000-2,000. The first three months when Mara Conservancy started their work in the Mara, 8 lions were killed as direct result of livestock-wildlife conflict. I was working in a lodge in the Mara (1996) when Mara Conservancy was not established. Poaching and unrest were out of control in some part of Mara. Tanzanian border just near Serena was no go area for us, and there were many poacher huts inside the reserve, as well as several reported cases of tourists being attacked by bandits. Mara Conservancy has reduced these horrible incidents to almost zero in just seven years, so you can imagine how dedicated these people are. With the current crisis, things could possibly return to the way it was and that is a scary thought.

Please help the Mara!

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After six weeks in Tanzania, I have returned to Kenya where increasing number of people are being hacked, burned and displaced out of their own homes by angry mob of people. I was difficult for me to immediately sit down and write about the current state of this country as I was bombarded with more and more depressing news during my stay in Nairobi. What is going on in Kenya? Where did all these hatred and anger come from…? Even here in Trans Mara district, Maasai are fighting with Kalenjin in certain parts of the district. In the small center near my house, Maasai youth are chasing away Kisii businessman claiming that ‘they are becoming rich from Maasai’. STOP IT! Can’t people see that they are destroying themselves by all these hatred and anger?!

Now no tourist comes to the Mara and operational fund for conservation work is virtually dried up. Rangers are being told to go back to their rural home untill peace and tourist revenue returns in Kenya. My vaccination work is difficult to continue as my work area covers both Maasai land and Kalenjin land…

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