LWC Education 2005

January - August

In 2005 the LWC’s education department led by Sigal Costo and Ateh Wilson, has expended and increased its activities delivering the conservation message to many more students and visitors. Our outreach program ended in May 2005 with the students leaving schools for their summer holiday. We have reached 873 students monthly, teaching in four different schools throughout Limbe. In addition, with the support of Disney grant we extended our program out of Limbe to the village of Batoke which is the bush meat capital in our area. 190 students from secondary school have benefited from this program and become more aware of issues
concerning their environment and the protection of their wildlife. Our education program addressed the bushmeat crisis in Cameroon and the results of our
evaluation questionnaire showed that the program left an impact on the students
and succeeded to change the students’ views. We are intending to continue our environmental education in Batoke and as well as in other schools in Limbe starting from October 2005.

In June, July we hosted our annual summer holiday in collaboration with Busch
Garden Zoo, Florida. In total, 107 students came to our centre to participate in
this special workshop. The workshop, that put an emphasis on the bushmeat crisis, enabled Cameroonian students to chat online with American students about issues concerning cultural differences and conservation. The workshop was said to be
one of the best conducted here and received excellent feedbacks from the participants. Nature Club continues every Saturday in the centre and on average
we have 40 students coming every week to take part in our program. In the next year we hope to increase the number of students we reach in our programs and in doing so to spread the message of conservation to more and more people in hope
of reducing the hunting and the eating of the endangered wildlife species of Cameroon.

Keeper Exchange Program

On 6th Many 2005 one of our best young keepers, Kill Matute, travelled to the UK
to participate in the keeper exchange programme which is sponsored by Chester
Zoo. Killi had not been past Douala prior to this so a trip to Europe was really
special. Killi benefited so much from the program not only he was exposed to
another world, another culture, but also because he learnt different methods of animal keeping and he also worked with different animal species that he had never seen before. Killi spent one month in Chester Zoo and returned to us with new
energy and a wider knowledge concerning animal keeping. We would like to thank Chester Zoo for sponsoring this very successful annual program

PASA Vet Conference

LWC Between the 3rd and the 9th April 2005
the LWC hosted the PASA Vet Conference. The conference
enabled over 35 vets from different
countries around
Africa, Europe and
USA to meet their colleague; give presentations and discuss different
issues relating to the veterinary care of wildlife. In addition,
the vets were taught new lab techniques
and participated in different procedures involving anaesthesia, health checks and post mortems. The LWC would like to thank Doug Cress, Steve Unwin and Wayne Boardman, who orgenaized the conference with the management of the LWC, planned the agenda and helped facilitate the activities.
The annual PASA conferences (Management, Veterinary and Education), all of
which have sometime been hosted by the LWC, provide all of the PASA sanctuaries an opportunity to share knowledge and experience, develop professionally, and
meet colleagues while at the same time visiting other member sanctuaries around Africa. The LWC vet, education and management team have benefited enormously from these annual events and would like to thank PASA for funding and organizing such successful programs. In 2006 the vet conference will be held at Tacogama,
and the LWC will be presented by Dr. John Kiyamg.

Visitors

Colleen McCann- WCS- New York
Colleen who arrived on 23rd April 2005, visited the LWC in order to have a first-hand impression of the centre and the work that is done here, with a view to develop a possible long term relationship between WCS and the. During her visit she visited schools and watched closely the education outreach program and spent time sitting in our nature club. She saw the ongoing construction efforts around the centre and was informed about future construction plans. She also travelled with Terry Sunderland, Peter Jenkins and Felix Lankester to inspect a possible field site for our chimpanzees. Hopefully, her visit will result in a cooperative relationship developing which will assist us in the development of the project.

Bennis Coffy- Bush Garden Zoo, Florida
Coffy arrived on 6th May 2005 as BGAC coordinator and as the representative of Conservation Cross Cultures (CCC) project who sponsored our summer holiday workshop this year. During her visit she introduced the CCC project and together
with the LWC’s education team designed the agenda and some of the activities
that would be presented during the workshop. Coffy experienced the local environmental issues first-hand. She interacted with our baby orphans here at the centre, she visited schools and gave a presentation to our students attending our
out reach program and to the students attending our Nature Club. She also introduced Bush Garden Zoo to our staff and explained their methods of work with their animals. Coffy brought suitcases full of stationary items worth of $600, BGAC’s T-shirts, a digital camera and the sum of $2000 as a donation for the summer workshop that was to be held in June/ July 2005.

Jane Dewar- Gorilla Haven
Jane arrived on 24th May 2005. Everyone at the centre was more than happy to
see Jane again as her last visit was over two years ago. On arrival, Jane
immediately went to see her beloved gorillas that she missed so much. She was amazed to see how they have grown since her last visit, and to see all the improvements in their enclosure. Jane brought many suitcases of goodies for the gorillas, the staff and the rest of the animals including 60 brass pad locks and a Canon photo card printer. A party was held at the Miramar hotel in which she gave each of our staff members a watch and a badge with the LWC’s logo. As a token
of our appreciation African dresses were given to Jane and to her husband Stewart whose hard work in the USA raised the funds that the Dewar wildlife trust donate
to the LWC. Jane is a long time supporter and her regular donations assist us with
our ongoing battle to protect endangered wildlife from extinction.

September - December

Our outreach program for the school year of 2005/6 started in October. Three new schools were added to the program in this academic year bringing the total of
schools participating in the program to five, and the number of students being
taught to more than 800. Of these schools 2 are primary schools and 3 are secondary/high schools. The program is 5 months long and includes the following courses:
• An introduction to conservation and wildlife
• Man’s impact on the environment
• What are primates?
• The bushmeat crisis in Cameroon

One school participating in the program is an orphanage, located 4 miles from Limbe, and has 60 children in different age groups, of which 35 participate in the weekly lessons. The inclusion of the orphans to our program is just one of the ways in
which the LWC aims to help the community here in Limbe. All of the children who participate in the program receive notebooks, pens, colouring crayons and other stationary. The program in the secondary and high schools is sponsored by
Houston Zoo and the primary schools program is sponsored with money colleted
by the volunteers in Apenheul Zoo in Holland.

Nature Club continues every Saturday in the LWC with more than 30 children coming each week. At the end of the year Nature Club students will present a play to their parents, written by Julie Langford, a British volunteer. The play is a futuristic story about and how Africa, in the space of 100 years, has lost her great apes and the
only places that they can be seen are zoos and laboratories.

Visitors:

Dr. Wendi Bailey from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
Dr Bailey, a tropical parasitologist, visited the LWC for 2 weeks in November 2005.
Her aim was to collect, for her research, as many individual strongyloides
nematodes as possible and so we invited her to come to the LWC to do a full
faecal screen of all the great apes and all of the staff. This provided us with the opportunity to have the parasite burden of the LWC properly assessed.
Additionally Dr Bailey brought with her all the equipment that was needed for the
vets at the LWC to be able to perform faecal concentration techniques and faecal cultures in house at the LWC, plus she taught us how the equipment is used!
Since Dr Bailey’s visit the veterinary team have been performing detailed faecal screening on all of the animals at the LWC, and the capacity to monitor parasite
loads and to screen sick animals has increased enormously.

Dr Bailey’s findings were also interesting: most of the apes had a normal healthy gut flora, and the nematode burden was, much to Dr Bailey’s disappointment, quite low.

Johanna Hutchinson – from Chester University
Johanna contacted the LWC in early 2005 regarding the possibility of performing a behavioural study on the gorillas. After much organisation she finally arrived in November 2005 and stayed for 2 months. Johanna is studying for her PhD, and her thesis will concern comparisons between the behaviour of hand reared captive gorillas, and mother reared captive gorillas. Johanna’s study is still on going but her preliminary results of the behaviour of the LWC gorillas have proved very interesting indeed. We look forward to reading her completed thesis.

Klara Petrzelkova – from the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Prague, Czech Republic
After a year or so of communicating with the LWC, Klara, who is involved with
Prague Zoo and is trying to develop a relationship between the LWC and PZ, came
to Cameroon to spend a month as a volunteer. Klara spent the month working with the gorilla keepers and the chimpanzee keepers. Klara also spent time working on
the faeces of the apes, searching for the protozoa troglodytella sp. Since returning
to Prague Klara has managed to attract some much needed funding for the LWC through selling animal adoptions. Thank you Klara.

Anna Randall – former volunteer at the LWC
Anna Randall, who worked at the LWC with Jacqui Sunderland Groves in the mid-1990’s, returned for a brief visit in November 2005. Prior to leaving the UK, however, Anna had a sponsored head shave and managed to raise a lot of money, all of
which she gave to the LWC. This was an enormously generous gift. The money
was used to buy new uniforms for the keepers, and to pay for some much needed veterinary drugs. Thank you Anna.

Anna Coe – Veterinary Nurse
Anna Coe, a veterinary nurse from the UK also visited the LWC between November and December to work as a volunteer. Anna very quickly immersed herself in the veterinary clinic, organising the cupboards, sorting the pharmacy, and generally casting a keen nurse’s eye over the entire place. Anna’s other responsibility was
to help Dr John Kiyang (the LWC resident vet) to computerise the entire clinical records. This was a huge task which Anna took full responsibility for. By the time Anna left at the end of December, all of the clinical records had been copied to the computer, and all of the individual case files had been printed out and filed in an ordered fashion. The ordering and updating of the files has been a great
achievement for the vet clinic and will enable our record keeping to be done in a much more professional manner in future.

WELCOME
LWC Education 2005





		January - August In 2005 the LWC’s education department led by Sigal Costo and Ateh Wilson, has expended and increased its activities delivering the conservation message to many more students and visitors. Our outreach program ended in May 2005 with the students leaving schools for their summer holiday. We have reached 873 students monthly, teaching in four different schools throughout Limbe. In addition, with the support of Disney grant we extended our program out of Limbe to the village of Batoke which is the bush meat capital in our area. 190 students from secondary school have benefited from this program and become more aware of issues concerning their environment and the protection of their wildlife. Our education program addressed the bushmeat crisis in Cameroon and the results of our evaluation questionnaire showed that the program left an impact on the students and succeeded to change the students’ views. We are intending to continue our environmental education in Batoke and as well as in other schools in Limbe starting from October 2005. In June, July we hosted our annual summer holiday in collaboration with Busch Garden Zoo, Florida. In total, 107 students came to our centre to participate in this special workshop. The workshop, that put an emphasis on the bushmeat crisis, enabled Cameroonian students to chat online with American students about issues concerning cultural differences and conservation. The workshop was said to be one of the best conducted here and received excellent feedbacks from the participants. Nature Club continues every Saturday in the centre and on average we have 40 students coming every week to take part in our program. In the next year we hope to increase the number of students we reach in our programs and in doing so to spread the message of conservation to more and more people in hope of reducing the hunting and the eating of the endangered wildlife species of Cameroon. Keeper Exchange Program On 6th Many 2005 one of our best young keepers, Kill Matute, travelled to the UK to participate in the keeper exchange programme which is sponsored by Chester Zoo. Killi had not been past Douala prior to this so a trip to Europe was really special. Killi benefited so much from the program not only he was exposed to another world, another culture, but also because he learnt different methods of animal keeping and he also worked with different animal species that he had never seen before. Killi spent one month in Chester Zoo and returned to us with new energy and a wider knowledge concerning animal keeping. We would like to thank Chester Zoo for sponsoring this very successful annual program PASA Vet Conference Between the 3rd and the 9th April 2005 the LWC hosted the PASA Vet Conference. The conference enabled over 35 vets from different countries around Africa, Europe and USA to meet their colleague; give presentations and discuss different issues relating to the veterinary care of wildlife. In addition, the vets were taught new lab techniques and participated in different procedures involving anaesthesia, health checks and post mortems. The LWC would like to thank Doug Cress, Steve Unwin and Wayne Boardman, who orgenaized the conference with the management of the LWC, planned the agenda and helped facilitate the activities. The annual PASA conferences (Management, Veterinary and Education), all of which have sometime been hosted by the LWC, provide all of the PASA sanctuaries an opportunity to share knowledge and experience, develop professionally, and meet colleagues while at the same time visiting other member sanctuaries around Africa. The LWC vet, education and management team have benefited enormously from these annual events and would like to thank PASA for funding and organizing such successful programs. In 2006 the vet conference will be held at Tacogama, and the LWC will be presented by Dr. John Kiyamg. Visitors Colleen McCann- WCS- New York Colleen who arrived on 23rd April 2005, visited the LWC in order to have a first-hand impression of the centre and the work that is done here, with a view to develop a possible long term relationship between WCS and the. During her visit she visited schools and watched closely the education outreach program and spent time sitting in our nature club. She saw the ongoing construction efforts around the centre and was informed about future construction plans. She also travelled with Terry Sunderland, Peter Jenkins and Felix Lankester to inspect a possible field site for our chimpanzees. Hopefully, her visit will result in a cooperative relationship developing which will assist us in the development of the project. Bennis Coffy- Bush Garden Zoo, Florida Coffy arrived on 6th May 2005 as BGAC coordinator and as the representative of Conservation Cross Cultures (CCC) project who sponsored our summer holiday workshop this year. During her visit she introduced the CCC project and together with the LWC’s education team designed the agenda and some of the activities that would be presented during the workshop. Coffy experienced the local environmental issues first-hand. She interacted with our baby orphans here at the centre, she visited schools and gave a presentation to our students attending our out reach program and to the students attending our Nature Club. She also introduced Bush Garden Zoo to our staff and explained their methods of work with their animals. Coffy brought suitcases full of stationary items worth of $600, BGAC’s T-shirts, a digital camera and the sum of $2000 as a donation for the summer workshop that was to be held in June/ July 2005. Jane Dewar- Gorilla Haven Jane arrived on 24th May 2005. Everyone at the centre was more than happy to see Jane again as her last visit was over two years ago. On arrival, Jane immediately went to see her beloved gorillas that she missed so much. She was amazed to see how they have grown since her last visit, and to see all the improvements in their enclosure. Jane brought many suitcases of goodies for the gorillas, the staff and the rest of the animals including 60 brass pad locks and a Canon photo card printer. A party was held at the Miramar hotel in which she gave each of our staff members a watch and a badge with the LWC’s logo. As a token of our appreciation African dresses were given to Jane and to her husband Stewart whose hard work in the USA raised the funds that the Dewar wildlife trust donate to the LWC. Jane is a long time supporter and her regular donations assist us with our ongoing battle to protect endangered wildlife from extinction. September - December Our outreach program for the school year of 2005/6 started in October. Three new schools were added to the program in this academic year bringing the total of schools participating in the program to five, and the number of students being taught to more than 800. Of these schools 2 are primary schools and 3 are secondary/high schools. The program is 5 months long and includes the following courses: • An introduction to conservation and wildlife • Man’s impact on the environment • What are primates? • The bushmeat crisis in Cameroon One school participating in the program is an orphanage, located 4 miles from Limbe, and has 60 children in different age groups, of which 35 participate in the weekly lessons. The inclusion of the orphans to our program is just one of the ways in which the LWC aims to help the community here in Limbe. All of the children who participate in the program receive notebooks, pens, colouring crayons and other stationary. The program in the secondary and high schools is sponsored by Houston Zoo and the primary schools program is sponsored with money colleted by the volunteers in Apenheul Zoo in Holland. Nature Club continues every Saturday in the LWC with more than 30 children coming each week. At the end of the year Nature Club students will present a play to their parents, written by Julie Langford, a British volunteer. The play is a futuristic story about and how Africa, in the space of 100 years, has lost her great apes and the only places that they can be seen are zoos and laboratories. Visitors: Dr. Wendi Bailey from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine Dr Bailey, a tropical parasitologist, visited the LWC for 2 weeks in November 2005. Her aim was to collect, for her research, as many individual strongyloides nematodes as possible and so we invited her to come to the LWC to do a full faecal screen of all the great apes and all of the staff. This provided us with the opportunity to have the parasite burden of the LWC properly assessed. Additionally Dr Bailey brought with her all the equipment that was needed for the vets at the LWC to be able to perform faecal concentration techniques and faecal cultures in house at the LWC, plus she taught us how the equipment is used! Since Dr Bailey’s visit the veterinary team have been performing detailed faecal screening on all of the animals at the LWC, and the capacity to monitor parasite loads and to screen sick animals has increased enormously. Dr Bailey’s findings were also interesting: most of the apes had a normal healthy gut flora, and the nematode burden was, much to Dr Bailey’s disappointment, quite low. Johanna Hutchinson – from Chester University Johanna contacted the LWC in early 2005 regarding the possibility of performing a behavioural study on the gorillas. After much organisation she finally arrived in November 2005 and stayed for 2 months. Johanna is studying for her PhD, and her thesis will concern comparisons between the behaviour of hand reared captive gorillas, and mother reared captive gorillas. Johanna’s study is still on going but her preliminary results of the behaviour of the LWC gorillas have proved very interesting indeed. We look forward to reading her completed thesis. Klara Petrzelkova – from the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Prague, Czech Republic After a year or so of communicating with the LWC, Klara, who is involved with Prague Zoo and is trying to develop a relationship between the LWC and PZ, came to Cameroon to spend a month as a volunteer. Klara spent the month working with the gorilla keepers and the chimpanzee keepers. Klara also spent time working on the faeces of the apes, searching for the protozoa troglodytella sp. Since returning to Prague Klara has managed to attract some much needed funding for the LWC through selling animal adoptions. Thank you Klara. Anna Randall – former volunteer at the LWC Anna Randall, who worked at the LWC with Jacqui Sunderland Groves in the mid-1990’s, returned for a brief visit in November 2005. Prior to leaving the UK, however, Anna had a sponsored head shave and managed to raise a lot of money, all of which she gave to the LWC. This was an enormously generous gift. The money was used to buy new uniforms for the keepers, and to pay for some much needed veterinary drugs. Thank you Anna. Anna Coe – Veterinary Nurse Anna Coe, a veterinary nurse from the UK also visited the LWC between November and December to work as a volunteer. Anna very quickly immersed herself in the veterinary clinic, organising the cupboards, sorting the pharmacy, and generally casting a keen nurse’s eye over the entire place. Anna’s other responsibility was to help Dr John Kiyang (the LWC resident vet) to computerise the entire clinical records. This was a huge task which Anna took full responsibility for. By the time Anna left at the end of December, all of the clinical records had been copied to the computer, and all of the individual case files had been printed out and filed in an ordered fashion. The ordering and updating of the files has been a great achievement for the vet clinic and will enable our record keeping to be done in a much more professional manner in future.