Filming Wild

Category: thank you | Date: Apr 11 2008 | By: admin

Thank you for your generosity, in helping to support the work of the African Environmental Film Foundation. In line with our recent appeal, this week’s donations will be used to pay for prizes for the children participating in the Environmental Awareness Competition at Kenya’s Giraffe Center. Altogether, 150 winners and runners up will receive a copy of one of our educational DVDs about conservation, from a selection of 12 different films.

The following donations have been received in the past week:

Dana J $50

Susanna N $25

Anonymous 25$

Thank you very much. We hope to be able to attend the prize giving day ourselves (on 6th June), and photograph the kids receiving their DVD prizes… We’ll be sure to post some photos here.

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Category: our life in the wild | Date: Apr 07 2008 | By: admin

In great haste, but just have to show you this and tell you a quick story:

I got up early in the morning the other day, to bake some bread before starting work. I measured out the flour, salt, yeast etc, and was about to start mixing it all together by hand when something in the flour caught my eye…and lucky I saw it too, for it was a tiny little scorpion! Where it had come from, I don’t know, but it was possibly hiding on the underneath of my flour container, and had fallen into the bowl when I was measuring out the flour. I’m just glad it happened to fall on top of the flour, as opposed to being buried under it, otherwise I would have been given a very nasty wake-up call in the form of a very unfriendly sting. Scorpions of all sizes give a painful sting, but the smaller they are, the more potent the sting, and the more sharp the pain. A close escape, I’d say…

I suppose, when you consider how many years I have lived in the bush, I have got away quite lightly (touch wood!), and have only once been stung by a scorpion - that was on my backside, about ten or fifteen years ago, when a few friends and I were lying back on some giant flat rocks at dusk, watching the stars appear one by one in the night sky…It was my own fault really, as I should have known better than to tempt fate (and scorpions) like that. It took about 12-18 hours for the pain to subside. No sleep for me that night! You know how some pain comes in waves - not so with a scorpion sting - the pain is consistent and burning for hours….but at least you know you just have to wait it out and you’re going to be OK - an African scorpion sting is not dangerous, as such…so it’s a matter of gritting your teeth and bearing it.

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Category: appeals | Date: Apr 03 2008 | By: admin

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CHILDREN’S ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS AWARD

The Giraffe Center of the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife is a non-profit organization whose objectives are to educate the youth in Kenya on the importance of conserving wildlife and the environment. This year, the Giraffe Center celebrates 25 years in conservation education.

The Giraffe Center has long been one of our major distribution partners, using our educational films as teaching tools to great effect.

Each year, they show our educational films about diverse conservation and environmental issues to over 165,000 children and adults, as follows:

Organized School Trips:……………60,000 children per year
Underprivileged Children’s Groups:……..5,000 children per year
Teacher Training Programs:………………225 teachers per year
Domestic and International Tourists:………>100,000 visitors per year

As part of their education program, the Center organizes an annual National Environmental Awareness Competition, whereby children participate in essay writing, artwork and photography, giving them the opportunity to analyze the environmental issues affecting them on a daily basis, and to suggest possible solutions to problems.

This year’s competition theme is “Environmental Conservation Education”, culminating in a prize-giving day on 6th June 2008, to coincide with World Environmental Week.

The African Environmental Film Foundation has been asked to contribute 150 DVDs of our films as prizes for the participating students (many thousands of children will compete).

150 winners and runners-up from different categories and age groups, representing students from across Kenya, each going back home to their village with a copy of an educational film which their whole community will see, have the potential to spread the conservation message contained therein to every corner of the country.

Despite the cost of these DVD copies being relatively small, it is nonetheless an expenditure for which we have not budgeted. Therefore, if we are to be able to contribute the DVDs as prizes, we need to raise the money to produce the copies.

Please help if you can:

The cost of producing each DVD copy (which has to be done in UK as no high quality replication facilities exist yet in East Africa), including the cost of the cover and freight from UK to Kenya is $7.50.
Producing 150 DVD copies (incorporating a selection from our 12 available films) will cost a total of $1,125.

Donations can be made online here, or by check made out to the ‘African Environmental Film Foundation’ and sent to our Foundation offices in the USA, Kenya or UK. Please specify that your donation is for the Giraffe Center Award Partnership. Thank you.
For more information, you can download a copy of the Giraffe Center’s letter to us, requesting our participation in this initiative, you can visit the Giraffe Center website, and of course you can always contact me personally with any questions.

A heartfelt thank you for any help you can give…

150 DVDs of AEFF’s twelve educational films will constitute prizes…

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