In Malawi - Christine Durant

Protecting African Wildlife – volunteering to make a difference

This article was published in the Dec.2005 issue of Nature Canada Magazine, a publication of Nature Canada, a partner of Uniterra.

Some birds have to fly further than others before they meet their soulmates. Christine Durant, 33, went all the way to Malawi.

A tiny country that calls itself the “warm heart of Africa,” Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, consistently ranking near the bottom of the United Nations’ annual human development index. Durant went to Malawi in 2003 on a two-year volunteer stint with Uniterra, an international cooperation programme operated by CECI and WUSC, two Canadian non-governmental organizations.

Her task was to help the Wildlife Environmental Society of Malawi work more effectively by building its ties to other organizations and government departments, arranging more sustainable funding, and working in the community to generate greater awareness of environmental concerns.

She became the branch manager for Zomba, a small city in the southern region of Malawi, where she helped the wildlife society develop links with a conservation association. Together, the groups were able to achieve better protection—in the form of improved hunting regulations and support for bird-breeding sanctuaries—for nearby Lake Chilwa, an internationally significant wetland owing to its bird population and migration. The true beneficiaries, says Durant, will be local residents who depend on birds for food when fish supplies plummet during periodic droughts.

Durant also initiated school projects to make students more aware of local environmental issues.

“Whether we were creating vegetable gardens or working on papier mache art projects, the idea was to teach people about their environment,” she says. “This is so important in a region like Zomba, where there is deforestation, drought, over-grazing and subsistence farming.”

Durant says it was hard to be there and see the “degraded and fragile” environment.

“But there is hope,” she says. “It was an incredible and motivating experience. It was exciting to see the impact we had, to be part of a group of people with a passion for this cause.”

She’s excited that the Lake Chilwa protection project is continuing in her absence. “It’s a five-year project,” she says. “I left it after a year and a half, and it’s still going.”

The rewards were personal, too. Durant met her husband in Malawi, where he was also working on a development project. The two lovebirds plans include more development work in the future. “We hope to end up back in East Africa eventually,” says Durant.