Kenyan wildlife ranger who can spot a leopard from three miles away blogs to save animals with the help of badass twenty something from England
Tourism has been down to almost zero in Kenya since the post-election violence in the country in January and February. The American government issued travel warnings for Kenya, evacuated expat personnel and travel insurance companies put Kenya on the no deal list, frightening families planning their safari vacations. Let’s face it, even the most cynical or ascetic among us still yearn secretly to glimpse a lion in reality rather than on PBS with the voiced-over narrative of that Richard person, whatever his name is.
The rural Masai tribe that resides in the environs of Kenya’s many wildlife parks generally avoids killing lions because they only eat cows. They actually believe they own all the cows in the world and keep pictures of their cows on their cellphones instead of their kids. One man added little icons available on his cellphone’s display settings to his cattle portrait — milkshakes and hamburgers. Yes!
Why am I telling you this? Since the tourists pay all the salaries of the wildlife rangers in Kenya’s famous wildlife park, the Mara Triangle, the rangers don’t have any money now because tourists aren’t coming. They can’t afford to regulate poachers and they can’t afford to pay back pissed-off Masai villagers when lions eat their cows and they only have one sour cup of milk to drink per day instead of three. Nevermind the beef. So, the Masai villagers might kill the lions in self-preservation.
That’s where a couple of badass heroes come in. Joseph Kimojino is this Masai ranger who is so good at his job that he can spot a leopard in a tree three miles away just by looking across the plain without binoculars. You don’t expect him to be funny because English isn’t his first language, and although he speaks English very well, it’s tough to be witty in your second language. But then one day we’re talking about why on earth black Kenyans have these old school English last names (for their first names) like “Wilson” and “Henry” and “Becket” instead of “Wangechi” or something from their tribal tradition. “It’s like my son John,” he says, all sly and quiet from the corner.
“What about your son?” I ask.
“Last week I went home to see my family,” he says. “He used to be John, and now he is Evan.”
Me and Will, whom I will tell you about in a second, were like, “What do you mean?”
“My son John was out with the cows. And my wife kept talking about someone named Evan. I said to my wife, ‘Who is Evan?’”
Will and I laughed so hard at that punchline. Apparently John would rather be Evan and had changed his name since his father’s last visit.
Ever since Joseph and his fellow rangers’ nonprofit wildlife management agency stopped getting money from tourism, he has been blogging about their cause to raise money. Joseph didn’t even know how to click a mouse in November, and now he is, as my brother would say appreciatively, “a sav” (meaning a savage, that being a great complement applicable to talent of any kind). Joseph also posts pictures of cheetah cubs and weirdly-named animals like the “Coke’s Hartebeest” to his Flickr page, which hundreds of people who love looking at pictures of cheetah cubs and commenting stuff like “cuuuuuute!!!!” read while they’re procrastinating in the office.
The person who taught Joseph all of this is a total badass of the Act One ilk named William Deed. He’s smart, mellow, humble, and spent six months living in North Kivu, Congo – one of the most dangerous places in the world, where insane nationalist rebels put AK47 barrels inside of innocent peasant girls’ bodies and….sorry about this, it was on the BBC….fire. William was doing the most bizarre of tasks there, teaching wildlife rangers in this mountain park occupied mainly by gorillas (the animal) and guerrillas (the people) how to blog about their work with the endangered animals.
Needless to say, not many tourists were visiting that park with their families and travel insurance.
William’s story is one of those unbelievable coming-of-age odysseys that used to keep me from killing myself when I was 24. He’s 28, and like most of us was once an unspectacular 21 year-old with a bachelor’s degree and no money. So he worked as a temp in a middle England town he calls “really shitty, shitty.” I bet it was one of those doomed temp assignments so many of us have worked in some far off artificial “suburb” of a city that’s like 300 miles away.
William worked with what he had, and wrote a blog called standinaqueue about how boring and horrible it is to wait in line at the bank during your lunchbreak from a shitty temp assignment. Now he gets to see cheetahs every morning and live in a tent that could have been a set in the movie “Out of Africa.”
DETAILS ON THE ARTICLES: I wrote an article about these guys for Wired. You can read it here.