Loath to ask, but desperate...

[dungrollin]

Dear all,

this is not my usual style at all, so I hope you'll forgive me for 
the spam.

Some of you are aware that I live in Abidjan, in French-speaking 
West Africa. Côte d'Ivoire is a developing country, though because 
of the four-year-old civil war, there's not a lot of development 
going on at the moment. 

Some colleagues of mine work in the Taï National Park (the largest 
tract of protected rainforest left in West Africa) on chimpanzees. 
The majority of them are PhD students working on the behaviour of 
wild chimp groups, though they also do some marvellous sensitisation 
work with rural populations around the park. They use music, theatre 
and round-table discussions to explain the plight of the wild chimps 
in the park, and they try to find alternate sources of income for 
poachers involved in the illegal bushmeat trade. 

In January, they discovered that a baby chimpanzee was being kept as 
a pet in the town of Taï. This is highly illegal and threatened to 
undo a lot of their work, since almost anybody who sees a baby 
chimpanzee wants one themselves as a pet, because they're 
*gorgeous*. I recently learned the way poachers manage to get the 
babies to follow them after killing their mothers, and it's not 
nice. The babies are too afraid to stray far from their mother's 
corpse, so the poachers hit them, hard, (occasionally hard enough to 
kill them accidentally) until they are so disorientated that they 
willingly climb onto the poacher's back, and ride away to a life in 
captivity. 

There are no chimpanzee sanctuaries in Côte d'Ivoire, so the only 
option was to send the rescued baby to the zoo in Abidjan. I had 
never been to the zoo before, having been traumatised by African 
zoos before. But when my colleagues turned up one night with 
baby "Fanta", I fell in love, and agreed to do anything I could to 
help.

The zoo is awful. I mean, *really* awful. The cages are old, bare, 
concrete cells; the bars are rusting away, and the animals injure 
themselves on the sharp edges. There is no money for veterinary 
care, there is barely enough money for the animals' food, the 
keepers' salaries are months overdue, the lions and elephant are 
skeletal, and the primates go mad in solitary confinement with no 
enrichment to keep them occupied. 

The *worst* thing is that the keepers and the staff are actually 
doing a great job, given the tiny amount of money they receive from 
the government. They are really motivated to change things, but 
simply do not have the money.

So, what with one thing and another, I am setting up an N.G.O. here 
in Abidjan, to try to raise money to improve the lives of Fanta and 
the other animals. I've started a blog
http://abidjanzoo.blogspot.com/
where you can keep up to date with what we're trying to do, and 
donate money via paypal.

I must mention that we are not *yet* a registered charity, (the 
process to be officially recognised as such in Côte d'Ivoire is 
lengthy and beaurocratic), though we are on our way. Nor can we use 
a bank account in Côte d'Ivoire to accept donations via paypal 
(because it's not on the list). The money therefore goes into the 
private account of one of the primatologists who did her PhD 
fieldwork here, and who is now working in the Max Planck Institute 
in Leipzig. 

We will, however, soon be posting a report on how much money we have 
raised so far (somewhere in the region of 1000 Euros - £700 - 
$1400), with accounts on exactly how it is spent. And if my personal 
assurance is worth much, I can tell you that it is me who is 
overseeing the cash at this end, to make sure that nothing goes 
wrong. (It doesn't do us any good if our donors have no faith in us.)

We are really in desperate need of funds to repair an enclosure for 
Fanta and her new friend (a rescued juvenile male called Rambo - an 
article on them both is coming soon on the blog), and provide them 
with enrichment materials, toys, climbing frames, hammocks and 
everything we can to make their lives as happy as possible.

So please take a look at the blog, and if you can't spare a knut 
yourself, please please please pass on the URL to everyone in your 
address book. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and do feel free to 
contact me on or off-list with comments, queries, suggestions for 
ways of raising cash, demands for further assurances etc.

Cheers,
Dungrollin.