Conservation Blog

This morning we arrived around 8:30am at the Fossimondi Primary School, welcomed by groups of excited children. A brief introduction meeting with the headmaster and teachers followed. Since we wanted to show a great apes film to the children prior the the art workshop, all the children of the school were asked to go to the Fon’s palace. A 10 minutes walk but most of the children were running all the way down to the palace as you can see in the video.

The Fon’s palace is actually the only building with a large enough room for all children and, not unimportant, electricity cables…

After installing all film projection equipment it turned out that the local generator was not strong enough and for a moment it didn’t look very promising for the film showing that day. Fortunately another generator was found within the village!



The children were excited to see chimpanzees, gorilla and bonobos. They were laughing out loud when young gorillas were playing or riding on their mother’s back. “They are like us!”, one of the pupils said with a big smile. Although they are living in villages adjacent to the forest, none of the children had ever seen a chimpanzee or gorilla in the wild. We promise to come back with more films in a couple of months.