Protectors of the Forest

There is no better way to show the state of the forest than these pictures i took last weekend. (to be shared all later)

I kept asking the Ogiek rep, 'Where is the Forest?' I kept hoping to get enveloped in the green darkness that is the forest, but that never seemed to happen. I kept seeing crops, tractors, long expanses of almost dead tree stumps... Now, my intention when I thought up this project was not really to try and save the forest. It was to give the Ogiek a voice. To help them tell the world of their mistreatment, their heritage, their culture, everything. But after talking to the chief, i discovered that you cannot seperate the two. He told me. 'Moving an Ogiek from the Mau Forest is like takin a fish out of the water, putting it on land and telling it to survive' So what do you want then?, I asked Kiplangat, the Ogiek People's Development rep. He said they wanted all non-Ogiek's off Mau forest. Anyone who cannot trace his / her family roots back to the Mau forest almost 100 years ago. I wanted to know what they were going to do after all the other people had left. Since they are farming as of now, would they stop? (not written word for word as he said it. Translated and grammatically corrected) 'We will plant trees. We will take it back to being a forest. No Ogiek likes farming, which is why even with all this land, we are still poor. We do not have the framign resourses, and we don't care about it. We farm right now because we need to survive. After we plant the trees, all the trees in the forest will play host to a couple of bee hives. We will harvest it, and sell it. We will live as we lived many years ago. We will hunt antelopes and hyraxes for food and but what we cant get with the money from honey. We want only one title deed. For the community, not for the individual. We want to start tree nurseries. Breed trees that we can sell in Kenya and outside....'

If you ask me, that sounds like an effing great idea!

Meanwhile, this is the state of the forest....


If it was a farm, then it is very beautiful. For a forest however....