Saving SavannaMy cousin Kris,
who is a pediatrician in Myrtle Beach and who has visited Zambia, sent
me a book called Secrets of Savanna by Mark and Delia Owens, with
a foreword by Alexandra Fuller. It is Ms. Fuller's words that I re-print
here, with some brief comments by me following.
"Not so far, relatively speaking, from where I spent the last
years of my childhood in Zambia, there is a valley so rare and
surprising in its beauty that once seen and hear and smelled, the sense
of it stays with you always. Forever after, a tiny breath of it might
come back to you in other places - say in a hint of dust in Italy or in
the way the sun catches the land in Mexico - and you feel the tug of
memory of that place. This valley is so rich with life that it seems
entirely possible that Life itself started here, or at least that it
congregated here in uncommon splendor and diversity. The landscape seems
ideally suited to such majestic sights as herds of elephants casually
fording a river or the philosophic stare of baboons at sunset. Perhaps
that is why memory settles on the valley as a place of origin, as if we
knew it in some other, wiser time.
But this valley - this template for what we might all have grown
up with, or lived near - if we had not so carelessly eaten our way
through our own wild lands long ago - was almost completely lost, When I
was young, in the 1980s, North Luangwa National Park (for this is the
valley of which I am speaking) was so rotten with heavily armed poachers
and so corrupted with the blood money of elephants that anyone who
ventured near it was considered foolhardy, if not downright stupid. Not
only was the valley itself infested with armed gangs, but the villagers
who lived in the land surrounding the park had been pressed into the
service of the poachers - who were very often in the pay of
powerful government officials and business people in the cities. Many
thought that the valley was as good as gone.
But that was before Mark and Delia Owens happened upon the park
and fell in love - illogically, incautiously - with a land so very
nearly reaped of all its life that it had all but been left to die. This
book is an account of the Owenses' years in that valley and with the
people who live in its periphery. It is the story of how, together with
the villagers and their chiefs, Mark and Delia gradually peeled away the
dark years of elephant poaching and allowed both the valley and the
settlements to flourish. In other words, the Owenses and the local
people achieved what has been replicated in very few places in the
world: a balance in which humans and wildlife have found strategies to
coexist, not in some unsustainable primitive dream but in a viable,
respectful way, with new ideas and resources building on the best of old
traditions. And in the process of saving the park, the Owenses found
pieces of themselves in the sly, sometimes wickedly funny wisdom of the
men and women with whom they worked. This book tells that story too.
However, as romantic as it sounds to hitch oneself to a dream and
to attach oneself to an impossibly noble goal, the reality of years of
gritty, flies-in-your-eyes, malarial loneliness in the name of love of
land, humanitarianism, and science is not for anyone with less than a
lion heart. I can't emphasize enough what courage and dedication - to
say nothing of sheer stubborn passion - it must have taken for Mark and
Delia Owens to rescue North Luangwa National Park while poachers and
corrupt politicians and officials did everything they could to hurt them
and derail their work and while even the land and the animals sometimes
seemed ungrateful for their efforts. But with almost superhuman
perseverance, the Owenses refused to give up until their goal of a
valley without poachers had been achieved.
I recently returned to Zambia for a magazine assignment and spent
time with Hammer Simwinga (the Owenses' protégé, a sort of agriculture
extension officer for the region, and every bit the hero described in
these pages), and I met some of the traditional birth attendants,
beekeepers, farmers, fish farmers, and shopkeepers described here. The
work that the Owenses instigated has outlived their time in the valley,
and there can be no greater tribute that that. In the words of one
villager, "You cannot separate the Owenses from this place. What they
have done has changed our lives for the better." It is true, the Owenses
cannot be separated from this place, which is ingrained in them forever.
- Alexandra Fuller
The passion and commitment conveyed in Fuller's description of the
Owenses is well applied to the passion and commitment I feel towards
providing excellent health care to the people of Zambia. Just as the
elephants of North Luangwa were forsaken, a lost cause to corruption and
greed, with root causes, I would say, in poverty, the health of Zambians
is in grave jeopardy due to Malaria, HIV, and Tuberculosis because of
similar root problems. Poverty is a conviction of modern humanity; there
is enough wealth in the world to feed all of our bodies, and permit all
of our souls to live long enough to see grandchildren live well.
Anything less is unacceptable, and if I have my way, I will take up the
torch that Susan Allen, Jeff and Elizabeth Stringer, Moses Sinkala, and
others have carried brightly in the center of the continent that gave
birth to us all.
From the bridge at Selma...to the mouth of the river Nile, from the
swamplands of Louisiana, to the high peaks of Kilimanjaro, from Dr.
King's America, to Nelson Mandela's Africa, the journey of equality
moves on... --U2
