Great Ape Trust connects youths in Ankeny, Rwanda

Des Moines, Iowa – April 29, 2009 – Students at an Ankeny, Iowa, elementary school are offering an international hand of friendship to youngsters in Rwanda after hearing a presentation by Great Ape Trust’s Peter Clay, whose recent two-week trip to the African nation to tend to business related to the Gishwati Area Conservation Program included a visit to a primary school near the forest’s edge.

Anne Williams’ second-grade students at Ankeny’s Northwest Elementary School reached out to Rwandan students in a letter asking them to become pen pals after Clay,

a senior adviser to the Gishwati Area Conservation Program in addition to his responsibilities as a senior animal caretaker at Great Ape Trust, spoke at an assembly for all Northwest second-graders in March.

When Clay spoke to the Ankeny students, he had just returned from a two-week visit to Rwanda, where he was an honored guest at a tree-planting ceremony at the Kinihira Primary School. He showed the Ankeny students a video of the ceremony, which traditional dancing, singing and poetry reading. The video made a deep impression on students, melting away the geographic and cultural gulfs between the students in Iowa and Rwanda, Williams said

“They saw kids as being kids,” Williams said. “The kids here love to dance, so the Rwandan students’ dancing made a great deal of sense to them. It was just kids having fun. They saw them as kids who live some place that is not in Iowa and not in the United States. And for second-graders to get a concept of a place that is not in the U.S. is really quite something.”

Williams said the 19 students in her class are enthusiastic about developing an international friendship with youngsters at the Kinihira Primary School.

“We would like to be your friends and learn more about you and your school,” the students wrote in a letter that Great Ape Trust Founder Ted Townsend and Director of Conservation Dr. Benjamin Beck will hand-deliver during an upcoming trip to Rwanda. Each of the students had a hand in writing the letter, which detailed aspects of their classrooms, the differences in wildlife in Rwanda and Iowa and some of their leisure activities.

The Iowa students also wrote about their shared passion for the environment. “We learned that you are planting trees to help the Earth,” they wrote. “We plant trees and other plants here, too. We also take care of the Earth by recycling.”

Great Ape Trust’s conservation project in Rwanda appeals to Clay on both a professional and philosophical level. In addition to having earned a master’s degree in international and cultural management, Clay has a long personal history of support for issues related to peace, social justice, equality and resource conservation. He proposed the idea of an informal exchange between the Ankeny students and their counterparts in response to the Gishwati project’s overarching goal to involve stakeholders in plans to create what has been heralded a “forest of hope” addressing both the environmental and economic needs of the people living near it.

Working closely with children to affect the conservation ethics of adults is a strategy Madeleine Nyiratuza, a Rwandan educator and environmentalist, has proactively pursued as program director of the Gishwati effort. Clay credited her work with local suppliers to obtain several hundred donated avocado and mango seedlings for the tree-planting ceremony at the Kinihira school, an effort that Clay said was “both symbolic and real.”

“It had both the symbolic piece of planting trees together, but provides the real benefit in providing fruit,” he said. “Madeleine is developing very creative partnerships and working with children to affect attitudes about the environment among parents and older siblings.

“The world’s children are the ones whose actions will make all the difference in the global environmental message that is conveyed,” Clay continued. “In Rwanda, I told the hundreds of students at Kinihira: ‘You are the future of Rwanda. What you chose to do will make a difference.’ Rwanda children showed that they care about the environment, and value is added when you link students in Africa and the United States behind a common goal.”

Williams expects the impression will be lasting at least among some of the students. “They have that hook,” she said. “Even as they get older, when they think back they may remember hearing about the expanding world back in second grade, and realizing that the world is bigger than Ankeny, Iowa.

“I’m hoping that it creates more openness,” Williams continued. “We can teach  ‘these are kids, just like you; they like to play and dance just like you; yes, there are differences, but they are trying to make the world a better place, just like you,’ and help them to realize that it’s a global society. I don’t know how much a 7- or 8-year-old can understand about that, but it’s a hook, scaffolding they can build on later. I’m not saying that all 19 will create long-lasting relationships, but even if only one kid continues to have some kind of correspondence, only good can come from that.

When Beck delivers the Ankeny second-graders’ letter to the students, he’ll ask them how they would like to see the potential friendship with the Ankeny second graders develop.