The Milgis Trust

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 01 2008 | By: milgistrust

What a shame a match is such an easy and cheap thing to buy!! The destruction that a raging forest fire does is unimaginable, just a single match… Sometimes hundreds of acres of virgin forest is burnt in the hope that the grass will grow for their cows instead… imagine the repercussions… Well the Samburu are really beginning to see these repercussions… Its another subject that I have talked about until I’m ‘blue in the face’… and felt that I am not being heard… The Northern Ndoto Mountains have been burnt and burnt every dry season… Now the people of Lesirikan, who used to have a flowing river through the town, have to dig deep wells to get to water…When the rains come the flooding is enormous, sometimes washing away ‘bomas’ [ enclosure for livestock ] that have been there for years… Now we have a good example, at least our warning may be heard.!! A pity ‘we’ have to learn the hard way..

The 5 beautiful mountains that are in our Milgis Trust conservation area are like ’steep islands out of a desert’… rising from 3000 up to 8000 feet very quickly. When a fire starts at the bottom, it doesn’t stop until it gets to the top…Its agony to watch… The wind swirls around fuelling the flames…Every thing in its path is destroyed.. We really need money to employ more scouts to try to stop this meaningless destruction… $ 110 per month… Apart from fires the forests on these mountains are still very much in tact…The Samburu take there cows go up there in the dry season, sometimes they cut branches from trees to feed them, they have for years, what we have to be careful with is that these cows do not become too many!