ANTELOPE PARK TRANSFORMS LIVES

The name Antelope Park has long been associated with luxurious safari activities and famous lions. But it has quietly been transforming the lives of many in the surrounding communities for many years.

Antelope Park is a 3,000-acre wildlife sanctuary about 15 km from the Midlands town of Gweru. It is the country’s biggest lion conservancies.

For many years the lives of people in its vicinity been transformed by several health and education projects and numerous humanitarian activities in partnership with a number of registered organisations in the city – far from the media fanfare.

Set in open savannah grassland, the park is a unique game reserve and a haven of tranquillity set in the African bush.

“We have always had the desire to make the people around us feel our presence. We have said we should always help people and we have been doing just that over the years,” said Liesl Carlsson, the community projects manager, in a recent interview.

Eco-tourists

She explained that most of the projects have been the result of the park pooling resources together with scores of tourists from around the world.

“In order to reach out to a bigger number of needy people, we have created a network of tourists who regularly visit us to become volunteer partners in community projects. That initiative has had positive results.

“Some of the volunteers, who like to be known as eco-tourists, have been touched by the plight of people around us, including children, widows, orphans and women in difficult circumstances. Many have become regular donors,” said Carlsson.

A few meters from the main enclosure of the park, 10 hectares of land has been set aside for the construction of an orphanage and a horticulture gardening project for the needy children. The prime land is worth about $60,000.

Hope Centre

When this reporter visited the site, construction had already started for the two buildings that will house female and male orphans in two separate apartments. Each house will accommodate 30 children each when completed. Carlson pointed out that though the park will be responsible for the construction, when complete, the orphanage will be handed over to the Midlands Children’s Hope Centre, a local voluntary organisation for vulnerable children.

MCHC founder and director Question Ndou said their relationship with Antelope Park stretched back from 2011 when the institution started assisting them in running a rehabilitation shelter for about 30 needy children in Mkoba.

“Besides the current project of setting up an orphanage, the park has been assisting us since 2011 when our humanitarian work in helping children, especially those living on the streets ,was almost grounded due to the bad economy.

“We established our centre in 1996 in response to the plight of the street-children. From that time until 2011, we depended on local companies for aid. But they could not go on with the assistance due to the bad economy. Unicef which had also partnered us, stopped funding us.

“So since 2011, Antelope Park has been our biggest funder - contributing about $2,000 every month to meet our costs like rentals, electricity, water bills and school fees for the kids. Besides, every week they contribute groceries for the children,” he said.
Drop-in Centre
The park is also the biggest funder of the Drop-in Centre, in the city, where children living on the streets go to get a meal and bath every day before they can be persuaded to go and live permanently at the rehabilitation centre.

Alice Shiri, director for Hope for Life, a voluntary organisation involved in humanitarian work to assist widows and orphans, said : “We take care of about 150 needy widows and about 70 orphans mostly in primary school. Park is our major funder.

They bought us a stove, deep freeze, beds, they pay monthly rentals for our place and their volunteers donate clothes for the orphans.”

The park is also involved in healthcare projects that are changing lives. They collaborate with four Gweru City Council clinics, which are understaffed and poorly resourced. Members of the eco-tourists network provide assistance to the qualified clinic staff in many of the routine tasks and observations. This frees up the clinic staff to concentrate on frontline healthcare.

Daniel Chagweda, head of Mkoba Polyclinic, which serves about 48,000 people in the northern part of the suburb, said the park had been “amazing”.

Gift of hope

“I am short of words. In 2011 when our clinic was in abject state with gutters falling, walls peeling off and floors embarrassing to our patients, they turned around the outlook of the institution. Walls of big rooms numbering about 12 were all nicely painted and floors neatly tiled.

They also gave us curtains that we are still using and some still look very new because they were many. “Besides that, at any given point, we get scores of volunteers to help in menial jobs and cheer up the patients - giving them hope. We regularly receive healthcare materials from the park also and it’s all amazing,” he said.

Christopher Ruwodo, the council’s director for health services, said the other clinics received similar assistance. Other services include conducting HIV/TB, immunisation and family planning campaigns; maternity care and home visits of patients.

Officially opened on 6 December 2012 by then education minister David Coltart, the African Lion and Environmental Research Trust, ALERT, school located on the outskirts of Mkoba surbub, is perhaps one of the biggest community projects ever to be established by the park.

The institution offers free lessons in wildlife conservation to children in Grades 6 and 7 from surrounding schools. The ALERT lessons are not available anywhere else in the current education system.

Staben Porovha, one of the teachers at the school, said 652 students have graduated from the school since its establishment and now have positive attitude towards wildlife. The courses are six-months long.

“The preliminary results of research carried by a UK-based masters’ degree student, Ruth Armstrong, who investigated the effectiveness of our conservation curriculum, were very positive. She discovered that some students we taught in 2012 still remembered the concepts we taught them and one of them had indicated that he recently strongly warned his brother who wanted to venture into poaching against the idea.

So we feel the school is doing a good job in grooming the community into one that is conscious of wildlife management,” he said.- The Zimbabwean