gorilla.cd

by Balemba Balagizi

Chardust, one of our alternative energy programs that I am in charge of, is up and running at full speed. The park is committed to finding solutions to the illegal charcoal problem by finding alternatives, or in this case, not letting any of the charcoal go to waste by turning the dust that would normally be of no use into usable charcoal. It’s a very new program, and the results have been amazing.

Here are the numbers so far (all approximate, and it varies depending on how much good dust we can collect):

• 750 kg of fireballs per day maximum production, which is currently used to stockpile finished product as we expect to have continually increased sales.
• Average of 50 bags (40 kilos each) sold per week.
• 8 full-time employed.
• 80 paid women involved in the dust collection in 5 big charcoal markets in Goma.
• Clients include both commercial, such as restaurants, and private households.

We are still finding clients, and the number has doubled from July to August.

The production looks something like this:

Collect the charcoal dust waste from the 5 major charcoal markets with the help of local employed women.

Bring it to the Virunga National Park facility on the edge of Goma.

The dust is sorted to remove stones, nails, plastic and other objects that can damage the machines.

A Hammermill machine breaks the dust up into powder.

The Fireball machine turns the dust into balls by adding hot water to the mix as it turns and turns.

The balls are laid out on racks to dry for about 4 days, depending on the weather.

And then packed into white nylon bags.

And now they are ready to sell. That’s a lot of charcoal that would otherwise go to waste, and burns as well as the original.

Fireballs. It sounds like something coming out of the sky in a natural disaster. Actually, it is a great invention by a Kenyan company that Virunga National Park initiated here in March of this year. Basically, new fuel briquettes are produced from charcoal waste (dust), salvaged from wholesalers in the city of Goma. Charcoal+Dust = “Chardust.” And the new charcoal balls are called “Fireballs.”

The park faces considerable challenges in protecting the park’s forests from large-scale illegal charcoal production. In contrast with most other cities in East Africa, charcoal consumption in Goma is used almost exclusively across all households because higher-quality alternatives such as kerosene, liquefied petroleum gas, and electricity are unavailable or unaffordable for cooking. Virtually the entire urban population depends upon charcoal.

The charcoal dust in Goma is found in seven specific areas of the city.  The Chardust project aims to create jobs and make available cheap eco-friendly energy sources through recycling.  It employs jobless women in different areas of the city for charcoal dust collection. The dust is brought to the alternative energy center located on the outskirts of Goma, where it’s then turned into fireballs briquettes. The production line involves 8 people and producing 350 kgs per day but the target is to reach 1000 kgs per day.

The selling was launched at the beginning of May, and will be focused mostly on big consumers like restaurants, hotels, hospitals and later for households.

We believe that this program will reduce the crude charcoal consumption by using its waste product. We are aware, however, that this is not a long-term solution to the charcoal problem, but will help in the interim while other sustainable solutions, like the bio-mass briquettes, are being further developed.

Watch this video on the process of production:

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The Briquette Program is going full steam ahead and production of both briquettes and the presses that make them is increasing rapidly. We have had early success selling briquettes in bulk for IDP camps, but now the main challenge is to compete with the charcoal markets of Goma that are the biggest threat to Virunga’s forests.

Demonstrating the proper use of briquettes

That is why I visited an organisation called APROSAF (Association pour la Promotion de la Sage Femme) to demonstrate how briquettes work. This is an association made up of 118 women (many of them midwives or sage femme in French literally meaning ” wise woman”) which was created in the wake of the 2002 Nyiragongo eruption to help families made homeless by the devastating lava flow which ripped through Goma.

Read the full story »

The Virunga Youth Alliance is a local club (and registered NGO) that brings together over 130 young members from the communities around the park to learn about environmental conservation through sport and other activities.

Children playing football (soccer) at the field in Rumangabo Station Read the full story »

On 28th November we blogged about the Rangers from Lulimbi (near Ishasha) being forced to flee into Uganda to escape the fighting. Well last week I accompanied Emmanuel to visit the 71 Rangers and their families who hid for over 5 days in the forest before making it over to Uganda. Read the full story »

Yesterday I was at the camp talking to Odette, the wife of Ranger Bosco Hakizimana. She was pregnant and due in about a week. She told me that she was feeling quite tired and we thought it might be because it has been hot here in Goma the last couple days.

However, when I arrived at the camp this morning, I discovered we were wrong. Odette had gone into labor last night at 11PM and had given birth to a baby boy. They never had time to call Joel the nurse, and she delivered it in her tarp tent with the help of a couple other women in the camp.

Joel has now given the baby an examination and is happy to report that he is perfectly fine. Both mother and child have now been transferred to a local maternity ward for a couple days to recover. They will wait until reunited with Ranger Bosco before giving the baby his name.

A couple days ago Robert Williams blogged about the briquettes project that is trying to find an viable alternative to charcoal and thus curb the destruction of the forests of Virunga National Park.

In this video, our partner in this project Anatole Bandu explains exactly how the briquettes are made:

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This is Balemba. Great news: the villager that went missing last month has finally reappeared. He showed up dehydrated, thin, dirty, and barefoot, but alive!

This is what he told me:

Having walked from Rumangabo to his village in Bukima, he got started working in his crop field. After a couple hours, two young men with guns approached him and asked him why there weren’t any other villagers around. He told them that he was just there earlier than the others.

The men then became threatening and took the food he had with him (sweet potato with beans). They ordered him to follow them, taking him to an area near the Bukima Patrol Post. For three days, he was subjected to interrogations and beatings.

Once they were satisfied that he actually knew nothing, they transferred him from Bukima to Bikenge. There, he witnessed widespread poaching and saw other villagers forced to work for the rebels. At one point he also saw a group of gorillas in the forest (Diddy thinks it was the Kabirizi group). This was the first time he had seen gorillas in their natural habitat.

Kwibesha from the Kabirizi group

He was forced by the rebels to bring 200 liters of water every day from a spring several hundred meters into the forest. He survived on potatoes and slept in an abandoned hut, with the rebels in their tents nearby.

He did the best he could to hide his fear and fatigue from the rebels. In the end, he was finally freed because he was smart enough to do everything the rebels ordered him to do. Oddly enough, the rebels asked him to come back from time to time to bring them cigarettes. They even offered him a job as a tracker, with the promise that he could one day become a park ranger. He of course declined the offer and left, eventually finding his way to the displaced people’s camp at Kabaya.

He is still very traumatized by his ordeal, but hopefully he will get better soon.

This is Balemba. We’re quite worried. A villager from Rumangabo, where we live, has been missing since last Monday. He went up to Bukima, on the edge of the Gorilla Sector, to cultivate his crops, and has not been seen since. It’s about a four hour walk from Rumangabo to Bukima, and many of the villagers who fled Bukima when the fighting started had started doing the long walk back to their fields every day to tend their crops. They sleep in the valley, because the rebel territory is considered too dangerous.

However, since last weekend nobody has been going back to Bukima. Before this incident, the FARDC (the National Army) troops caught two rebels who were in government controlled area where we are. The FARDC officers told all the villagers not to go back to Bukima to cultivate in case of retaliations by the rebels. Unfortunately this one villager did not get the message and went anyway. We’re trying to get all the information we can but it’s very difficult.

There have been many cases of villagers going missing in the rebel held area over the past six months, and never being seen again. It’s terrible, because the villagers have nothing to do with this terrible war, they are only the victims. They have to cultivate their crops to survive, but take huge risks in going behind enemy lines. We will start to report on these disappearances, because it is one of those things that nobody hears about.

This is Balemba. We are just beginning to develop the informer network around the gorilla sector. The approach is to work on the edge of the forest. So far it is working quite well. Two of the informers from the local community have manged to set themselves up as a team of herders. The rebels have livestock, and use local Bashumba herders to manage the livestock for them. The two are now herding the rebels’ livestock and are able to discuss the status of the Gorillas. This is the information that they have managed to obtain:
A group of gorillas was found near the Bukima Patrol Post, on the flanks of Mt. Gashore. According to them, this is the Rugendo family that was so viciously attacked last July. Apparently one of the black backs had had a fight, probably with a solitary male in the forest. This is not surprising as the blackbacks are very vulnerable to an aggression by solitary silverbacks wanting to take over the group. Apparently the blackback has many wounds as a result of that fight.

A worrying development is that there is beginning to be more and more livestock, and some of it is regularly going into the park. But there is still nobody living around Bukima because people are still very scared of the rebels. Only Luzaria, the widow that I spoke of in the last post, who lives on her own with her two sheep, is living near Bukima.
Bikenge is now a tourism spot. The rebels have started to open footpaths, because they say that large numbers of tourists will be coming soon. Trackers and new rangers have been recruited by the rebels, although most of them have no idea what they are doing. One of our informer’s brothers has been hired as a tracker and may be able to provide us with regular and detailed information.

We are all quite scared, but continue to work as best we can.