Lions and Walrus - yet still not a safari

This has been in the works for some time now, but this Lion will now officially be blogging on the Walrus website. The Walrus is a Canadian magazine known for its love of lions. Okay, I don't actually know if they love lions, but they liked me enough to ask me to start blogging there. I'll still write here, and when I write there I'll put the link here.

My blog there is called This is Not A Safari. I thought about sticking with the Lion theme, but i decided that maybe that platform just isn't big enough for two large mammals. After making a list of other inane names (Thoughts Along the Nile, Kampala Musings, Lion versus Walrus), I decided on This is Not a Safari.

The new title is still related to animals, but my point with the lion was always somehow related to the fact that I have NEVER. SEEN. A. REAL. LION. When I visit America, distant acquaintances or friends of friends who learn that I live in East Africa generally reply with something like, "I've always wanted to go on a safari!"

As if I ride an elephant to work.

Trust me, if that option were available, I would take it, because it would be pretty awesome to just sort of step over and perhpas even do some smashing of Kampala traffic jams as I made my way to town.

But, my life is more than lions and my work is not about saving gorillas. Hence the title.

The first post there today is about a character readers of this blog will be familiar with: Stephen of (formerly) Kireka. For all of you who have been waiting to hear what happened to him, here it is.


A UGANDAN ORPHAN WITH A WEB PRESENCE

KAMPALA, UGANDA—When you Google “Stephen Batte,” you get over 600 hits. That’s a huge number of Internet references for a nine-year old Ugandan orphan, who up until recently didn’t have enough to eat, shoes, clean clothes, or a blanket, let alone a web presence.

But, now that he’s famous, in part thanks to me, he’s got an online following and about a dozen American and Canadian couples anxious to adopt him.

I met Stephen in May just outside Kampala, when I went to take photos for the Associated Press for a story about young children slaving all day to crush rocks in a stone quarry. Most people in the area are urban refugees from a twenty-year conflict that has ravaged Northern Uganda, though most of these children don’t know the place their parents left behind or the regional geopolitics that perpetuate the conflict. They do, however, know how to crush rocks: filling a twenty-litre jerry can earns them 100 shillings (about six cents). While their parents may have fled Northern Uganda for the safety of Kampala and the possibility of economic advancement, few people make it out of the quarry once they arrive. Every day, hundreds of adults and children sit scattered throughout the vast pit, tirelessly crushing rocks into smaller and smaller pebbles.I went to the quarry and found a community leader I had spoken with on the phone. She led me to Stephen, who an AP colleague had already interviewed and written about. He was shy and quiet, small and timid. I spoke with him for a quarter of an hour and then asked if I could take his picture. He let me. Then I walked around, watching dozens and dozens of children crush walks. I took about eight GB of photos over two or three days, and filed about twenty shot to an AP editor in Johannesburg, who put them on the wire. They were published in scores of newspapers across the West and posted on many web sites around the beginning of June.

Stephen’s web presence was born. (MORE...)