Congo park rangers blogging from the front line

Tired of blogs chewing over the same old fat? Four elite park rangers in eastern Congo are now armed with cameras and blogs as well as rifles and know-how, as they work to protect the few remaining mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park from rebels, poachers and land invasions.

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The above post is what happens when you use the automatic "Blog It" function in Digg. This is definitely a good way to generate traffic on a website. Here is the sequence of events:  I saw this post on Global Voices linking to this blog post by a Londoner named Fred blogging from the DRC about how Congo park rangers are blogging. At the bottom of his blog post was a "digg this" link. I was so enthused about what I learned from  his post that I felt that I must help bring more attention to it with my little vote. Fred (who interestingly has a button to auto-translate his blog into Chinese) writes:

...I highly recommend taking a look at what may be the only Congolese blogs written in English (Diaspora excluded - if I’m wrong about that, please let me know). Wildlife Direct deserve bounteous credit for arming three elite park rangers in Eastern DRC with cameras and blogs:

• Elie Mundima commands the Rangers in Virunga National Park, where he says nearly 100 rangers have died protecting mountain gorillas from land invasions, poachers and rebels in the past 10 years
• Atamato is based at Ishango, on the northern shores of Lake Edward. His job is to protect the last remaining hippos in Virunga
• Aloma Major has been using his blog to have a conversation with a school in Colorado (more of a monologue, so far: I wish they’d leave some comments)
• Paulin Ngobobo is a senior warden with the Congolese wildlife authorities. His most recent post includes pictures of a newborn mountain gorilla called Ndeze

I was just poking around their blogs. Great stuff: wonderful pictures and videos, and real windows onto the lives of some dedicated Congolese park rangers. If you care about African wildlife you should definitely follow their blogs. A great example of one less thing I ever would have known about if it weren't for Global Voices.

There are, by the way, many more Congolese blogs written in French - from which Alice Backer frequently translates excerpts. You can see them all on GV's DRC page.

When talking about the difference between blogs and conventional journalism, why the two complement each other, and why I think we need both, I love to point to GV's DRC page and contrast it with the New York Times' Congo page... The NYT has some excellent journalism which GV cannot duplicate, but I would note that the last NYT story on that page is from November... while GV continues to link to and sometimes translate fresh blog posts coming regularly out of the DRC - whether or not there is some new disaster or conflict or election.

GV's coverage of some countries and regions is stronger than others which is due in part to whether it is easy or difficult to find active volunteers to help us represent their country and region. We're strong on China but weak on Japan and Korea for example, because we've had problems finding Korean and Japanese bloggers who are interested in spending the time to introduce the conversations from their blogospheres to the English-speaking world. If anybody out there knows some strong bilingual Korean and Japanese bloggers who would like to help us out, please have them get in touch with me.

Comments

[Fred]

Thanks for your interest, Rebecca. I think this is a glimpse of the potential of blogs to connect the dots in ways previously unimaginable.

[Rebecca MacKinnon]

Happy to call attention to these fabulous blogs, Fred. I'm so excited about this particular example I used it as the lead example in a book chapter I'm writing about blogs and the future of journalism.

[Fred]

I just came back to this. I'll certainly keep an eye out for news of the book. I enjoyed the way you outlined the path of discovery and connectivity.

A week back, Global Voices also picked up on the way a few bloggers relayed updates on the evolving situation during a nasty round of fighting here in Kinshasa (link)