For your lifetime: understanding climate change; a training for our staff
During the last couple of months, we have been focusing a lot on training with the staff in order to maintain and improve our skills and staff presence around the camp. While as a guest you might not realise it, we have more than 12 members of staff working behind the scenes at the camp to keep the place running smoothly. These staff members include the ones you see on a daily basis - such as our guide, James, the room girls, Patricia and Fridah, or the mess tent girl, Fifi. But there is also our excellent chef, Stella, working away in the kitchen, and a host of mechanics, groundsmen, askaris (watchman) and general handymen.
Our most recent training occurred one night when we had an empty camp - since we have a particular focus in the camp on sustainability, I created a powerpoint to discuss with the staff the importance of understanding what sustainability is and why it is important. For some of our staff, it was the first time they had ever heard of sustainability - however, I broke the subject down and we spent the hour speaking about climate change and what that means for our camp, our staff and our guests.
Since everyone in Kenya knows about the rains that come (traditionally long rains start in mid-March and the short rains start in mid-November), I started the conversation on this topic. It certainly got the staff talking and we discussed how and why the rains in Kenya are now more unpredictable.
From this discussion we moved on to discuss what climate change is, how it is created and worsened and what us, as humans, are doing to make climate change. Some of these points on the presentation may seem obvious to our readers, but for staff members who have not heard much about climate change before, it is important to start at the beginning!
And of course, once we had covered what exactly climate change is, we moved on to how we can slow / stop climate change by changing our actions in the camp. It is, of course, our actions that have created the problems we see now. So it is only our actions that can make the positive changes we need to see!
Sustainability is one of our most important ethos in our camp but it can’t just be a ‘top only’ approach - we ALL need to be passionate and proactive in the way we behave and the changes we make. Encouragement, training and learning is always going to make progress occur and we look forward to seeing new changes over the next year.