A New Job in Congo
By Bryna Griffin
(Former EVR Graduate Student)
After finishing my MS (well, about 9 months after) I started at Conservation International's Global Conservation Fund as the Grant Manager. It was an amazing experience and I enjoyed nearly every minute of my three and half years there. I worked with projects from Peru to Papua New Guinea and got to visit quite a few of them. All the projects were/are developing conservation areas of various types and include a diverse array of community management/engagement/benefit strategies and sustainable finance models.
After learning in all of the EVR courses about so many models that have succeeded and failed over the year, it was quite a privilege to be closely involved with dozens of them in "real life." Yet I had a sense of being an observer from 3,000 feet, and I knew at some point I wanted to step on to the ground and get experience managing the day-to-day of a single project.
One of the projects in my portfolio was in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Focused on community-managed conservation areas in eastern lowland gorilla habitat, it is being implemented by Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International in partnership with an organization of local communities (UGADEC) and several other NGOs, including CI. I fell in love with the project from my first read of a proposal in 2005 and last May finally got the opportunity to visit. You can check out photos from my trip here. There are some of DRC and a few of across the border in Rwanda where we visited mountain gorillas.
While there, even more than at any of my other projects, I seemed to remember why I wanted to be in conservation in the first place and knew I had to get back on track to get into the field. I didn't know how, where or when but I knew I had to go somewhere! Several months later the stars must have aligned because the DRC project team sent me an email announcing that the project director was being replaced and did I know anyone who might be interested. Um... me?
Fast forward a few months and I've left CI, packed my belongings into storage in Massachusetts, signed a 2-year contract with DFGFI and am booked on a flight to Kigali, Rwanda, on January 9th. I'll be based in at DFGFI's office in Goma, DRC (a 3-hour drive from Kigali). I will be co-managing a team of about 20 core staff and a program that includes developing conservation areas, schools, clinics and gorilla research.
It also includes a small university which was built and is managed by the local communities to train conservation specialists (offering Associates and Master's degrees) as well as the building of an orphan gorilla center this year! All told, we've got about 400 employees on staff, most in the field, including rangers, teachers, doctors, gorilla vets, communications specialists, etc. All of them local except me!
I'm thrilled, nervous and a bit in disbelief. I also need to learn French asap! I will be blogging about my transition as I go and I'll send the link later.
Posted Jan. 4, 2009
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For more information contact Bryna at brynapg@mac.com.