Tacugama

Category: Chimpanzee, Introduction, Tacugama | Date: Mar 10 2008 | By: admin

Hi again - it’s great to be able to start another blog entry by saying thank you; we’ve received a generous donation from Antonio C. His donation will go towards our community support work and you can read below on how the Tacugama team is expanding….

Close to Tacugama are the villages of Regent and Bathurst, founded by freed slaves some 200 years ago. Both villages are very scenic, surrounded by beautiful hills and wooden houses based on creole architecture. Regent can also boast of having the famous St.Charles church, the oldest stone church in West Africa.

Krio House
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St Charles
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Over the years, we have built close relationship with these communities and have always been helping them in many ways.. education, community development, promoting jobs etc. Keeping the youth engaged also helps to curb environmental degradation to some degree. Unemployment amongst the youth is high and they are always looking for short cuts to make ends meet. Poaching for forest resources is an easy way out. It is difficult to preach conservation to hungry youngsters, it is important to provide them with alternatives and community support programs go a long way to complement our efforts.

Recently, the youth brought up a brilliant idea to keep the boys busy by launching Tacugama Football Club. Yes… we are not just managing chimps here, now a football team too! A very professional, enthusiastic young team. We have entered and now qualified to remain in the Western Area League. We’ve started well, in our first match, we had a fantastic 8 goals to 2 victory and in the second we won by 4 goals to 1.

Tacugama FC
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We would like to build on this and we need your support. We are short of football kit: boots, balls, jerseys, guards etc. We rent most of the kit for $20 per match and spend another $40 on food, drinks and transportation for the team per game. At the moment we are playing one game a week and some extra help will certainly boost our efforts.

All the chimps are doing well. We’ve made one more introduction into the infant group: Bidi, a 3 year old girl has completed her quarantine period and is being introduced to the nursery group. As always, Mama Posseh is very concerned and demands to stay with Bidi in the enclosure to give the little one some more confidence.

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Gaura is going through his next set of vaccinations, beginning to be playful and it doesn’t take much time to make him laugh!