Wildlife Sanctuary Project, Namibia.
Volunteering at the wildlife sanctuary will provide you with a once in a lifetime opportunity to get hands on work with African wildlife. The project provides refuge for orphaned and injured animals including baboons, caracals, wild dogs, cheetahs, leopards and lions.
As a volunteer you will be involved with caring for and feeding the animals as well as helping to maintain and develop the sanctuary. During your time on the project a typical day will include preparing the animals food, cleaning and maintaining enclosures, feeding the animals, taking them on walks and providing intensive care for juvenile wildlife. Volunteers will also be involved in physical labour such as building new facilities, animal interaction such as taking care of a baby baboon overnight and you will also spend time out in the surrounding environment to conduct game counts.
As a Wildlife Sanctuary volunteer you will also have the opportunity to visit the clever cubs schools. This amazing pre-school provides free education to the San Bushmen children who would otherwise not have access to education. The school provides a full curriculum as well as being a place for the children to dance, sing and play.
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Video Transcript Below:
Wildlife Sanctuary Project, Namibia
Q: What does a typical morning look like at the Wildlife Sanctuary?
Janna Foster Volunteer: ‘We all meet in the morning at 8 o’clock to just kind of go over the day. They’ll make announcements and then all the volunteers are divided up into teams and they’ll announce what activity each team will be doing for the morning. Like whether it’s enclosure cleaning, food prep, baboon walk, cheetah walk, stuff like that’.
Q: Tell me more about caring for the babies at the sanctuary?
April Lacey Volunteer: ‘The babies that we look after overnight and things, their parents have sometimes been shot or they’ve been found on their own. They’re only a few weeks old, so here they offer them the opportunity, I mean they have to be bottle fed because they would be fed by their mums and obviously they don’t have mums. And, with the baboons they don’t have another adult female that will step in as the mum so we sort of do that job.’
Q: Are there any cultural aspects to this project?
Andreas Kornevall, co-founder workingabroad.com: ‘The cultural aspect to the project which is engaging with the Bush-men, the San people, so it opens up a world of indigenous knowledge that is sadly fading in the world. So, this is a great opportunity to be part of that.
Corne De Roubaix Volunteer Co-ordinator: ‘I’m the volunteer liaison, like the big brother for all the volunteers coming here’.
Q: So when all the volunteers arrive, you’re the guy they all meet?
Corne: ‘I’m the face they get to meet. The first welcoming voice they get, greeting them, checking them in quickly, giving them brief information: just a few schedules about breakfast, lunch, where they stay.’
Q: What are we trying to do here at the sanctuary? Conservation?
Corne: ‘The sanctuary is basically for those little animals that’s orphaned or injured that we take in and we take care of them. Because of the conservation fights, where it is far from over, we have a bottleneck of animals that we receive on a regular basis. They cannot be released back into nature immediately because they’re not strong enough, they’re injured and we have to make sure that and we have to make sure that they’re strongest, and that we give them the best possibility of having the longest life possible.
Q: And then some animals you’re able to release?
Corne: Yes, we have a variety of animals that we can release, successfully release. For example, the porcupine, the warthogs, the little meerkats, the antelopes that we also have, we’ve got a Kudu and a Hartebeest, a red Hartebeest. Once they’re strong enough they’re weaned off the milk supply and they can go back onto the farm. We release them basically on the farm and then they mingle with their own species and they can start having their own life with their own species again.
