When Lori Bergemann was young, her engineer father took a job in India with Hindustan Motors. During the years the family lived there, while at boarding school in New Delhi, she often went to the zoo to visit the elephants. One day, “the elephants were standing and swaying back and forth,” she says. “I just felt really sorry for them. And I made a secret promise to myself that one day I would find a way to help them.”
It took thirty years, but Lori made good on her promise.
Today she is an impassioned, risk-taking conservationist whose non-profit Amara Conservation fights the poaching and snaring of African wildlife.
The path that led Lori to Kenya opened late in 1999. She was in her sixteenth year working at the Earle restaurant in Ann Arbor, Mil. When her sister Heidi invited her to take a trip. At first they planned to return to India, but a after a chance meeting with a tour operator who is also a wildlife conservationist in Kenya, they decided to change their destination to Africa.
On their second day in Africa, out the bush, “We were surrounded by wild elephants, I was so moved,” she recalls. “I thought, ‘This is where I am supposed to be.” Her initial strategy was to continue residing in the U.S. and raise funds for project based work to help the elephants of Kenya, but after two subsequent trips to Kenya, she realized she was needed on the ground full time. In 2001 Lori permanently relocated to Kenya.
Often on the road, Lori spends weeks at a stretch in her Land Rover traveling through the remote African bush, working with Amara’s Kenyan staff, educating people about the importance of protecting and respecting the wildlife that surrounds them. She found the word amara in a dictionary. “It means ‘urgent need’ in Swahili,” she says. “I thought, ‘It’s a pretty word’—and urgent need is what we’re trying to address.”
Lori speaks easily and passionately about her work and about Africa. Amara’s work is needed, she says, because in Kenya the schools do not teach anything about the environment. If people “understand why they have to keep their environment precious, and how they’re responsible for it they will all be more receptive to the idea of working against poaching themselves, and finding their own solutions to the problems of a degrading environment”
Americans have the misconception that Africans, especially those in remote places, live in perfect, imaginary “primitive” harmony with nature. But most rural Africans regard wildlife as a threat. “There’s a competition between the people and the wildlife,” she says, “The lion can hurt them or eat their livestock, the hyena could attack their child, an elephant could raid their farm. So they avoid them.
I want to work to help the people who live here make better choices, find their own solutions – help people get information to think about things in a different way. I want to have a sustainable long-term impact.
A big stroke of luck for Lori was meeting Africa’s leading documentary filmmaker, Simon Trevor, who directed Bloody Ivory and worked on Gorillas in the Mist and Out of Africa. Trevor heads up the African Environmental Film Foundation.
He devotes himself to making documentary films for Africans in African languages.
Lori takes Trevor’s documentaries into the bush to teach Kenyans about wildlife and the environment. Each trip starts with a two-day frenzy of packing the Land Rover with food, safari gear, film equipment, a generator, extra gas—everything she needs to survive for two to four weeks. She always takes one or two other people with her, and typically they drive six hours to get to where they work, and stay in the area.
“You head off down roads and across rivers, over boulders,” she says, “and it’s a long trip”. More than once, she’s arrived at a school two weeks later than expected. “They don’t care, ”she says. “The kids are always thrilled, always excited. They’ll wait all day for us to show up, and they’ll be just running and jumping and screaming when we get there.”
Some of the Africans Lori meets have never seen a film before.
She takes a screen with her and hangs it up wherever possible, nailing it to a building or throwing a rope over something. Often, she shows films outdoors, with the screen hanging from the roof of the Land Rover. “The older people, especially in the really rural areas—all of them, they’re just wide eyed and amazed. I’ve had people afterwards say, ‘How did you get the elephant on the wall?’”
An excerpt from Lori’s diary:
Learn More About AmaraToday we were again up at dawn, a long day in the schools. It was late but we had one last place to stop, a very poor place. We set up everything, I sat down in the dirt, people handing me their babies – feeling dirty, sweaty, tired and being eaten by mosquitoes – BUT
Seeing the faces glued to the screen, the smiles, laughter, surprise as understandings sank in … kids, women, young and older men … learning for the first time why cutting trees encourages drought … how overgrazing creates deserts, the value of the wildlife to Kenya, the commitment shown by the Kenya government burning ivory in 1989 ….
In this one village, seeing 1,000 people changing how they think… This really makes a difference. I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
What a gift.
