Letters to the Editor, September 2024

The cover of the June issue caught my eye as it looks just like one of the many photos I have taken myself on the shores of Lake Victoria. After studying Zoology at the University of Nairobi and then serving two years in the Peace Corps in Tanzania, I continue to go to East Africa (especially Tanzania) on a regular basis — taking folks on safari with the help of Africa Joy Tours, a locally owned Tanzanian company that we support (it’s not easy to find a safari company that isn’t owned by foreign interests). From the nearby Serengeti National Park, we always make a special side trip to Lake Victoria to learn about the efforts being made there by local women who are working hard to provide educational and employment opportunities for themselves and for their children. Our visits help fund these programs, and I wish more tour companies would do the same.

Here at home in Palm Desert, California, I’ve been teaching college conservation classes for 30 years, and population growth is always the number one issue that I emphasize when it comes to impacts on and connections to the environment. The most successful conservation programs in developing countries such as Tanzania are the ones that also focus on what I call the “three E’s” — education, empowerment, and employment — for women.

Kurt Leuschner

In the June issue, you asked for letters from readers who have had experiences in Tanzania. I have been to Tanzania three times, not as a tourist, but working in a school started by a religious sister, a native Tanzanian, who had studied in Duluth, Minnesota, where I lived. She returned to Tanzania in 2017 and opened a school with 21 students in January 2018. I went there with a retired doctor friend who had earlier served in the Peace Corps working at a medical school in Dar es Salaam. He wanted to go back for a short time, and I asked to go with him. He contacted the sister, who said she would be delighted to have me come because she was teaching the children in English. Having a native speaker in the school would be most helpful.

I was there for two hot months, from mid-February to mid-April, in a rural area about 50 miles from Dar es Salaam. I had a bedroom with a “modern” bathroom in the convent where three sisters also lived. I worked with five or six preschool-age children, teaching counting, the alphabet, and all the other things preschool children need to learn. There were few teaching materials — my friend and I had brought books, puzzles, crayons, paper, etc., but I also made many things.

We took several shopping trips to Dar es Salaam, where I experienced the crowds in the streets, the markets, and the traffic jams with buses, trucks, motorcycles, cars, and bikes. Quite a nightmare!

I returned to Tanzania two more times — in the summers of 2018 and 2019 — for one month each time. By 2019, the school had grown to almost 100 children. I have kept in contact with the sister. There are now over 600 children in the school. Since I have decided that I will not fly anymore due to the impact of air travel on the climate, I won’t be returning to Tanzania, but I have wonderful memories of my time there.

Judy Sausen

My day brightens every time I see an issue of Population Connection arrive in the mail!

Nancy Power

As always, I appreciated the June issue of Population Connection, especially the articles on Tanzania generally and on Maasai Harmonial specifically.

Joan Walsh

Global warming, microplastics, herbicides, pesticides, wanton greed, autocratic violence, frankenfood, wars, tribalism, etc. There is no need for demographers to project world population by the end of the century — humans and most other species will have perished by then. Earth will abide and hopefully so will some life forms.

Kendrick Miller

I have been a member and supporter of ZPG and Population Connection since my college days, going back about 55 years. I became an active environmentalist after I read Silent Spring when I was about 14. In 1971 or so, I started a ZPG club at MIT, where I was an undergraduate student.

I liked John Seager’s “President’s Note” in the June issue, and his comment on knocker uppers brought back a strong memory from over 40 years ago: My grandaunt had told of her first profession as a teenager, over a century ago. She was employed as a hooker, which startled all of us, until we learned that her first job was affixing hooks to women’s garments!

Dr. Avi Ornstein