The nearest town to Ishango is Kaviyonge, a fishing town where we regularly go to talk to the chief of the Fishing Cooperative and to see if we can get the Cooperative running again successfully, as it was before the war.

It is now a long time ago since it was running properly, which was back in the 1980s, with the collapse taking place in the 1990s. The installation of the cooperative was in these buildings below, which unfortunately are now falling apart.

We desperately need money to rehabilitate these buildings so we can have the cooperative running again. (In the background you can see the Tshiabirimu Mountains, where you can find the lowland mountain gorillas).

During the war many people from the surrounding villages came to live here, to make a living from fishing. But a lot of these people did not, and still don’t, respect the rules we had put in place and have rapidly depleted the fish stocks by bad fishing methods.

We have put a limit on the size of the holes in the fishing nets used by the local population, to try and prevent them from depleting entire stocks of fish by taking all the young. But we know that many fishermen are ignoring this rule.

Above is the catch for one fisherman in one night, about 8 to 10 kilos of fish, which is not a lot for the area. Not a lot at all, and is in fact a rather serious situation.

With more than 18,000 people living in this small town, the strain put on the lake is already too much, and so to survive the people who live here are now obliged to illegally cultivating the surrounding land within the park. Also, as well as illegally cultivating land, the local population are also poaching animals from the park, and so are now having a detrimental effect on all of the wildlife in the region.

In the coming years, with many births taking place, the population of the village is going to grow rapidly and force villagers to take even more drastic measures to make a living, which in turn can only mean more strain put on the park.

Currently, every fisherman has to register with the chief in charge of fishing, giving details of what boats and nets they are using, as well as learning about what size fish they are allowed to catch.

The Chief has also had to put limits on the amount that people are allowed to fish, and is also trying to enforce rotations of fishing times so that they do not keep over fishing this area.

We have taught the locals about why they should not fish in spawning grounds, but they still continue to fish here, and so we would one day like to have the money to buy some buoys to physically show where these restricted areas are.

Without money to properly help fund these programs, there is not much we can do but keep the talks going with the fishermen. Unfortunately words alone can not fill their stomachs and neither can they protect the wildlife here around Ishango.

Technorati : Fishing, Ishango, Virunga, WildlifeDirect

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