Hero Rats!

I’m catching up on a backlog of blog posts. National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo.org) has really taken the place of blogging. But I’m currently at 23000 words after 15 days. The more you write, the harder it gets to tie all these characters and plot elements together in a climax. Maybe I’ll be like Stephen Kind in The Stand and just kill everybody off to simplify my work.

In early November I visited Apopo, an organization that trains local people to handle and train rats to address important social problems. Currently they have over 250 indigenous giants rats sniffing land mines and detecting tuberculosis.

I plan to turn my hours of video into a 5 minute rat-torial to the tune of Perry Grip’s eponymous song:

For now, I’ll just show a few nice photos:

And Apopo helped us train 30 students at a local school to be Storytelling Scribes.

It fits with my suspicion that innovative organizations are willing to try new things even when there doesn’t appear to an immediate benefit to them. Apopo’s work takes place in Mozambique, Thailand, and in Dar Es Salaam (for tuberculosis detection). None of the local stories will be about them, but they are willing to support GlobalGiving as our first storytelling partner organization in Tanzania.