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East Africa
To depart on a safari is not only a physical act,
it is also a gesture. You leave behind the worries, the strains, the irritations of life among people under pressure, and enter the world of creatures who are pressed into no moulds, but have only to be themselves; bonds loosen, anxiety fades, the mind closes against the world you left behind like a folding sea anemone. —Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika
Dear Friends,
Little did my parents Felix and Jane think more than 50 years ago that the small safari enterprise they had just inaugurated would become one of the world’s premier safari companies. (In our minds, of course, Micato is not just “one of,” but the absolute world’s finest safari company—and fortunately, many well-informed minds agree, as evidenced by our numerous awards.)
And, needless to say, little could anyone have also imagined that visiting our serene savannahs—or world tourism in general— would be so upended by the health challenges facing the globe today. We’ve learned not to make predictions, but as I write this letter in late summer 2020, East Africa is faring significantly better than the rest of the world and holds great promise of providing a much needed “tonic of wildness” for travellers seeking respite and repose. Moreover, as Travel+Leisure says, Micato “treats their guests like well-loved, outof-town relatives.” This is how Felix and Jane — pictured here in Nairobi — have conducted their lives, built our family-owned and family-operated company, and why every member of the Micato family will become your welcoming family, from the Safari Directors and Driver Guides who will be with you 24 /7 on safari to the Micato USA and Micato Africa teams who are ready and eager to assist at any time. And so, we invite you to take an armchair safari with this brochure and hope you will consider joining us at home in Africa for an experience that will surpass even your fondest safari dreams. Sincerely,
Dennis Pinto Managing Director
Your Safari Team in the Bush Safari Directors: Guide, Helper, Friend And with you every step of the way. Safari Directors meet you upon landing in Africa and are with you until the moment you depart, always nearby and on prompt call around the clock— not just during business hours. Every Micato Safari Director in Kenya has earned the prestigious Silver-Level certification by the Kenya Professional Safari Guides Association and are seasoned professionals, most of whom have been with us their entire careers.* Graduates of Kenya Utalii College or Tanzania’s College of African Wildlife Management, they guide forays into the bush, lecture on flora and fauna, deftly handle logistics, and impart fascinating nuggets of African history, Swahili, and tribal folklore. They will also become dear friends. In Southern Africa, Micato Safari Directors meet the same high standards, while wildlife explorations are led by Game Rangers and Trackers stationed at each camp. Safari Directors offer a deep knowledge of the region’s natural history and are fluent in South Africa’s cultural history, current affairs,
local art, and culinary and winery scenes — you name it. But their real talent lies in their ability to make the logistics of travel calm and effortless for Micato travellers.
Driver Guides, Tops in Their Field It bears repeating: While most companies offer only Driver Guides, Micato groups safari with a team of Driver Guides and a Safari Director. In Kenya, our Driver Guides hold a minimum Bronze-Level certification from the Kenya Professional Safari Guides Association and many are Silver-certified. Micato is one of the few safari companies that still operates an in-house training school with classes in conservation, the latest discoveries in paleoanthropology, guest relations refreshers, and many etceteras, including CPR training in which every Safari Director and Driver Guide is fully certified.
Having a Safari Director and a Driver made such a difference. I learned so much ... felt sorry for [guests] not on a Micato safari! —Sarah Wille
The Pintos treat their guests like well-loved, out-of-town relatives.
— Travel+ Leisure
The Many Micato Differences How does a safari company amaze and excel for more than 50 years? By a cheerfully relentless dedication to service and innovation. With painstaking discernment, profound expertise, and the generosity of spirit that arises from a family’s bedrock commitment to hospitality. n
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Travel+Leisure has named us #1 World’s Best Safari Outfitter nine times. No other company comes close. Exclusive access to people, places, and experiences available only through the Pinto family’s longtime connections. Share a meal with our founders, Felix and Jane Pinto, at their suburban Nairobi home. Itineraries perfected by generations of experience and local knowledge. Luxurious camps and lodges—obsessively, continually curated. Safari Directors—all Silver and Gold certified— accompany every East Africa safari from beginning to end. A wonder-working Concierge Team, at your beck and call every moment of the day and night.
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All tips included, even to Safari Directors and Driver Guides. All meals included. And we unhesitatingly pick up the tab for meals in any local restaurant on all Custom Safaris. At mealtimes, regional wines, beer, and bottled water are included. In Southern Africa, spirits are often included, too. Free valet laundry service, everywhere, every day (and complimentary, custom-designed Marmot luggage to put it in). Small-group, boutique safaris of fewer than 18 travellers, and only 12 in Southern Africa. 100% guaranteed departures on our scheduled Classic Safaris, even for parties of two. The finest, well-stocked safari vehicles, Wi-Fi equipped, with guaranteed window seats for all. Surprises. We’re famous for them. You’ll be amazed. And — this could well be at the top of the list—we pay for an African child’s education for every safari we sell.
A Day on Safari Early-Morning Game Drive The sun rises early and eagerly on the savannahs, and after some tea, coffee, and pre-breakfast snacks, we venture into what the great lover of Africa Peter Beard called “a paradise caressed by light and air in their most special forms.” Back at the lodge, we tuck into an English-style breakfast, or perhaps we enjoy an acacia-shaded picnic in the bush.
Exploring Africa’s Intimate Landscapes “Whole landscapes seem alert,” Peter Matthiessen wrote about Africa in The Tree Where Man Was Born. He may well have been thinking of our alertness in these landscapes, a charged, joyous concentration “like a marvelous childhood faculty restored.” We roam the savannahs and forests with our eyes, searching for their treasures — Look! There, a cheetah!— and the land is no longer mere scenery, an object to look at and admire, but a living thing that invites intimacy and engagement. We know about our species that the more we engage with something, the more likely we are to develop a fiery affection for it.
Sundowners and Sunsets After a festive lunch, with talk of sightings and amazements (high on the list of safari surprises: the fresh and tasty food), we have time for reading, music, maybe a profound nap followed by a swim, and then it’s off for an afternoon game drive. After a lovely dinner back at camp, and some time around the campfire, we’re off to bed. And in the morning we may agree with author Elspeth Huxley that there is no “sleep so perfect as that stirred but not broken by the thrilling vibrance of a lion’s roar.”
Africa always brings us something new. —Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis
Flying Over Africa You may remember—it’s hard to forget—the scene in the film version of Out of Africa when Denys Finch Hatton (played by Robert Redford) lands his Gipsy Moth near Karen Blixen’s (Meryl Streep’s) farm. She rushes out to the spiffy little biplane, and Finch Hatton doesn’t take off his flying goggles, he barely throttles back his engine, he just says, “Get in,” and thus begins one of cinema’s great moments: a heart-firing poem of a swooping flight over the incomparably eloquent landscapes of East Africa.* Isak Dinesen, Blixen’s nom de plume, remembered her many African flights as “the most transporting pleasure of my life. . . . Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. ‘I see,’ I have thought, ‘This was the idea. And now I understand everything.’ ” It’s as true today as it was in the 1920s: flying low and easily over the continent in small planes
is a matchlessly intimate way to appreciate its subtle and dramatic colours, its tectonic dramas, and its cavalcade of creatures. We fly over villages, waving to their residents, and in a few moments, we’re on the ground, shaking their hands. One of our guests said it well: “For me, flying over Africa is about as flying as flying gets.” Our Custom Safaris offer as many flights as your personalized itinerary calls for, and we— and our guests over the years—think the Before she climbs into the flights that link lodgplane, Blixen asks Finch es and camps on our Hatton, “When did you learn to fly?” And he answers with a Classic Safaris (six on Redfordian grin, “Yesterday.” The Micato Grand S afari, Rest assured our pilots have for instance, and five hundreds upon hundreds of on The Stanley Wing) times more experience than that—and many of them are safari highlights, have movie-star smiles. airy dalliances with Africa’s incomparable landscapes.
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the heart of kenya and tanzania
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Tanzania’s Tarangire, Ngorongoro Crater & Serengeti
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Kenya’s Maasai Mara
12 days door-to-door Includes days en route to/from Nairobi
he names alone are magic:
The Serengeti. Ngorongoro Crater. The Maasai Mara. We’re reminded that when we travel, we visit names as well as places — names with romantic heft, names that resound, names that may have captivated us for many years. Names like Ngorongoro. (Then again, if we’d never heard that sonorous name, and we made the exhilarating drive up the flank of the old volcano and reached its rim and suddenly beheld the green and animal-thronged crater far below, Ngorongoro would be just as utterly amazing.) In less than two weeks, The Heart of Kenya and Tanzania introduces us—or re-introduces us—to places with famous names, but most of all, it brings us to fantastic places, fantastic in the sense that their like is to be found exactly nowhere else on earth.
All our lives we’ve seen these animals in captivity or on a screen. Now we see them in wilderness, propelled by the force of their evolution; at last they’re able to tell us what they are, who they are. —Mary Marenka Poxon, in a letter to her sister, Eileen Borzencki
day
1 En route
days
2 & 3 Nairobi
After arrival at Jomo Kenyatta Airport, we’ll be met by our Safari Director and driven to the classic Fairmont Norfolk Hotel, for more than a century the world’s preferred pre- and post-safari stomping ground. We’ll meet sassy pachyderms at the Daphne Sheldrick elephant orphanage, consort with the world’s tallest terrestrial animal at the Giraffe Centre, make a pilgrimage to the home of Karen Blixen — aka Isak Dinesen, one of Africa’s supreme laureates — and have lunch at Lavington, home of Micato’s founders, Felix and Jane Pinto (be sure to ask about Jane’s adventures in the world of international table tennis).
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4 Tarangire
We’ll tour the informative National Museum and after lunch fly in early afternoon from Nairobi to northern Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro International Airport. We fly onward to Tarangire National Park and the Tarangire Sopa Lodge, a classic example of beautifully designed modern lodge architecture. Tarangire is an apt place to begin a wildlife safari. Home to just about all the headliner beasts, including a large and robust elephant population, Tarangire also shelters such rarities as the fringe-eared oryx and the long-necked gerenuk, a particularly winsome and creatively constructed antelope. Tarangire charms us with its exemplary African landscapes: acacia trees, brawny brown hills, sweeping vistas, clear nights of “soft velvet,” as Elspeth
Huxley wrote. “[Like] a warm conservancy whose great dome was encrusted with all the diamonds in the world, and all the scents in the world were there too, changing like currents in the sea.” days
5 & 6 Ngorongoro Crater
We drive from Tarangire up into the green Crater Highlands, weaving our way to our lodge, the Ngorongoro Sopa, perched at well over 7,000 feet on the rim of the fabled Ngorongoro Crater. As geologic masterpieces go, Ngorongoro has had quite a career. It’s been a gigantic peak, perhaps a rival of Kilimanjaro, and, after it blew its snowy top in what must have been a rather impressive explosion (our forefathers over at the nearby Olduvai Gorge, busy getting their humanoid act together, probably saw it), Ngorongoro spent many millennia as an alternately quiet and occasionally bubbling lava lake. Now in an extended pacific mood, the crater is home to upwards of 25,000 personality-rich animals, who roam—as we will—over a sweetly lush area larger than 76 Central Parks. days
7 & 8 The Serengeti
After stopping at Olduvai, the symbolic wellspring of our DNA, we drop down to the Serengeti, the
known universe’s largest (and, happily for us, most wonderfully watchable) collection of illustrious mammals: elephants, giraffes, tumbling pool-fuls of hippos, elegantly slinking serval cats, zebras with incredibly muscular haunches (leading us to If there were a wonder why they were Guinness Book never ridden—very weak of Best Sunsets backs, that’s why), and and Sunrises, the Serengeti’s would scores of species more, all be near the top of of them going about their the list; one morning business unconcerned by we saw a cloud on the likes of us. (“But make the horizon lit so incandescently by the no mistake,” an old Africa still-hidden sun that it hand once wrote, “these was almost too bright aren’t theme parks. The to look at directly. truest owners of these lands are the animals who roam them free and, if that’s their nature, fiercely.”) We’ll soak up the essence of the Serengeti from the Sopa Lodge, set on an escarpment overlooking the seemingly limitless plains, enjoying a sundowner after a game drive, watching clouds build up as the day cools, big clouds that “look like you could scoop them up with a spoon,” Elspeth Huxley wrote.*
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THE HEART OF KENYA AND TANZANIA EAST AFRICA CLASSIC SAFARIS
days
9 & 10 The Maasai Mara
We fly back to Kilimanjaro International, then to Nairobi, and on to the Kenyan section of the Serengeti–Maasai Mara ecosystem, a world treasure, one with no counterpart, anywhere. (During humanity’s tenure, the closest any place on earth has come to equaling the Serengeti’s incredible wealth of wildlife may be paleolithic Siberia, with the ancient North American Plains Your Safari Director another contender.) The size of will discuss with Vermont (with Liechtenstein thrown you a variety of in for good measure), the Serengeti– individualized activity Maasai Mara ecosystem is, amongst choices at every safari location. much else, famed for the dramatic migration of its 1,000,000-plus wildebeest and 750,000-or-so zebras (and the intense attention that migration gets from predators, both mammalian and reptilian). Though the migration reaches seasonal crescendos, the movement of animals—north after the Long Rains,
south as the rains return to nourish the southern plains— is more or less continual, and the sight of a two- or three-mile-long train of animals on the move is extremely memorable. Up here in the system’s north, the landscapes are grandly varied but tend to be more green (which is why the migration heads up here, in search of water), with somewhat less savannah than in the south. We’ll be staying in a characteristically attractive tented camp, either Kichwa Tembo or Fairmont Mara Safari Club, both of which take advantage of the Mara’s scenic mix. Kichwa is set in riverine forest on the banks of the Sabaringo River, and the Mara River nearly wraps around the Mara Safari Club. Both camps offer balloon excursions; wafting over the Mara in the piercingly fresh and golden morning, floating over elephants and hippos, feeling a mild and worthy intoxication-by-grandeur, is one of those things that, having done, we wonder how on earth we ever contemplated not doing.
I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the Giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. —Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa EAST AFRICA CLASSIC SAFARIS THE HEART OF KENYA AND TANZANIA
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11 & 12 Nairobi and onward
We fly back to Nairobi in the morning for some relaxation, freshening up at our day rooms at the Norfolk or the near-the-airport Boma Nairobi, and perhaps making time for a visit to the Micato-AmericaShare Harambee Centre, a guaranteed spirit-lifter, before our late evening flight.
Make Your Safari a Private Classic, Or Add an Amazing Extension The Heart of Kenya and Tanzania can easily be transformed into
It certainly was a new experience to receive so much attention from a company owner. The personal touch of Jane Pinto and her sister Dulu was very much appreciated. And our driver Frederick was so warm and amiable that we thought we were traveling with a friend. We were especially moved by the enthusiasm and dedication of Roba, our Safari Director. It was beyond a vacation or even a dream.
— Roger, Julia, and David True
Tariff 2021 Land arrangements, per person
an exclusive, fully Private Classic Safari, with your family or group of friends’ own Safari Director, vehicles, etc. We also offer handy and beautifully orchestrated trip extensions.
May $10,550 850 1,750
Double Occupancy Single Supplement Internal Flights on Safari
November $11,550 950 1,750
Balance of Year $13,550 1,250 1,750
(Nairobi / Arusha / Tarangire; Serengeti / Maasai Mara / Nairobi) Connections may apply. For assistance booking international flights, we will be happy to refer you to our preferred air ticket purveyor.
2021 Dates Door-to-Door from Home | Departs Wednesday, returns Sunday Every date is a guaranteed departure Jan. 06 Jan. 13 Jan. 20 Jan. 27 Feb. 03 Feb. 10 Feb. 17 Feb. 24 Mar. 03 Mar. 10 Mar. 17
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Jan. 17 Jan. 24 Jan. 31 Feb. 07 Feb. 14 Feb. 21 Feb. 28 Mar. 07 Mar. 14 Mar. 21 Mar. 28
May 19 – May 26 – June 02 – June 09 – June 16 – June 23 – June 30 – July 07 – July 14 – July 21 – July 28 –
May 30 June 06 June 13 June 20 June 27 July 04 July 11 July 18 July 25 Aug. 01 Aug. 08
Aug. 04 – Aug. 11 – Aug. 18 – Aug. 25 – Sept. 01 – Sept. 08 – Sept. 15 – Sept. 22 – Sept. 29 – Oct. 06 – Oct. 13 –
Aug. 15 Aug. 22 Aug. 29 Sept. 05 Sept. 12 Sept. 19 Sept. 26 Oct. 03 Oct. 10 Oct. 17 Oct. 24
Oct. 20 Oct. 27 Nov. 03 Nov. 10 Nov. 17 Nov. 24 Dec. 01 Dec. 08 Dec. 15 Dec. 22 Dec. 29
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Oct. 31 Nov. 07 Nov. 14 Nov. 21 Nov. 28 Dec. 05 Dec. 12 Dec. 19 Dec. 26 Jan. 02 Jan. 09
2022 Dates Door-to-Door from Home | Departs Wednesday, returns Sunday New rates and dates may apply Jan. 05 Jan. 12 Jan. 19 Jan. 26 Feb. 02 Feb. 09 Feb. 16 Feb. 23 Mar. 02 Mar. 09 Mar. 16
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Jan. 16 Jan. 23 Jan. 30 Feb. 06 Feb. 13 Feb. 20 Feb. 27 Mar. 06 Mar. 13 Mar. 20 Mar. 27
May 18 – May 25 – June 01 – June 08 – June 15 – June 22 – June 29 – July 06 – July 13 – July 20 – July 27 –
May 29 June 05 June 12 June 19 June 26 July 03 July 10 July 17 July 24 July 31 Aug. 07
Aug. 03 – Aug. 10 – Aug. 17 – Aug. 24 – Aug. 31 – Sept. 07 – Sept. 14 – Sept. 21 – Sept. 28 – Oct. 05 – Oct. 12 –
Aug. 14 Aug. 21 Aug. 28 Sept. 04 Sept. 11 Sept. 18 Sept. 25 Oct. 02 Oct. 09 Oct. 16 Oct. 23
Oct. 19 Oct. 26 Nov. 02 Nov. 09 Nov. 16 Nov. 23 Nov. 30 Dec. 07 Dec. 14 Dec. 21 Dec. 28
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Oct. 30 Nov. 06 Nov. 13 Nov. 20 Nov. 27 Dec. 04 Dec. 11 Dec. 18 Dec. 25 Jan. 01 Jan. 08
THE HEART OF KENYA AND TANZANIA EAST AFRICA CLASSIC SAFARIS
THE WORLD’S
Most Awarded SAFARI COMPANY
Unprecedented Nine-Time Winner of Travel+Leisure’s award for #1 World’s Best Safari Outfitter Travel+Leisure Hall of Fame
1,000
PLACES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE #1 New York Times Travel Guide Preferred East Africa
Legacy in Travel Philanthropy Award
Unprecedented Five-Time Winner of Condé Nast Traveler World Savers Award Three Education, Two for Doing It All Member of the World Savers Hall of Fame
Virtuoso Winner Best VAST (Active) Operator Best Escorted Tour Operator Best Destinations & Experiences Custom Tour Partner Virtuoso Performance Award
Global Vision Award Development, Youth Education Micato One for One Commitment
World’s Best Value Winner
Trips of a Lifetime
Best Tour Operator Africa / Middle East
Best African Safari Tour Operator
Sorry for the fine print, but here are some other Micato Awards and Accolades: World Tourism Award • Travvy Awards: Gold, Best Escorted Tour Operator, Africa, 2016, 2018; Silver, Best Escorted Tour Operator, Adventure, 2020 • 33-Time Winner, Travel Weekly Magellan Awards, including Gold for Best Marketing Video, Best Trade Brochure, and Best Consumer Website, 2019 • Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International’s (HSMAI) Adrian Awards: Leadership in Corporate Social Responsibility, 2018; Gold, Best Trade Brochure, 2014-2016, 2018; Gold, Best Consumer Brochure, 2014-2016, 2018; HSMAI and National Geographic Traveler Gold Winner, Leader in Sustainable Tourism • Ubuntu Tourism Award • Travel Weekly’s World Travel Market Global Award Tanzania Tourist Board Cruise Development Award • TORCH (Together Our Resources Can Help) Inspiration Award, to Lorna Macleod, head of Micato-AmericaShare • William D. Littleford Award for Corporate Community Service • Travel Agent magazine’s Tour Operator of the Year: Leaders in Luxury— Dennis Pinto • LuxuryLink.com’s World’s Best Luxury Tour Company • National Geographic 50 Tours of a Lifetime
T H E MICATO COMMITMENT FOR EVERY SAFARI SOLD WE SEND A CHILD TO SCHOOL
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. —Nelson Mandela
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n unimaginable number of Kenyan children don’t attend school because their families are too poor to pay even the most nominal school fees. In principle, primary education is free in Kenya, but myriad fees often put it beyond reach: parents are obliged to buy their child’s desk; to pay for term exams, the wood for cooking fires, and a portion of the cooks’ salaries. Then there are schoolbooks, uniforms, writing supplies, and notebooks. All this adds up to many, many thousands of eager and worthy children staying at home.
The One for One Commitment For more than a quarter of a century, Micato-AmericaShare has been a passionate advocate for East African children and their families. Under the Micato One for One Commitment, simply by signing up for a Micato safari, every guest on every safari sends a child to school—year after year. Thousands of Kenyan children are able to attend school thanks to our guests, who join us in the One for One Commitment by signing up for safari. Every child deserves an education, and we’re overjoyed to be contributing to this unalienable right. left: A typically exuberant classroom, led by Peter Mithamo at a school near the MicatoAmericaShare Harambee Centre. Anastasia Pinto summed up the African ethos when she said, “African people will give away their last dollar or loaf of bread to someone who needs it more.”
Micato-AmericaShare For more than 35 years Micato’s tribute to our birth continent has been our nonprofit, Micato-AmericaShare. In these seven pages we’ll tell you about what AmericaShare does, but first, here’s why: It all began with one little boy, going from person to person in a Nairobi shopping centre with a note from his school headmaster. The note said that he was an orphan and needed to raise 700 shillings for a school uniform before he could come to class. He had only collected 100 shillings. The boy approached Micato’s Lorna Macleod. She read the note and handed him the 600 shillings— the equivalent of $15. Tears running down his face, the boy stood there for a moment, said “God bless you,” and dashed away. At that moment Lorna realized that Micato was an ideal bridge between some of the poorest people on the planet, and some of the wealthiest, our travellers. So we gave that bridge a name: AmericaShare, and have been helping to change lives for the better ever since.
We’re proud of our accolades and of the lifesparking joy our safariers routinely experience, but as our Managing Director Dennis Pinto often says, “Micato-AmericaShare is the why of why we exist.”
The Harambee Centre The heart of Micato-AmericaShare’s Kenya operation is Harambee Centre, a multi-building oasis of calm and purpose in the midst of Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest slums (where a staggering 60,000 or more children can’t attend school). Harambee Centre — made possible by our dear friends Bernard Wharton and Jennifer Walsh and scores of caring safari-goers—serves Mukuru residents with a Community Centre; a beautiful, 25,000-volume library — with more than 57,000 yearly visitors — and a flourishing second library, both made possible by Suzie and Bruce Kovner through a grant by the Kovner Foundation; and a digitally up-to-the-minute Computer Centre (see the next page).
THE MICATO ONE FOR ONE COMMITMENT
Harambee’s Computer Centre A big, bright room, equipped with over 60 computers, visited more than 40,000 times since its inception, Micato-AmericaShare’s Harambee Computer Centre — enabled by Dr. Derrick Rossi—offers Mukuru residents free computer access and digital skills training through a series of eight-week classes in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel basics. The Centre has joined with a group of young professionals to offer classes in graphic design, and makes the math tutorials of the online Khan Academy available to students before their pivotal year-end exams. Intel East Africa’s mobile computer learning truck is also a visitor to Harambee.
More Milestones The ever-growing Harambee Centre Library was recently the proud recipient of the Best Community Library in Nairobi Award by the Kenya Association of Library and Information Professionals. To its post-graduates, Micato-AmericaShare offers scholarships that cover the cost of acquiring trade skills or semi-professional certifications or professional degrees.
We partner with Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity to bring eye clinics to the community. VOSH doctors examine and treat thousands of children and adults, and donate thousands of prescription eyeglasses. Lacrosse, a game not played in Kenya, was introduced in Mukuru in June 2014 through an AmericaShare Project by teenager Ian Macleod with support from private donors, businesses, and the International Lacrosse Federation.
Sponsorship It’s not unusual for inspired safari guests to decide on the spot (or back home for that matter) to sponsor a child to attend boarding school. This programme places a child in a carefully vetted boarding school, and provides every resource necessary for that child to graduate high school (and beyond, if the spirit is willing). Many lives, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been changed by this programme.
Learn More At our website, AmericaShare.org, or email us at Inquiries@AmericaShare.org.
THE MICATO ONE FOR ONE COMMITMENT
The Red Hill Library and Community Centre Tucked away on the verdant seaward side of the glorious Old Cape Road, south of Cape Town, past the imposing Steenberg Mountains and lovely Simon’s Town, on the way to the Cape of Good Hope, is the community of Red Hill, whose 1,500 makeshift households are blessed with wonderful views, bright community spirit, and not much in the way of community services. “Micato-AmericaShare’s educational outreach in East Africa inspired us to find a community in South Africa where we can have a lasting impact,” says Lorna Macleod, AmericaShare’s co-founder and executive director. “And at Red Hill, we knew we had found our place.” That place is AmericaShare’s Red Hill Library
THE MICATO ONE FOR ONE COMMITMENT
and Community Centre, a joyful place for a town with a single part-time clinic, 37 per cent unemployment, and no school for its more than 2,000 school-age kids, who, if they attend school, have to take long bus rides to state schools in the vicinity.
Red Hill’s Present and Future Accomplished in close partnership with the Red Hill Development Forum and the Red Hill Literacy Project, this bright new library is staffed with trained librarians, a computer centre, and a welcoming community meeting place.
Knowledge is like a garden. If it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested.
—African proverb
Goals for the future: Bringing in IT professionals to train Red Hill’s teens and adults; a broad variety of new classes; more librarians; reaching our goal of 2,500 books and a dozen computers; further expansion of the Centre with a second floor; more joy and learning to the Red Hill community.
Most of Micato’s... ….safariers to the Cape Peninsula will visit the Red Hill Library and Community Centre, and many of them will be inspired to help it bring more light to the community. They’ll want to make donations like books, computers, or funds for a new building. So: if you’d like to visit Red Hill, either before or after your Micato safari, or if you’re just inspired by what you’re seeing and reading on these pages, send an email to Inquiries@AmericaShare.org.
This collaboration with Micato-AmericaShare has brought light to our community. Scholars are able to do their homework and research in the library, which provides a great environment for their education and homework clubs. The Forum is also benefitting from having a productive space in which to meet. This project has uplifted the entire community by making resources available to everybody. —Luyando Lombo, Red Hill Development Forum member
Huru International East African girls who can’t afford sanitary pads very often avoid school during their periods, losing as much as an entire month each school year. The consequences are significant: girls who miss school or work fall behind, drop out or quit, perpetuating a grim cycle of poverty and gender inequality. Micato is a major donor and proud supporter of Huru International, founded in 2008 by AmericaShare’s co-founder Lorna Macleod. Huru manufactures reusable sanitary pads—more than 1,400,000 to date— which have been distributed in free Huru Kits to more than 177,000 girls in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. But Huru Kits have proven to be a simple, sustainable, and wonderfully practical way to alleviate this worldwide problem.
THE MICATO ONE FOR ONE COMMITMENT
Each Huru Kit consists of a colourful drawstring backpack with eight reusable pads; three pairs of underwear; detergent-grade soap for washing pads; a resealable waterproof bag for safe storage of used pads; and educational materials on HIV prevention and reproductive and sexual health.
Since Huru pads came we are comfortable and we do not feel left out. We are able to attend classes without fear or shame. It brings so much joy to know there are people on earth living far away from you who can rescue you.
— Charity, age 16 All Huru pads are locally produced by women and men from underserved communities, and are designed for the resilient girls and women who use them. Each pad lasts a minimum of 18 months, making them a cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative to expensive disposables. The crucial and heartening bottom line: Huru Kits have saved girls 4,779,594 school days that otherwise would have been lost. Independent evaluation shows that girls who receive Huru Kits are three times less likely to miss school during their periods.
Learn More About Huru’s important and effective work. And about its highly successful Skills Transfer Program, a targeted, practical programme that addresses East Africa’s huge problem of youth unemployment, which disproportionately impacts girls; 65 per cent of the Skills Transfer Program’s trainees have no income whatsoever. Huru’s informative website is accessible 525,600 minutes a year at HuruInternational.org. And its phone number is: 212-340-7115.
We educate women because it is smart. We educate women because it changes the world. —Drew Gilpin Faust, first female president of Harvard University
THE MICATO ONE FOR ONE COMMITMENT
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