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13 year old Ganga (left in first image, with her twin sister and father) gets home from school at 4.30pm each day. She does not leave the house until she walks to school with her sister and other students just before 10am the following mornings. In the second image you can see a very small boy standing in the door way of the family's humble abode. That was the exact place that Ganga saw her four year brother Bil Bahadur Shrestha snatched by a leopard, the last time he was seen alive...
Ganga is too afraid to leave the house.
I'm not going to go into the details of this event or the many similar ones we are researching in this area, in this blog today. The little boy in the doorway was born a year after Bil Bahadur was killed, giving Ganga and her family someone they watch incredibly closely, with fear tragedy could strike again. Pragati Shahi interviewed family members with her usual professionalism and care but we both walked away from the scene deeply moved by what we had discovered.
We said goodbye to a mother (3rd image) who gave us a brave smile but who had pain in her eyes... and pain in her heart. She had told us of trauma few can really understand. Her husband, Shyam Shestha, had taken us through that tragic night's events in detail, he was stoic but his eyes too told their own story. Ganga's eye's were truly expressive, they told of a sadness that cut deep into her soul.
We will tell this story in the future, we'll link it with the many others in the area. Words and phrases like maneater, revenge killing, mistaken identity and above all, safety, came up many times. This is a poor family. They had no lighting from electricity at the time of the attack, they don't have a phone now (we will change that soon) and while there was a small cash compensation given there was no psychcological support. There are measures that can be introduced to help families like this. We will see this through.
I have just under six months to go in a three year assignment which really started many years before and will extend many years ahead. It is very much about the leopard now, and our relationship to this misunderstood, persecuted animal that causes a lot of fear and in the context of serious human/wildlife is the major player. As I've mentioned several times before the leopard does not have the rock star status of species like tiger, snow leopard, rhino and elephant, it doesn't live just in protected areas, the leopard lives with us in many places.
That means the leopard lives in close proximity to people like the Shrestha family and it means tragedy can happen anytime. True conservation is fairness to both sides. The leopard is a vital species, a remarkable ecosystem engineer. And little Ganga is a beautiful young girl who has the right to more sparkle in her eyes...
