estherarmas
QUESTION. How do the video and the text work together to…
QUESTION.
How do the video and the text work together to introduce and explain the impact of Richard Turere’s invention? In your expository essay, clarify how individual text sections and print and graphic features convey a purpose or meaning. Cite evidence from both the text and the video in your response. Structure your essay to include a thesis statement with a central idea, supporting paragraphs with evidence, and a conclusion.
TEXT
One of the talks from the TED stage in Long Beach, Calif., this week came from Richard Turere, an inventor. He is a Maasai from Kenya. And he’s 13.
“From ages 6 to 9, I started looking after my father’s cows,” Richard says. “I’d take them out in the morning and bring them back in the evening. We put them in a small cow shed at night,” and that’s when the trouble would start. Lions would jump in the shed and kill the cows, which are enclosed and an easy target.
Lions are the top tourist attraction to Kenya, especially in the Nairobi National Park, which is near where Richard lives.
Lions are also considered critically endangered in Kenya.
The Kenya Wildlife Service estimates there are just 2,000 lions left in the country. One of the main causes of their demise, “is that people kill them in retaliation for lions attacking their livestock,” says Paula Kahumbu, executive director of Wildlife Direct, a wildlife conservation organization in Africa.
She has been studying the conflict between humans and lions, and her work led her to Richard. In one week, she monitored over 50 cases where lions attacked livestock. “It’s a very, very serious problem,” she says.
Her work studying the problem led her to Richard.
One night he was walking around with a flashlight and discovered the lions were scared of a moving light. A light went on inside him and an idea was born.
Three weeks and much tinkering later, Richard had invented a system of lights that flash around the cow shed, mimicking a human walking around with a flashlight. His system is made from broken flashlight parts and an indicator box from a motorcycle.
“The only thing I bought was a solar panel,” which charges a battery that supplies power to the lights at night, Richard says. He calls the system Lion Lights.
“There have been a lot of efforts to try to protect the lions,” Kahumbu says. “It’s a crisis and everyone is looking for a solution. One idea was land leases, another was lion-proof fences. And basically no one even knew that Richard had already come up with something that worked.”
His simple solution was so successful, his neighbors heard about it and wanted Lion Lights, too. He installed the lights for them and for six other homes in his community. From there, the lights spread and are now being used all around Kenya. Someone in India is trying them out for tigers. In Zambia and Tanzania they’re being used, as well.
To get to the TED stage, Richard traveled on an airplane for the first time in his life. He says he has a lot to tell his friends about when he goes back home, and among the scholars and prize winners, scientists and poets, what impressed him the most on his trip was something he saw at the nearby Aquarium of the Pacific: “It was my first time seeing a shark. I’ve never seen a shark.”
VIDEO Transcript
The video depicts wildlife in the Tanzanian desert of Africa
Transcript
00:045 seconds NDELELYA MWATARO: I am a pastoralist.
00:088 seconds I move my cattle from time to time.
00:1111 seconds There are times I take them to the grazing range
00:1414 seconds and when the grass runs out, we go to the Ngorongoro Crater.
00:1818 seconds When the rainy season returns and there’s plenty of grass,
00:2223 seconds I bring them back home.
00:2424 seconds NARRATOR: Despite living in a rapidly changing modern world,
00:3131 seconds the Maasai have held onto their traditional lifestyle, one
00:3435 seconds which almost entirely depends on raising cattle, goats,
00:3838 seconds and sheep.
00:3940 seconds NDELELYA: My cattle are very important and profitable to me.
00:4444 seconds When they give back, I drink their milk and when they become
00:4848 seconds older, I’m able to sell and buy food,
00:5151 seconds and other needs like clothes and medicine for the cattle.
00:5455 seconds I’m also able to go to the hospital if I need to.
00:5959 seconds NARRATOR: In 1959, this deep volcanic crater
01:041 minute 4 seconds and the surrounding rangelands were established
01:061 minute 7 seconds as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area:
01:091 minute 9 seconds a protected place where the Maasai could preserve
01:111 minute 12 seconds their practice of livestock grazing while coexisting with
01:151 minute 15 seconds some of Africa’s most dangerous predators.
01:181 minute 18 seconds DENNIS IKANDA: One of the special things
01:251 minute 26 seconds about the Ngorongoro Crater is the large concentration
01:291 minute 29 seconds of animals that are found here, and one of those animals
01:341 minute 35 seconds happens to be the lion, which is very densely studied.
01:401 minute 40 seconds So if you compare it with other areas in Africa which
01:441 minute 44 seconds have lions, the number of lions here
01:471 minute 47 seconds make it one of the most dense lion populations in the world.
01:521 minute 52 seconds I mean, we’re talking about twenty-two lions per square
01:551 minute 56 seconds kilometer, whereas the average would probably be around 5
01:591 minute 60 seconds or 10 at the very most.
02:022 minutes 3 seconds NARRATOR: For the past seventeen years,
02:042 minutes 5 seconds Dennis Ikanda has worked as a lion biologist,
02:072 minutes 8 seconds studying their behavior and how they
02:092 minutes 10 seconds relate to the human communities that live close by.
02:152 minutes 15 seconds DENNIS: So, what we have here is a typical creature: male,
02:192 minutes 19 second she’s a young male, probably a little over his second
02:232 minutes 24 seconds birthday, and he’s sitting on a kill.
02:282 minutes 28 seconds Lions are like the only carnivore
02:312 minutes 31 seconds in this part of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area
02:352 minutes 36 seconds that are actually capable of bringing down
02:382 minutes 38 seconds such a huge buffalo.
02:402 minutes 41 seconds So, this guy will linger here for a few more hours,
02:442 minutes 45 seconds and then he will abandon the kill,
02:482 minutes 48 seconds and that’s when all the hyenas, vultures,
02:502 minutes 51 seconds and jackals will now move in and clean up everything.
02:542 minutes 55 seconds NARRATOR: Fifty percent of the world’s lion population live
03:013 minutes 1 second in East Africa.
03:023 minutes 3 seconds Navigating a landscape alongside these animals
03:053 minutes 5 seconds is something that the pastoralist Maasai
03:073 minutes 7 seconds have successfully achieved over time.
03:093 minutes 10 seconds Yet today, lions are under threat,
03:123 minutes 13 seconds declining in large numbers.
03:143 minutes 15 seconds DENNIS: We used to see so many lions here
03:173 minutes 17 seconds during the wet season, but nowadays you
03:193 minutes 20 second scan hardly see any.
03:213 minutes 21 seconds NARRATOR: According to Dennis, the problem
03:233 minutes 24 seconds is twofold: a combination of ritual and retaliatory killings
03:273 minutes 28 seconds by a growing Maasai population.
03:313 minutes 31 seconds DENNIS: The significance of Maasai ritual lion killings
03:383 minutes 38 seconds is embedded deep in their culture
03:403 minutes 41 seconds and it has taken place for so many years.
03:463 minutes 46 seconds Lion killing as a right of passage
03:493 minutes 50 seconds bears a significance in the community in the sense that
03:543 minutes 54 seconds lions-like in many other communities-are animals that
03:593 minutes 59 seconds are widely respected for their strength and power.
04:024 minutes 2 seconds And being able to kill a lion with the aid of a spear
04:064 minutes 6 seconds was one way which the Maasai could prove that transition
04:104 minutes 10 seconds from youth to manhood.
04:144 minutes 14 seconds NARRATOR: In the 1970’s, the Tanzanian government officially
04:184 minutes 18 seconds banned the ritual killing of lions,
04:204 minutes 21 seconds yet it unofficially continued in the Ngorongoro Conservation
04:244 minutes 24 seconds Area.
