07/03/2023
It’s never easy to abandon the lifestyle you grew up in after you start questioning its ethics. Robert Byarugaba is one of the best examples of people who turned from their way of life to take the route less taken.
Byarugaba grew up on land that was incorporated into Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda in 1992, when he was 19 years old. As the first-born son of a popular poacher, Byarugaba was pulled out of school at 10 to start hunting bushmeat like wild pigs and daiker, a type of wild antelope. Even after the park was established in the early ’90s, Byarugaba continued poaching into the early 2000s, when he grew tired of living at odds with the law.
But Robert and the Bwindi community were never just rebels without a cause. The poachers in this community aren’t seeking trophy prizes in these wild animals or even black market sales, they do this for survival. “People are just killing for meat here,” he says. “Five kilograms of meat is five dollars in a market. Very few people can afford that. If you set your own traps, you can catch a daiker that’s 14 kilograms and feed your family for a week.”
The geography of Bwindi is rather symbolic as well. Bwindi’s sloping hills above the village have high-end lodges tucked away. The tourists who come here come just for one simple reason - Roughly half the world’s remaining population of endangered mountain gorillas lives in the Impenetrable Forest; and for decades, gorilla treks and sightings have single-handedly sustained tourism to this region.
Robert used to be a porter for tourists trekking to see gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest. In 2016, he founded the Bwindi Community Integrated Rural Development Initiative (BCIRDI), a community of reformed poachers who produce coffee, oyster mushrooms and most prominently, honey.
The story of the BCIRDI led by Robert Byarugaba is a beautiful story of leaving all you have grown up with due to a conviction to take the route less taken. What are your favourite Route Less Taken stories? Send us your stories at [email protected], and we’d feature them here.