The Orphan Who Grew Up to Protect the Gorillas That Saved Her Village

The relationship between conservation and the communities that live at the edges of protected areas is not abstract — it is the specific calculation made by specific people in specific villages about whether the park adjacent to their land is something that benefits them or something imposed on them. When that calculation tilts toward benefit — through employment, through revenue sharing, through schools built from tourism money — the park gains its most effective defenders: the people whose daily lives depend on its survival. The Bwindi conservation framework and the gorilla families it protects are sustained by this relationship as much as by ranger patrols and UWA management.

Grace Tumwesigye was seven years old when her parents died of HIV/AIDS in 1999, leaving her in the care of her grandmother in a village at the edge of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. She grew up in a community whose relationship with the park was hostile — families had lost land access when Bwindi was gazetted, and the gorillas that conservationists came to see were viewed by many as symbols of a system that had taken from the community without giving back. In 2027, Grace is the UWA community liaison officer for the Rushaga sector, responsible for managing the relationship between the park authority and the communities whose cooperation determines whether gorilla conservation succeeds or fails. Her path from orphan to conservation officer is a story about how a community’s relationship with its forest can change — and what it takes to change it.

Growing Up Between the Forest and the Farm

Grace’s grandmother, Constance, was a farmer. Her fields bordered the park boundary and were regularly raided by bushpigs and baboons that moved between the forest and farmland. She did not love the park. But she also understood, with the pragmatism of someone who had farmed the same land for 40 years, that the park was not going away. “She told me that the forest was here before anyone alive could remember, and it would be here after everyone alive was dead,” Grace recalled. “She did not say it was good or bad. She said it was real.”

Grace attended school on the edge of Bwindi — one of the schools whose construction was funded in part by gorilla tourism CRS revenue, though she did not know that at the time. She was an exceptional student. A community development NGO operating in the area identified her as a scholarship candidate in 2008 when she was 16. She received a bursary to complete secondary school in Kabale and performed well enough in her national examinations to qualify for a place at university.

Discovering Conservation as a Vocation

Grace studied natural resource management at Mbarara University of Science and Technology. Her choice was partly practical — she was interested in the environmental science components of her secondary school curriculum — and partly personal. Growing up adjacent to Bwindi had given her a complicated relationship with conservation: she had seen it as an imposition for much of her childhood, but she had also watched gorilla tourism begin to generate visible community benefit as she grew older. The craft cooperative her grandmother’s friend joined, the road improvement that came with increased tourism traffic, the health centre upgrade in Buhoma — these were changes she could trace to gorilla tourism revenue.

At university she studied the theory behind what she had observed empirically. She learned about community-based conservation, payment for ecosystem services, and the social conditions that determine whether protected areas succeed or fail. She did her field research placement with UWA in Bwindi — her home territory — and was offered a junior community liaison position on graduation in 2015.

The Work of Community Liaison

Community liaison work at UWA is not glamorous. It involves attending community meetings, mediating crop raiding compensation disputes, managing the application process for CRS project funding, advising communities on how to engage with the tourism economy, and building the trust relationships that determine whether communities cooperate with anti-poaching efforts. It requires patience, cultural knowledge, and the ability to represent an institution — UWA — that has a complicated history with the communities it serves.

Grace’s advantage is that she is of those communities. She grew up in the village she now works in. Her grandmother’s farm abuts the park boundary she now manages. When she speaks at community meetings, she is not an outsider explaining conservation policy — she is a community member who chose conservation as a career because she understood from lived experience what was at stake. This credibility is not something that can be trained into a position. It can only come from someone whose biography is continuous with the community’s own story.

What She Wants the Future to Look Like

Grace’s goal for the communities she works with is specific: she wants every household within five kilometres of the Rushaga sector boundary to have at least one member employed in the tourism or conservation economy by 2030. Not because employment is the only measure of community welfare, but because employment creates the daily economic stake in gorilla conservation that transforms attitudes from abstract to concrete.

“The gorillas saved my village by making it worth protecting,” she says. “My job is to make sure the village keeps saving the gorillas by making them worth protecting too. It goes both ways.” When you trek gorillas in the Rushaga sector, the community relationships that make your encounter possible are maintained in part by people like Grace — Ugandan conservation professionals whose lives are the evidence that tourism-funded conservation can change the human landscape as profoundly as it protects the natural one.