Tag archives: Africa

Meerkat Memories
By Chuck Graham   |   December 26, 2023

A mob of meerkats was on my Southern African menu. Deep in the Kalahari Desert, I scanned that brilliant red earth with my binoculars from dawn until dusk. Finally, on the morning of our third day in Namibia, it was meerkat mania as 20 of them arrived just after breakfast. This was my 16th trip […]

Virunga’s Natural Wonders
By Chuck Graham   |   June 27, 2023

The 500-pound male mountain gorilla (also known as a silverback) was hungry, not hangry, just hungry in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda in Central Africa. As shafts of morning light penetrated the rainforest, he casually lumbered over to a dense stock of bamboo, the biggest shafts as round as a baseball bat. He looked upward […]

Andrew Antone’s Wildlife Exhibit & Book ‘Africa’
By Joanne A Calitri   |   October 18, 2022

On honeymoon in March 2022 with his partner Patrick, photographer-musician Andrew Antone’s safari journey turned into a project to bring awareness to the natural world and wildlife he encountered through his camera lens. After pooling through 11,094 images, he selected 500 images for his book, and 32 photos for his exhibit at the Santa Barbara […]

Dear Montecito: Ally Hodosy
By Stella Haffner   |   August 6, 2020

As schools around the country start to reopen and older students begin the migration back to college life, I worry about the safety of teachers and pupils alike. But a smaller, less socially conscious voice in the back of my head quietly cheers for the small freedom of leaving home. Some of us may have […]

From Africa to Montecito
By Dalina Michaels   |   June 13, 2019

Fleurie Leclercq grew up in a little village in Cameroon, in Central Africa.  A village where she walked two miles each way – each day – to school. A village where she walked to the river to get water for her family. A village where her grandmother raised her ‘til she was 10 years old, […]

Get up and Goat
By Richard Mineards   |   May 17, 2018

Goats were in abundance when 12-year-old African Women Rising, a northern Uganda charity, held its second Goat Fest with more than 200 guests at a rustic Cold Springs Road estate, raising enough to purchase 300 of the animals. “It’s not so much a fund raiser as friend raiser, to draw attention to the 11-year-old organization,” […]