INSIDE Loango Park, one of the thirteen National Parks that the Gabonese government is using for its conservation efforts, is N’Dola Lodge. Nothing special like all the other lodges in Gabon, but this lodge has a Luxembourgish – a national of Luxembourg – as the manager, Francis Kokutse reports.
‘I grew up in a wealthy family, but I gave all that up. My parents own their own company and we saw my father working and working daily. I was always told that you need to work to earn money to live well. My parents never imposed their will on my me, they were only strict on my going to school but allowed me to do whatever I wanted to do,’ Lynn Gindorff told Africa Briefing.
Lynn gave everything up and heeded the call to serve in Africa. Nothing strange, as other Europeans have done so in the past. Lynn, however, is young and had a future in finance in her country, but chose to travel to Africa because she wanted to be happy. That is what brought her to Loango Camp.
‘I was working in finance, basically was responsible for internet banking. Before, I was into insurance,’ she said, adding that, ‘the last four years I took the decision to travel to Africa, I was in finance.’
At the time, Lynn said, her job was doing basic things like opening accounts for people, she then got promoted to oversee internet banking. In this position, she worked for four years and then decided to take unpaid leave. This, according to her, was ‘to figure out what I would want to do with my life because I was unhappy with what I was doing.’
‘It was not that work did not interest me. In fact, during the initial six months that I got employed, I found the job remarkably interesting, over time, it become boring. That was when I took the decision to travel and Africa was what came to mind,’ she said.
Lynn initially went to the Namib desert in Namibia to do a foundation course in Elephant and Human Relations. The conservation site where the training was done was a small one, but it helped to deal with farmers who had issues with wildlife.
The trainers and trainees deal with elephants coming to the village to break water tanks, and Lynn said, ‘this often leads to the people not being able to get water for their livestock and families. For this reason, we built walls around the water tanks to prevent the elephants from getting at the tanks’.
‘After one village you could be called by others to have their problems solved for them. I became happy because of what I was doing. After Namibia, I went to South Africa to do the Ranger and Guiding Courses with a school called ECO Training for eight months,’ Lynn said.
She said two months out of the eight months was get her trained to a Guide and to do the Four-by-Four Safari Driving course. They were thought everything about how to live in the bush and inside tents.
‘Though there were many Europeans who came for the course, I was the only one that stayed back to continue in the business. I stayed with the school for five months as an intern. From there I went to Seychelles to do a conservation project on turtles which involved beach cleaning and counting nests as well as monitoring,’
Finally, in December 2018, she decided to go back home for two months to see if she could work again. ‘That was when I felt I could not. My boss told me she saw that I was happy with what I was doing in Africa. That was the moment I knew I had caught the African bug and there was no turning back.’
Looking back, she said, she was earning more in Luxembourg but, realised that she was also spending more than living in the bushes of Africa, adding that, ‘I would rather enjoy what I was doing than make money.’
Lynn said, she is aware that, without money it is impossible to live in the world, but since coming to Africa there has never been a single day that she woke up and did not want to go to work or looking forward to the weekend.
She said not many people will understand her but, she has passion for the respect of every human, no matter what, and cannot stand injustice in whatever form. ‘For me everyone is the same, rich or poor,’ she added.
Lynn was emphatic that, ‘Wealth does not mean anything to me because I see it as what has caused problems in the world. I do not believe that there should be poor and rich people in the world.’
