Rosamond Carr, foremother

(Thanks to guest blogger Alice Edwards for her guest post and this tribute to IntLawGrrls' newest foremother)

Rosamond Carr, with whom I'm pictured a right, was a wonderful feminist in her own way, a real humanitarian, mother of Rwanda’s orphans, and a good friend to me.
Having started out life in New York as a fashion design hopeful, New Jersey-born Rosamond moved to the Belgian Congo after having married British “big game hunter and filmmaker” Kenneth Carr. He was 24 years her senior -- although she shared with me that she had not known that he was so much older than her when they married. A few years into the marriage, it foundered.
But by then, it seems, Rosamond had fallen in love with Africa, and instead of fleeing back to the States, she bought a farm in Rwanda, growing flowers for hotels, businesses and embassies in Kigali and living modestly. It was at this time that she started raising money to send young Rwandans to school and university, many of them the children of her farm workers. She never married again, nor had any children of her own.
Rosamund's life became intertwined with another amazing woman -- and IntLawGrrls foremother --the zoologist Dian Fossey. Rosamond always spoke fondly and vividly about Fossey if you’d ask her. Identified in the Fossey film biography Gorillas in the Mist (1988) as "Roz Carr," Rosamond is portrayed by actress Julie Harris.
Rosamund refused to leave her home and her staff during the April 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Her farm was in the foothills of the Virunga mountains, close to some of the worst slaughter and fighting in the country. Eventually she was evacuated and many of her staff and friends were killed, but she returned in August the same year to turn her own pyrethrum-drying plant into the Imbabazi Orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the genocide. She was still running the orphanage when I met her in 2000-2001, when we became neighbours in the lakeside village of Gisenyi, on the Congo border. I was there working for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Though she turned 90 during that time, Rosamond incredibly active for her age. She was generous to a fault, and her beautiful garden was a real sanctuary from what was still difficult Rwandan politics at that time. We corresponded by old-fashioned letter until she died in 2006, aged 94. Her life is portrayed her memoir, Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda (1999), co-authored with her niece, Ann Howard Halsey.
Rosamond's selflessness inspires me to this day.

On May 10

On this day in ...
... 1869 (140 years ago today), at the 2d hour of the afternoon at Promontory Summit, Utah, a golden spike was driven into a rail, marking the completion of the 1st transcontinental railroad in the United States. Built in large part, as we've posted, by immigrants from China and Ireland (left) and other European countries, as well as freed former slaves and veterans of the Civil War, the railroad connected the East and West Coasts of the ever-growing country. (photo credit)
... 1946, Dr. Biruté Galdikas (below right) was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. She would grow up in Canada, and then earn a Ph.D. in anthropology frm the University of California at Los Angeles. She, along with Dian Fossey (transnational foremother of IntLawGrrls' guest/alumna Annecoos Wiersema) and Jane Goodall -- known together as the "angels" of their mentor, paleontologist Louis Leakey -- were among the most renowned researchers of the great apes. (photo credit) Galdikas is an expert in primatology, and has spent much of her life studying the endangered orangutan that inhabit the tropical rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra, both islands of Indonesia. She has written a memoir, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo (1996).

(Prior May 10 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: Annecoos Wiersema

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome as today's guest blogger Annecoos Wiersema (left).
An Assistant Professor of Law at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University in Columbus, where she teaches Environmental Law, International Law, Property Law, and Comparative Environmental Law. Annecoos earned an L.L.B. from the London School of Economics in England and an S.J.D. degree in International and Environmental Law from Harvard Law School, where she was the George W. Foley, Jr. Fellow in Environmental Law. She's taught at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, was a litigation associate in the Denver office of Arnold and Porter, and was a Visiting Scholar at the International Monetary Fund.
Annecoos' research focuses on how legal institutions might fulfill their goal of protecting species and ecosystems notwithstanding ecological science’s recognition of complexity and uncertainty. The question is at the heart of her guest post today.

Annecoos dedicates her post to Dian Fossey (below right), the scientist who, as described in this prior post, was killed in 1985 in Rwanda, where she'd devoted her life to the study and preservation of mountain gorillas. Annecoos writes:

Although sometimes controversial, Dian Fossey’s work with gorillas led to international attention and continues to inspire efforts to protect the species. Together with Jane Goodall and Biruté Galdikas, she makes up the triumvirate of women who worked with great apes beginning in the 1960s, trying to ensure their survival and generating worldwide international support for their protection. Her work bridged international boundaries as an early example of transnational activism.

Today Fossey joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below the "visiting from..." map at right. (photo credit)

Heartfelt welcome!

On December 27, ...

... 1979, fighters aided by the troops from the Soviet Union deposed and executed Hafizullah Amin, President of Afghanistan. "The Afghan radio announced in a broadcast monitored here that Mr. Amin had been sentenced to death at a revolutionary trial for 'crimes against the state,'" according to the New York Times. The coup marked the beginning of Soviet involvement the Central Asian country that would last for a decade, ending in 1989 when "[t]he last Soviet soldier came home from Afghanistan ... leaving behind a war that had become a domestic burden and an international embarrassment for Moscow."
... 1985, a few weeks before she would have turned 54, the San Francisco-born woman who had devoted her life to the study and preservation of the mountain gorillas, Dr. Dian Fossey, was found dead from machete wounds in her cabin in Karisoke, Rwanda. The crime never was solved. A Fund continues the work of Fossey, pictured above with the gorilla she named Puck.