Fifty students from the Sustainable Development Zone spent four days at Chitengo learning to read the land beneath their feet—and to turn what they find into the park’s next generation of tourism trails.
From July 19 to 22, Gorongosa National Park hosted the first phase of Safaris in Deep Time, a science and storytelling initiative for high school students from the Girls’ and Youth Clubs. Fifty students and four tutors arrived from the villages of Gorongosa, Muanza, and Inhaminga to begin training as the park’s next generation of youth storytellers. The project is led by Gorongosa’s Science Department, in collaboration with Education, Communication and Media, and Tourism, and funded by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany as part of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Germany and Mozambique.
The days moved between the field and the classroom. Susana Carvalho opened the workshop with an introduction to Safaris in Deep Time and to the fifty youth spotlights the students would go on to build. Doug Flynn spoke about Gorongosa’s tourism mission as a tool for sharing knowledge and protecting biological and cultural heritage. From there, the students turned to the mechanics of storytelling itself—framing, light, sound, voice-over, script—with Samo Jossefa and Augusto Bila leading sessions on digital content production, video technique, and even AI-assisted music creation. A visit to Gorongosa’s science labs introduced the students to iNaturalist, guided by Karen Gil, Mufudzi Junior, Beto Tenente, and Sofia Nhalungo. In between, there was a sunset safari with partners from the German Embassy, and an evening screening of the film “A Nossa Gorongosa.” After their final training session on July 21, the students heard a pep talk from Nils Heller, Culture and Communication officer at the German Embassy.
By the time the students left Chitengo on July 22, each had the beginnings of a video: a short piece spotlighting something from their own community—a fossil bed, a sacred mountain, a song, a story that has never made it onto a map. Fifty of these spotlights will eventually feed into new tourism trails and the park’s future visitor center, offering travelers a way into Gorongosa that starts well before the Big Five.
Phase one is done. More training, and more trails, are still to come.
