Our appeal to raise funds for the inspirational young Kenyan Dominic Kimani (photo left) is drawing to a close, and as the ‘Chip In’ widget in the sidebar shows thanks to a small number of our conservation-minded readers we’ve collected more than the 2000 USDollars we were aiming for (when I wrote this you’d given just over 2300 USD in fact). Excellent, gratifying, and heart-warming - especially considering that many of you who gave to the appeal probably knew next to nothing about Sharpe’s Longclaw (an Endangered grassland pipit found in only three sites in the Aberdare Mountains in southern Kenya - which is obscure by any standards!) when we started the project. Our thanks go to you.

We’ll be closing the appeal at the end of September (still time to ‘Chip In’ a dollar or two folks), but we have one more question before we do: do you, your friends, your employers, your local computer store etc etc have a laptop (preferably running Windows XP) lying around that you no longer use?

Why do we ask?

The plan (as detailed right here) has always been to provide the full amount raised by our appeal to Dominic in the form of the “Small African Fellowship for Conservation”, from which he’d draw a monthly stipend for a year to undertake both survey and educational work: my maths isn’t great, but 2300 divided by 12 is about 190 - so Dominic will be trying to save an Endangered species on about 190 USDollars a month.

Now, we’ve just discovered that Dominic is desperate to get hold of a (second-hand) laptop. He’s collecting huge amounts of data, he’s having to write reports both back to 10,000 Birds and the National Museums of Kenya in return for the Fellowship, he needs to be able to produce educational material, and it would obviously be a great help if he were able to communicate effectively with other researchers and activists.

The funds we’ve raised can (under the terms we discussed with him) legitimately be used to buy a laptop - but it doesn’t take a genius to work out that would blow a fair chunk of his Fellowship! What would surely be a better way of helping him would be if we/you could find an old/no longer used laptop and give it to him instead.

And I do mean ‘give it to him’. I’m going out to visit Dominic, a school in Kenya, and the survey team in mid-October and it would be just fantastic if I could take a laptop with me.

Now that I know what Dominic needs I’m going to try to find him a laptop myself of course, but it’s short-notice to approach computer companies etc. So I’m hoping someone out there in the blogosphere may have the solution?

What are the requirements?

• It doesn’t have to be new,
• or packed with software,
• or be a “name brand”
• or have bluetooth, or wi-fi, or GPRS
• - it just has to work!
• (oh, and having the original power cable would help too)

In fact in Dominic’s own words, ” i basically don’t need an email/internet ready laptop. a laptop that will accept a modem will be very efficient, in Kenya we have Safaricom and Zain who are mobile phone service providers and they are offering very good services for the internet through a modem which should be straight forward. at the moment i don’t have an email software to load myself but i don’t think it is a problem.
About the programmes, i will mainly need, word, Excel, powerpoint, Ms office, Explorer Mozilla , Adobe and any other programme especially the one that can help me make simple films for the kids as well a good images for our project updates feel free to choose anything you feel will be good for me. ”

Shouldn’t be too difficult eh (he says wildly understating just how hard it will be)?

I’ll gladly pay for a new battery if the one you’ve got is no longer holding any charge, and I’ll happily drive to pick it up in the UK or pay to transport it from elsewhere in the world to the UK (I hope it goes without saying that if I had an old laptop I’d give it to him myself, but I don’t). And we’ll give you thanks in flashing lights and splash your name across perhaps the most widely-read bird blog in the world (that’s 10,000 Birds by the way). Not bad publicity in return for an old lap-top cluttering up a cupboard, eh?

So how about it? Could we use our blogs to reach out across the planet to our friends/colleagues/employers and help a dedicated young man who is passionately committed to helping a bird that is facing extinction..?