One of the photographs in a new series “Children of the Mountain” by academic and journalist Howard French. The  children live in and near the Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. French was there reporting a story on sociobiologist E.O.Wilson (now 82 years old) for The Atlantic. Wilson is working with an American billionaire, Greg Carr, and the Mozambican government to save the Gorongosa National Park, under stress during the civil war (more like proxy war by Rhodesia, South Africa and the United States) from 1976 to 1992 and since then by poachers and “locals setting fires to clear fields for farming and to smoke out wild edibles, from bushmeat to insect delicacies.”

Here’s French’s description of the park:

… the only largely intact rain forest in all of Mozambique, a semitropical country roughly the size of Texas and Oklahoma. Solitary and broad-shouldered, the mountain rises more than 6,000 feet above the surrounding plains, providing a local climate unlike any other for hundreds of miles around it. It draws its water from the warm, moist winds that blow in from the nearby Indian Ocean, kissing its cool upper flanks and sustaining a unique ecosystem of rare orchids, mountain cypress, and rich bird life like the green-headed oriole, along with any number of other species yet to be identified.

Here‘s the full set.