Trinidad and To­ba­go con­ser­va­tion­ist, Len Pe­ters, to­day had an au­di­ence with Queen Eliz­a­beth II, in recog­ni­tion of be­ing award­ed one of three Com­mon­wealth Points of Light awards.

The vir­tu­al con­ver­sa­tion took place to­geth­er with re­cip­i­ents from Cyprus and Mozam­bique, with the queen join­ing them from Wind­sor.

The queen awards one vol­un­teer from across the Com­mon­wealth each week with a Points of Light award, in recog­ni­tion of the dif­fer­ence they have made in their lo­cal com­mu­ni­ty.

The video con­ver­sa­tion that the queen held with three Points of Light awardees in­clud­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­al Len Pe­ters.

Al­though the con­ver­sa­tion took place to­day, Pe­ters from Trinidad and To­ba­go, had re­ceived the first ever Com­mon­wealth Points of Light award in Feb­ru­ary 2018 in recog­ni­tion of his com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven con­ser­va­tion or­gan­i­sa­tion – the Grande Riv­iere Na­ture Tour Guide As­so­ci­a­tion.

Over 30 years, his ed­u­ca­tion­al work in lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties and reg­u­lar pa­trols of lo­cal beach­es has trans­formed en­tire com­mu­ni­ties, with Trinidad and To­ba­go now home to one of the dens­est leatherback sea tur­tle nest­ing sites in the world.

Talk­ing about his or­gan­i­sa­tion, which was found­ed in 1990, Mr Pe­ters said: “The or­gan­i­sa­tion was formed to try to con­vince the res­i­dents who live in my com­mu­ni­ty that the leatherback sea tur­tles, the most an­cient of all sea tur­tles, that come to our is­land every year to nest, need­ed pro­tec­tion. My com­mu­ni­ty con­sists of per­sons who would eat the leatherback tur­tle as food. Every leatherback tur­tle that crawled on­to the beach at night would be con­sumed by the res­i­dents. ”

He ex­plained that his own fam­i­ly was one of the largest tur­tle-eat­ing fam­i­lies in the vil­lager but, de­spite that, he and a group of friends came to­geth­er “to try and make a dif­fer­ence”.

“Here you have a young boy from a tur­tle eat­ing fam­i­ly want­i­ng to make a dif­fer­ence,” he said.

“At night we would walk the beach back and forth pro­tect­ing the tur­tles that came up, to try to con­vince peo­ple that it was the right thing to do. What we didn’t know, that 30 years lat­er that ef­fort would see Trinidad be­ing recog­nised as one of the most im­por­tant nest­ing sites for the leatherback seas tur­tles in the world.”

He said when they start­ed their con­ser­va­tion pro­gramme they would have 20 to 30 tur­tles com­ing to nest – now they have 500-600.

“This project has trans­formed the en­tire com­mu­ni­ty, the lives of the res­i­dents. The eco­nom­ic dri­ve of the com­mu­ni­ty now is all about con­ser­va­tion now,” he said.

“So David At­ten­bor­ough got to know what you were do­ing?” the Queen en­quired.

Mr Pe­ters ex­plained that the cel­e­brat­ed nat­u­ral­ist spend two weeks with them, and “in­spired the chil­dren to dream”.

“That’s very in­ter­est­ing in­deed to hear that,” the Queen said.

Source: https://www.stan­dard.co.uk/news/uk/queen-com­mon­wealth-roy­al-video-call-b102764.html