If her technique is hardly more than that of a home movie, her strategy is complex: the myth of the unimpeachable innocence of wild children against an uncaring world converges with the public image that Le Besco, the actress, projects.

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"For a guy like me to be very eccentric, to even go to extremes to write a children's book with all the wild things I do and make it believable was pretty much incredible, " Rodman said.

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"We're already hearing stories about families living on at most one meal a day, children going into the bush to search for wild food and wild fruit, " Mr Lee told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

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Add to this the reasonable Two Oceans restaurant, superb springtime flora, a funicular railway to an old lighthouse and wild beaches complete with shipwrecks, and there is plenty to keep children entertained for a whole day.

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Teaching the Nomads in the Wild was a need-based intervention and unlike many similar literacy programmes which target children, RLEK decided to focus the literacy programme on adults.

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