The Beginning of the End

4-25-11

I realize its been a while since I blogged and I didn’t even post the beginning of my last blog, but I’ve been really busy with not that great of internet. We have started our Directed Research projects which are basically a thesis that you have to do research, and write in 3 weeks or less than present your findings and solutions to the community. It is very stressful and we are working all the time. Last week we spent every day collecting data. My group, environmental policy, is researching water management and usage in the Amboseli Ecostyem and its effectiveness. This means that we have two forms of data collection: a GPS group that goes out and walks along the rivers and maps all the farms that utilize this river and a questionnaire group that interviews farmers at random intervals. I was doing GPS for the first three days and it was so painful. I walked at least 45km in three days, that’s a lot of miles. For those who have working google do the conversion and let me know how many. Then on the fourth day I was in charge of inputting data. It is such a pain, we don’t have a cord to connect the GPS to the computer so we have to input by hand every single coordinate into the computer. It takes forever, and at every GPS point we recorded different information which also needs to be inputted. The questionnaires go by faster because there are less numbers. While out GPSing I’ve fallen in two rivers, waded through a knee-deep swamp full of dung-water, gotten the worst farmers tan of my life and walked really far. Its kind of worth it and cool that we are doing this because this is the first time its ever been done. No one has mapped the water usage before in this region or have farmers been interviewed to this extent. We are also interviewing officials that control the water management which I can’t wait for. We had to write a proposal as a group, but the rest of our paper (over 30 pages, in the past has been 60 pages on average) will be written as individuals. Our proposal is 9 pages single spaced. This DR has consumed my life to the extent that I barely have time to blog. I also have such terrible internet that I have for the most part given up on writing blogs.  I guess I should continue describing Tsavo. That will be another time and place though. For now I will describe Tsavo as a great camping experience, but I was disappointed by the wildlife. Since it had recently rained a lot and the vegetation as super dense we barely saw anything. No man-eating lions, no rhinos in the rhino sanctuary, not even snakes. I did kill a scorpion ready to strike by the fire. Oh and my flashlight and headlamp are both broken and the flashlight died while walking to the bathroom the first night. Austin had a light that we shared, but it is a lot harder to do things without a light. I think I am cursed with flashlights. The light I was borrowing from him is now broken, we thought it was just dead batteries but even with brand new ones it won’t work. Then back at camp I borrowed Christina’s extra flashlight and now that won’t work…. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?? I’ve been using my cellphone’s flashlight and I can only hope that doesn’t get broken either.

Yesterday was Easter, and we also had a non-program day. Will organized a 5k for the Aids clinic that we visited a couple weeks ago and we raised a couple hundred dollars for it just from student donations. Sarah raised money by doing chores and errands for people for money. She raised over $150 that way. So impressive. We did the race around the camp. Our camp has a mile perimeter that includes a running trail, so we raced along that. I am terrible at running and finished around 34min., but the fastest person finished in 23:19. Afterwards we had an awards ceremony and the two people that raised the most money got Nutella as a reward (all the way from Nairobi) and the fastest people got their choice of fruit that Will was given while interviewing farmers. Then we all showered and changed into church attire and most of us attended a church service hosted by one of our guides. My group has this guide that leads us around while doing GPS, his name is Pastor Peter and he is this short, very round man with a metal wire glasses that look very tight on his shaved head. He walks SO FAST!! Its incredible, everyone who knows me knows I walk fast, he walks ten times faster than me. It was painful to keep up with him. But he invited us to his church for Easter in Kimana so we all wanted to go. We showed up with 26 white people and completely filled the church. He and another pastor led the service. It was really intense, they were super emotional, but the singing and dancing was so much fun. They get so into praising the lord that they are all dancing with all of their heart. It was really fun. After church we returned back to camp for lunch. While everyone else was eating Christina, Sarah and me hid easter eggs. Christina had filled 70 plastic eggs with candy from town the night before and she recruited me to help her. We hid them ALL over camp and then at 1pm we released everyone to go look for them. It was hilarious, people were running and fighting over eggs and looked really comical searching. Only 60 eggs were found, so ten are still out there. LOL After the egg-hunt some people went into town to the bar and the rest of us stayed and did beading with some Maasai women. They are called Mamas and they taught us how to make beaded jewelry, SO COOL! I made an anklet, a bracelet and two rings. I will probably make this my new hobby since it is so much fun and really easy. We were beading straight till dinner. Dinner was so good, Christina and Sarah had baked red-velvet cake for Easter with yummy frosting. And Molly had made no-bake cookies which are made of melted butter, sugar and milk, then mixed with cocoa powder, oats and peanut butter. I had lots of sugar yesterday; I even had a sugar crash from it because I haven’t had candy, cake, soda, and lots of chocolate all in one day in MONTHS. Then I watched homeward bound, so cute, with my friends and went to bed. Overall a good day. Today will be dedicated to DR work. AHHH. So if you don’t really hear from me in the next two weeks it’s because all my time is being dedicated to writing a 30-60 page paper. 

Read my other post right before this (posted the same day)! Wish me luck on my DR. 

I'm home in three weeks!

-Julie

No Man-eating Lions for me

4-13-2011

Tsavo West National Park

The day begun really early, and as M.O.D (modafunsi of the day or student of the day), I was in charge of wrangling up all the students to load up the cars, eat breakfast and help prepare to leave camp. Once in the jeeps we headed towards Tsavo. Normally only a 2.5-3 hour drive we made several stops along the way for travelling lectures. My car was Erica, Courtney, Mikayla, Greg, Nicky, Jess, and Alice with Daniel driving us and mama J (a cook) in the front seat. The first stop was a hill with a beautiful view over Kuku group ranch near a secondary school. Shem, our Wildlife Management teacher lectured us for an hour. Shem is my favorite teacher, although I’ve heard he is a very hard grader, and he has a very dry sense of humor. He looks like Bill Cosby… and when he wears a sweater it is unreal how canny the resemblance is. Elliot has this plan of bringing Shem to D.C., going to Ben’s Chili Bowl and trying to pass him off as Cosby so we get a free meal. Shem already agreed to the plan LOL.

After the lecture we got back in the jeeps and headed towards the national park. 30 minutes away from the hill we stopped to pick up our armed guards. The government requires that every tourist/white person travelling to and in the park must have an armed guard per car. This requirement is a result of lots of armed raids against tourist cars and to protect tourists from wildlife in the park. At the site to pick them up we were sitting in the jeep waiting, minding our own business and we were bombarded by people selling carvings, beaded jewelry, knives and so much more. They come up to you in the car, and god forbid your window is open because then they actually stick the object and their arms through your windows and grab you or force you to hold onto the item, and harass you. They are yelling prices and just trying to get your attention and if you show them the slightest interest, even if it is just looking at them they won’t go away until your car drives away. I had no intention of buying anything, but then I saw this beautiful carving of a hippo and I just had to have it. I bargained it down from 8,000 KSH to 1,000 KSH= $12 and he handed it over. The hippo was so heavy that I dropped it on my lap which really hurt and my first thought was, how on earth will I get this home with me? I’ve decided I’m going to leave my school books here and that’ll equal the weight of the hippo. Then I saw a rhino and I also had to buy it. Normally the carvings look very cheap and not worth my time, but these two were something special. I made friends with the carver, his name is John, and Jess asked him to make her a lion for when we returned on Saturday. I also normally am strongly against buying carvings just because they illegally harvest wood from the forest and it is very unsustainable. For example ebony: Ebony trees take 80 years to grow and reach maturity and in times of stress, such as drought, it can take them 100 years. But it only takes one person five minutes to cut it down for their own purposes. Ebony is a beautiful black wood, but not worth knowing I just endorsed the destruction of a 100 years worth of growth. Ebony trees are also very important for their environments, so it’s devastating to the forests to lose these trees. Ebony has become so rare that they now make carvings out of other trees. My rhino is rosewood and he wouldn’t tell me what the hippo was made of but it’s very clearly painted black so I’m not worried about it being ebony.

I had perfect timing, because after I paid for the rhino we sped off towards the lava fields. Tsavo West National Park and Chyulu Hills are composed of many dormant volcanoes, with the most recent explosion 500 years ago. The last lava flow is still very visible and it covers the whole landscape with hardened black basalt. We were driving surrounded by bushes and trees and dust under the hot sun when we rounded a corner and as far as we could see there were black lava fields. We stopped for 15 minutes and walked all over the dried lava, it was unreal. The rock is very hollow, but has razor sharp edges. Daniel, our Maasai program assistant who drives and helps organize our events, compared it to the sharp edge of a Machete. Of course I was stupidly wearing flip flops that day so I had to be super careful walking over the dried lava. I took pictures, but of course it can’t compare to seeing it in reality. I took an Archaeology of Pompeii class where we learned how the city was covered in ash and lava… It was so easy to see this lava and picture it covering an entire city. It was creepy too knowing the volcanoes are only dormant and could go off at any time. We got back in the jeeps and stood up for a game drive. That is why I was wearing flip flops, because when we do a game drive we lift off the hatches of the roof and stand on the seats, and we have to be barefoot so we don’t ruin the seats. We saw these adorable animals jumping and climbing all over the sharp rocks, klip springers, they are little antelopes that are really agile and their heads are so cute and look like baby foxes. After struggling to climb over the lava myself it was so cool to see these springers just hop and run so easily across it.

At this point we were almost entering the park and we all got really excited. We couldn’t wait to see the maneless, man-eating lions and rhinos in the rhino sanctuary. We all stood up out of the hatches with our binoculars and cameras at the ready. I kind of assumed before getting here that I would never use my binoculars… little did I know how useful they would be. The only thing I can think to compare it to in order to properly explain the difference it makes would be wearing glasses. When I don’t wear glasses everything far away is really blurry and I can usually only see outlines, but when I put glasses on every detail is sharp and clear. This is the same with binoculars, you’re probably thinking DUH, but when you are looking at an animal like a cheetah that is really far away and your camera can’t focus on it and you’ve lost all hope of seeing it, having binoculars is a life-saver. Being able to see the cheetah’s tear-drop face is SO COOL or every detail of a hippo’s mouth when it yawns, indescribable; especially now that I can successfully identify sex, age and species of most large mammals in Tanzania and Kenya.

Immediately after we entered the park, around 11am, we reached the Mzima Springs. Remember the hippo video I watched before leaving where I saw hippo infanticide? Well these springs are where those hippos live. Most of the water I’ve seen in Africa is dirty, not clear, and looks really gross, but these springs are completely pure. They come from Chyulu Hills, a huge water catchment, and it is pumped so fast (totally naturally) into the spring that the water is purified by the pressure. It enters the springs by a small hole in the ground on one side and on the other side it exits the spring and goes underground through another small hole. Very cool! The springs are home to hippos and crocodiles. So when we got there we expected to see hundreds of hippos, little did we know that the severe drought of 2009 wiped out almost the entire population and only 5-10 remain. We ate lunch surrounded by begging vervet monkeys, which can be really aggressive although they look super innocent (one jumped through the hatch into a jeep where Elliot was sitting and we had to scream at it to get out). After lunch we had to walk as a group down to the springs where they have this lovely stone trail from one of the springs to the other end with funny signs on trees. One sign said “please do not engrave your initials on my trunk”. It was really nice to hear the sound of rushing water, and to see water that was actually clear, but we didn’t see a lot of animals. Farther down the trail we stopped at what looked like a small hut resting on the water, turns out it has an underwater looking point where you can see everything that is in the water. The water is so pure that you can see quite far, I imagine when the springs have lots of hippos this spot must be really cool. All I saw were fish… But upon exiting we looked across the spring to the other bank and saw the fattest crocodile ever. It looked like it had just eaten a zebra, it was that fat. That was awesome. Finally at the very end of the trail on the other side of the springs we saw hippos really far away so basically all we saw were their ears and nostrils. What I really liked, and I usually see at every tourist stop, is the skulls of different animals. At the springs they had hippo skulls which are huge and as big as half my body.

Our game drive began again and we headed towards our campsite in the park. Unfortunately we didn’t see any animals, a huge disappointment after our Serengeti expedition, but the landscape was beautiful. Since we are in the wet season, and it has been raining despite the drought, all the animals have dispersed outside the park because resources are more abundant. While the lack of animals sucks, the landscape was really gorgeous. Everything was green and there is just more vegetation than in Serengeti. It’s also harder to see the animals because it’s mostly very dense bush on either side of the road. The road itself was cool. It kept changing colors from black dirt, to grayish dirt to bright red dirt. In the park where we did game drives the road was a bright red color, which meant that after every game drive we all got out of the jeeps covered in red dust and completely filthy. We reached the campsite after a very uneventful but beautiful drive and set up the tents. Of course my tent was right on top of an ant hill so every time we left anything outside our tent it was immediately swarmed by ants. At least they weren’t safari ants; those were near the bathrooms and one bit Austin’s big toe because he got too close. After we put up the tents we got back in the jeeps and went to the top of a hill and watched the sun set over Chyulu Hills, so gorgeous. In the car while waiting for the sun to set my car played riddle and logic games. I think being in Africa has taught me so many games. I need to write them all down before I forget them. 


Will tell more later,


-Julie 

Kilimanjaro Bush Camp

4/4/2011

UPDATE: I just got back from Tsavo and was unable to post this before my camping trip because I didn't have internet. If you emailed, facebooked or sent any technological communication to me I was unable to open it or even respond. Please stop telling me to watch youtube videos, etc... because I rarely have access to internet and then sporadically to certain websites. I'll have a Tsavo blog soon!

This past week has been a whirlwind of activities. We have had a full week of classes, papers due, travelling lectures, community service and volleyball tournaments before our Directed Research Projects begin. We are leaving tomorrow for Tsavo West National Park where we will be camping for a week, similar to Serengeti I will have no technology for a week and again won’t be showering. Tsavo means Place of Slaughter because the Maasai killed so many Kamba back in the day. It is well-known for having man-eating lions and male lions without manes. And we will be camping in the middle of the park. Molly, our Student Affairs Manager now that we are in Kenya, says that every year animals come through the camp while we are sleeping and one time a pride of lions was hunting a group of girls walking to the bathrooms but a car driving nearby scared them away. Terrifying! But as long as I stick with the askari and armed guards I’ll be safe.

Pause: We are in the middle of watching a video about the hippos in the springs of Tsavo and it was super cute showing us the baby and its mother swimming around. The baby is so small in comparison to the mom and it was really cool. Then it began to discuss the male hippos and how aggressive they are and how they practice infanticide (killing of the babies). So when the mother is introducing the baby hippo to the dominant male who is also the father the male KILLS the baby. They showed the whole horrible chase scene and how he used his massive jaws to clamp down on the baby and you could hear the screaming and then after it died the mother comes up and nudges it to try and wake it up. Then she tries to lift the baby to the surface to breathe because she can’t believe it is dead. I’m so horrified and traumatized.  That was literally the worst thing I’ve ever seen and I hope I never see it again.

I guess I should describe where I’m living. I have moved to Kilimanjaro Bush Camp, in Kimana, Kenya, the other SFS site where I will be doing my directed research for the next month. From my banda I have a view of Kilimanjaro every day and it is literally the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. When you see the sun rise and set over the mountain it just makes you want to cry it is so stunning. The bandas have these high pointed thatched roofs that look stereotypically African and every banda has a view of Kilimanjaro. When we shower, communal showers, you can see over the door a cool view of the mountain. Well if you are taller than 5’4” you can, unfortunately I am shorter than that but if I hop I can see it. LOL The camp is much larger than Moyo and feels much more like a research center. There is a mile long track only the perimeter that my friend Jess and I run every morning. At least we were until the past couple of days where we have had to leave really early every day for lectures and transects. There is a volleyball court, soccer field and a forest in the camp. It is beautiful here and since it has been raining everything is awesome and green. We are surrounded by wildlife too. There is a troop of baboons that live behind my banda, we have vervet monkeys, bush babies (which are the cutest little animals EVER and have the largest eyes), friendly local dogs, and elephants sometimes break through the fence and browse on our trees. But we haven’t had to deal with that yet. There are bad things here too, rats in my banda, black mambas (one the most poisonous snakes), red spitting cobras and very poisonous scorpions. I’ve so far only seen two black mambas, both after they had been killed and I killed a scorpion in the bathroom yesterday. Overall this camp is amazing, the library is huge and the food is much better (although still the same) and I really like the chumba (classroom/cafeteria). A huge issue is how bad the internet is. We only have power from 6:30pm to 11pm from the generator. In the day it is solar, very unreliable. And our internet is a satellite dish that sucks. Like right now, I can open up google but can’t open facebook, my emails, or any school websites. It makes it really hard to communicate or apply for jobs.

Two days ago we went to Amboseli National Park, famous for its thousands of elephants, but we only saw a group of ten elephants, two hippos and a cheetah the whole day. After Serengeti it was very boring and couldn’t compare. All the animals leave the park after it rains and it had rained for the past three days so no wonder it was boring. There is a lodge in the middle of the park that has been abandoned for the past ten years and it is very creepy looking. There are two really nice lodges immediately nearby that look so bizarre next to these abandoned rundown buildings overrun by monkeys. We hung out at the Oldupai lodge for an hour after our lecture in the park and it was really nice.

Last week we went to this gorge and hiked down to a beautiful waterfall that is only flowing after heavy rainfall and we are in the wet season (but still in a drought). The hike looked very much like America and we all forgot we were in Africa because there were corn fields and trees that looked very similar to East Coast trees. One side of the river was Tanzania and the other side was Kenya. So we were hopping back and forth joking about being in different countries. Afterwards we went to Loitoktok to this AIDS support clinic that does free testing and is a support group for people with AIDS. We had these women from the clinic talk to us about how they found out they were positive, what their families did to them, how their lives have changed and what they are doing now. These women were so inspiring and so strong. We all bought all of their jewelry and souvenirs they sell at the clinic to raise money for medications and testing. The stuff I got was so cool and unique and cheap, I felt bad so I gave them more money than they asked for because the work was really good quality.

I need to pack for Tsavo because we leave really early. I will update you again after my weeklong camping trip. Cross my fingers I come back in one piece! Hehe

The funny thing is I probably won’t be able to post this until after Tsavo because I have no internet and have had none this whole day.

Baadye,

Julie