hadi basi

Checking 8 months off the list - I guess this is it for a while. Your nerves can be tamed once more and your interests, peacefully subsided. No more scorpions or zebra carcasses - no more lion collaring or hyena catching- no more picking up poop or attending lengthy Maasai meetings. Speaking of which - the goodbye barbecue.

Asking the Maasai to organize “a little get together” with friends and family isn’t a request lightly received. After a week in Nairobi, we showed up to camp the day of the party, expecting to say our good-byes and thank-yous over some goat stew and a soda. The goat was there, the soda arrived with us, but instead of diving right into it we were seated in rows of chairs facing each other - and then the introductions began. Maasai women are surprisingly shy about saying their names; you would have no trouble getting them to get up and sing you a song, but they giggled when asked to say their names. Introductions were followed by thank-yous, followed by speeches, each reiterating that this was supposed to be a “casual” get together. I guess getting together a group of nomadic pastoralist people is kind of too big of a deal to be casual about it.

Goodbye camp – goodbye Nairobi - we’ll be seeing you – as my grandparents used to say instead of goodbye. I’d like to think that my transition into American life came from an undercover CIA agent my last day in Nairobi. A man came up to me looking rather out of place in his dressed down sweatshirt and ball cap – like a suit that doesn’t know how to put himself together without one. I saw him out of the corner of my eye starring at me and he finally came up and asked what country I was from. He sounded American, looked like everything, and seemed to be quizzing me on my knowledge of the places I said I was from. Then he asked what my heritage was because he couldn’t place my face. I said the name was Czechoslovakian and he asked if I had ever been and when I told him no he said that Prague was a really nice place. Finally he asked if I was a missionary or what I was doing in Kenya. I said wildlife research and that seemed to lose his interest and he ended the conversation casually and walked away. But as he walked away I saw him bring a black bag up to his face and say something into it. Maybe I’m analyzing this too much, maybe I’m just looking for something exciting to say in my last blog entry, maybe he just pick pocketed me and I still don’t know what I lost.

Ticket confusion left Paul and I without seats together on the plane and so we had to do some confronting to get to sit next to each other. We worked the Nairobi-London leg ourselves and Paul, in so many words, told the large guy sitting in his row that my seat up front had more leg-room. He left willingly, I even watched him get served my vegetarian meal and eat it. I happily enjoyed his lamb curry. I don’t know why I selected the “special” meal – I think someone told me that the vegetarian meals were better on airplanes. After we sold our deal to the man who could use some extra leg-room, I tried to get the woman sitting in the middle seat to trade with me for the aisle. Middle seat for an aisle – seemed easy enough. She didn’t say anything, just waved her finger at me like I was being naughty and pointed to her own seat. Then Paul asked if she wanted the window seat and she gave him the same response. So she sat between us the whole eight-hour flight. I don’t think that she spoke much English, or maybe she just didn’t speak, because she conversed with the flight attendants through a series of finger pointing and she hit me once when I was sleeping because she wanted to get up to use the bathroom. She hit me a couple more times because she didn’t seem to know how to use her lap beat and wanted me to do it for her. At that point, I wanted my extra leg-room back.

I also want my British airline employees back. I can’t decide if it’s just their pleasant accents or if they really are just nicer. Upon arrival in Chicago a woman working the customs line used a series of voice raises to get her point across to me. Why waste the extra breath on an actual explanation, just say the same thing louder that you said before. Welcome home. Back in Bozeman – after a 20-hour road trip from St. Louis, which neither of us bothered to check out until the morning we were leaving – estimations had been slightly lower. Kenya even said good-bye to us one more time in South Dakota. If you are familiar with Wall Drug you’ll know that they begin their advertising in all adjacent states. One billboard on I-90 read: Wall Drug – there’s a sign for it in Nairobi, Kenya.

moja tu

Sampson – stripped of his wisdom by a woman – and so the story goes of Sampson and Delilah. Sampson - momentarily stalled in his path by a woman - and so the story goes of Sampson and Christine. My novice trap setting skills, the first trap I set, proved good for one go at it. I’d have to say it was beginners luck; the settings since have not been as fruitful though we think we’ve perfected the method for next time, next year. You can look forward to my reunion entry in January - telling you about a handful of new hyenas that have signed up to the cause.

A week ago we were invited up to the infamous lodge. If one was so inclined, it would cost that individual somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred dollars a night to stay there – per person, not per room. Our presence was allotted for because Johann, Sam’s boyfriend, had clients on safari staying there. We spent our token afternoon sunning ourselves at the private pool on top of the compound called 360 – so named for your three hundred and sixty degree view of the land lingering below. This little bungalow would set you back eight thousand dollars a night. Each structure has its own pool perched on the edge of the cliff. Low walls etch out the perimeter and the bathroom, but everything else is open. There is little else to the space actually - slippery white tile floors and a large white bed encased in a mosquito net – all seemingly trying to defy the dusty conditions that surround it; even the staff wear long white robes. I’m told that all the white is about portraying a coastal ambiance. In the gift shop you can buy beaded waste bins, appropriately sized for your bathroom, for three hundred dollars. Though I guess the tolerance of a person paying close to a thousand dollars a night to be there is ample enough to find these prices in the margin of fairness

Camp is winding down; we’re back in Nairobi for a week while Paul prepares his poop samples for export. Poop - we introduced Albert in camp to this word when we were out doing animal counts one morning. We found a herd of wildebeest and drove over to collect some fecal samples - but we told Albert we were looking for poop. Hearing Paul use this terminology, he must have thought that poop was the correct word to use and when he was out with Sam another day recording what animals had been to her plant plots, he said, “I think this one is some weird sort of giraffe poop; it must have been at the end of pooping.” Sam subscribes to a proper British style of English - the right style of English most Brits would say - so she was less than pleased with the infiltration of our American slang. In true Christine spirit, I can finally count the days remaining on my hands and feet so productivity can wake up alert from its pondering slumber. We finished the stones dictating the paths of travel, each accompanied by a skull and its appropriate hoof track painted on the stone. I clear coated the stones and the skulls to save them from the sun and the dogs. Bucket and Monster seemed to have thought that I laid out these skulls as a dinner menu for them despite my insistence to the contrary. Once I soaked them in shell-ac they started to believe me.

All this research going on around me has inspired me to ask my own study questions. There’s some research going on in the Mara on spotted hyenas and their resistance to anthrax. I’ve decided to start doing my own research, using myself as the study animal, and inquire about the build up of immunity to scorpion stings. Two down and so far they still hurt.