Maasai Wedding

And I now present to you, Mr. and Mrs. Schuette – just in Olkiramatian though.  We had a joint Maasai wedding with Sam and Johann at the Resource Centre.  The centre symbolized our new home and Sam and I left early in the morning to our Maasai parent’s boma to get dressed and prepared for the wedding.  We were led to separate huts, adorned with Maasai beads – some to keep and some for ceremonial purposes - and then sat waiting for our husbands to arrive.  Kichwa mkubwa (big head) – my Maasai family stressed over mine and tried two different head ornaments, which neither of them really fit.  After awhile everyone else arrived and Paul and Joel came into my boma - Joel was our best man.  Then my father and mother gave us advice and two older men that filled the role of godparents, gave blessings.  The beer came out for the wazee (old men) and we were told that beer always accompanied blessings.  My father’s advice was to be good to Paul because the family has chosen him for me so we should try to work together.  My mother’s advice was the same, but she stated it more bluntly and said that because they would be receiving livestock from Paul they didn’t want him to come back and say that their daughter was lazy.  No real livestock was exchanged though a bull and 2 goats were slaughtered for the ceremony.  Another two goats were born on the day of the wedding and given to Sam and I as wedding presents.  I’m not sure who will take care of them in our honor - perhaps I’ll arrive back in Bozeman with my first goat to start the farm.  When all blessings were given, Paul and I were led out of my parent’s boma and started the journey to my new home.  Fresh cow dung, milk, and a special type of grass were placed over the entrance of my parent’s boma for good luck.  When we arrived back at camp there were about 300 people waiting for us and the women sang and danced us into the boma.  We were led to each of our tents, which represented our new homes, and there we sat and enjoyed sodas while we were given more blessings.  My Maasai name was given official status at this stage – Nashipai.  It means joy and happiness in Maasai.  The christening required some chanting and my tweezing out the pauses and filling them in with a response.  I think I did okay though clapping and laughing always trailed my voice.

We decided to make the most efficient use of our time with Dave and Erika in the field by first having our wedding on day 1 and introducing them to pretty much everyone in the community and on day 2 tracking one of the lions and seeing a hunt and a kill.  Kereng’ende and Esipata, along with 4 of their pride mates, killed a warthog and we had front row seats to their supper.  A black-back jackal and a few hyenas appeared in the background with leftovers in mind though one warthog didn’t even split between 6 lions very politely.  Day 4 we collared lion number 6 – Bolt.  She has a lighting bolt white patch under her left eye and she happened to be the lion we had in mind when we went out looking.  Within an hour, there she was sitting on the side of the road.  She’s part of a third pride of lions further south into the Shompole conservancy.  A pride we’ve known about for some time, but haven’t had the chance to monitor closely.  They are extremely used to vehicles due to the Shompole lodge sitting prominently in their home range.  There are 4 young one-year old males without manes yet that walked right up to the truck, curious and fearless. So the first night out - we see a kill and the first attempt to collar - a success.  Day 5 and 6 we spent telling stories and reliving hardships.

The goodbyes begin and our long lost friend Mkubwa (the big man) came to bid us farewell.  Well, to be honest we meet him 98% of the way.  Dr; Western took us on a scouting mission via plane and we heard Mkubwa’s signal about 18 kilometers north of camp.  The next day we set out on an expedition into unchartered territory outside of Olkiramatian’s group ranch. Sitting on the edge of where the truck would go and barely hearing the signal, we played the buffalo calf call, which drew Mkubwa out along with another male lion and three lionesses – pride number 4.  So there he was - definitely looking mkubwish – and not on his own.  It’s hard to say if he abandoned Mwanzo for them or if he had abandoned them for a brief stint with Mwanzo during the drought.  Either way Ren has reaped the benefits of his absence, but by looking at Mkubwa now, I can’t imagine that he ever lost a fight.  Content with our findings we started driving back, pole pole (slowly) over scattered lava rock.  The lions seemed a bit concerned that there wasn’t actually a buffalo calf around and they trailed our exit just to make sure.  It took us awhile to get there, navigating the lava rock and huge gullies so it’s possible the lioness’s had never seen a non-editable moving beast and wanted to be absolutely sure that this was true.

Mbwa Kidogo

 

Where have I been?  Is it too late to report on the World Cup?  I don’t care about the end, flash back to when the US was still in it - apparently soccer is one of my more obvious emotions.  My surprise 30^th birthday party produced a mere smile on my face.  Yes I realize that was over a year ago, I’m just building up examples here.  I’m bad at excitement, apparently, but US verse Algeria - England verses Slovenia was the day Sam said she saw a whole different side to me.  Two flat screens side by side in the bar - they were gracious enough to allow the US game to be on one of the six TVs in the room.  The tense situation pulled all USA supporters out of the woodwork and we became instant friends, sharing in screams at the pathetic offsides call and high fives at the climax of victory.  When the room grew calm we said our sheepish goodbyes to our new best friends, probably never to see them again.  We had our own soccer match at the local primary school that ended with the C.O.O. of the Cincinnati Zoo and I colliding head on - we were on the same team.  I lay motionless for a few moments in a bloom of dust before getting up and deciding it was time to sub out.  Most blame was directed at him although he claims that I elbowed him on the way down.   

Cincinnati Zoo?  Oh yes, camp has been a revolving door since I last reported.  Sam turned 30 and half of British Kenya came down to celebrate and then Earth Expeditions - affiliated with the Cincinnati Zoo - came out to do their annual inquiry based education program for teachers that includes a lot of interaction with the local community.  We brought the cheetahs out to celebrate.  The Cincinnati portion of the group has a strong liking to cheetahs and the first week of July every year when they come out seems to be about the only time we see cheetahs here.  This year I told them that the cheetahs were pets and we bring them out for good PR.

Monster had 8 puppies – none of them look like Bucket.  I actually don’t think there was a father involved, they all seem to be clones of Monster.  It’s my first batch of puppies to watch, but I sense that Monster is trying to get rid of some of them.  At night she distributes puppies around the camp and they are left crying which can’t be good.  She sits off in the distance and just watches them cry.  Tough love?  If I’m around, I veto this decision, scooping puppies up and taking them back to where they belong.  They are famous puppies in the community, booked before they were even born.  For some reason Bucket gets a lot of respect and is deemed a special dog and everybody wants one.  

As our time here comes to an end, I’ve been given the task of another blog to design, a website to figure out, and some CAD drawings to do to help a friend.  Nothing like piling it on at the last moment, it really wouldn’t be natural any other way.  The director of ACC came up to me and said, “Christine, I’ve just seen the website for SORALO, I didn’t know you had skills in web design.”  I replied that I hadn’t known either.  We’re in Nairobi for another week while Paul fumigates all of his poop samples for export and then we’ll head back down to camp with our replacements, Dave and Erika, for the final few weeks.  I think there’s one more blog left in me.   

17 pigs, 9 cats, and 3 dogs – all with free range of the household – just some closing remarks for your consideration.

Safari

 We went to a ceremony at Michael’s boma to honor the passing of his father.  Tradition has it that he was to be buried at Michael’s since he is the eldest son. Further tradition dictates that the family is not allowed to migrate from the boma for two years while the body and soul return to nature.  Elders of his father’s age group drank and ate and shared memories of their friend.  Then they went into each of Michael’s wives’ huts and blessed them by spitting on the ground.  I mentioned that part of the partaking of the day was drinking, and the men did indeed drink.  At one point one of the elders walked up to a group of children sitting on a goatskin mat and the conversation went as follows:

“Do you know who I am?” 

“No” 

“Well you should, I am very popular.  I’m very popular because back in my day I killed a lot of zebra and rhinos.”

One hundred elephants greeted us when we drove into Amboseli National Park.  Tiny black dots on the horizon turned into this spectacle.  We went to visit a pilot carnivore study that is being designed to mirror Paul’s.  Differences to note:  besides the expansive views and vast numbers of elephants, you can’t night game drive in national parks.  The 6:30 pm deadline was a bit of an inconvenience as we were sitting at a plush resort on the complete other side watching the sunset and would-be stunning view of Kilimanjaro had it been clear enough out to see it.  We raced back to our cabin through a series of parallel roads outside of the park and dove back in when we absolutely had to.  I feel that the minutes gained driving outside could be applied later while driving inside and that no rules were broken by looking at it in this way.  The delays of our day actually started with a grumpy old bull elephant that stood stubbornly on the road outside our cabin and threatened us every time we started to drive.  Ears pinned and trunk in mouth - I’m told these are the signs of true aggression - he turned to face us whenever we made an advance.  Finally we drove off road and gave him a wide birth to avoid his sour mood.  Amboseli is home to a lot of elephants.  David Western set up a fenced off area about seven years ago to show KWS how Amboseli would look if there were not so many elephants.  Seven years has produced an amazing amount of growth, you wouldn’t believe it.  They want to set up a number of these little protected areas and rotate them to invite many bird species and leopard back into the park that have left due to their habitats being destroyed.

We went to the Maasai Mara too – a 2-day trip to close out the visit of a friend - and were welcomed by our own private pool of hippos.  Paul asked the watchmen where we got in to swim and then we laughed and wondered how many other guests had come up with that joke and thought that they were being original.  Our game drives turned up everything but the rhino.  We saw cheetah, a leopard, lions, and a spotted hyena with a collar on it.  And we drove into the center of a herd of buffalo that were on our route.  I was driving and refused to stop for pictures, but our guide just laughed at me and said they weren’t going to charge us.  So I stopped and they didn’t charge us, but there were about 200 of them and we were the most protected members of the herd – being smack dab in the middle.   

Back in our familiar habitat - Mwanzo ate a hare – she pounced on it like a housecat when it turned up on her path of travel.  We gave her a brand new collar since hers was about to expire and the old one will remain a tattered treasure of Paul’s.  Our visitor christened the moment with a great title for Paul’s future manuscripts, ‘Mwanzo, my first, my last, my only.’    

Most children in Olkiramatian and Shompole excitedly greet you by repeating, “how are you, how are you,” many times and sometimes they efficiently answer your probable follow up question as well by saying, “how are you fine, how are you fine.”  Paul stopped at a shop in Entasopia and a group of children came up to follow suit in this ritual.  One of the boys stood silently waiting his turn, gently stroking Paul’s truck, and then said in perfect English, “This is not a car, this is a Toyota Land Cruiser.”   

Mkona - Hand

I’ve been communing with birds this month.  While driving back to camp late one night a nightjar – bird - plopped down on the hood of the truck and traveled with us for a couple of kilometers.  We were just becoming aware of a storm that had been raging north of us when our road turned into a river.  We could have abandoned the truck and replaced it with an inner tube and a floating cooler of beer if only it had been flowing in the right direction.  The bird joined us just prior to this discovery.  Once we were pretty certain we weren’t going to sink in the river road, we stopped the car and I decided to remove the bird before it slipped under one of the wheels - assuming the minute I opened the door it would fly away.  No – not one to make rash decisions – it allowed me to pick it up before flying away as I repositioned it in my other hand.  How did it know I wasn’t going to eat it?  Bird # 2 shared the toilet with me and seemed to have just watched the movie ‘The Men Who Start At Goats’ as it was trying to fly out the mesh windows – I showed it the light and the door.  Bird #3 flew down from a tree and rested on my shoulder for just a few yards.  I might take up bird whispering or at least add it to my resume.

 More rain – it took us almost the full month of May to get our transects in.  Lions tend to be everywhere when it rains.  One of the local resource assessors told us that his dad warned him about lion activity during the heavy rains following a big drought.  He said that it makes them crazy.  Michael’s sons saw a couple lions on their walk to school one morning and they’ve been showing up to camp on occasion too.  Just as day was breaking and Paul and I were sleeping soundly in our tent, three lions strolled past the staff tents triggering a chase response from the dogs.  Our watchman peeked his head out of his tent to see three lions race past with Bucket and Monster in close pursuit.  At some point during this series of events, the lions realized that they were lions and the dogs realized that they were chasing lions and the chase reversed and Monster tried to jump in the tent with Albert.  We found another group of nine lions down south on a transect.  Out in the open in the terrible heat, huddled under one little tree – it must have been an ambush waiting to happen.  Sure enough when we came back for night transects, they had already killed a grants gazelle.  Not an easy prey for a lion to hunt, so I suspect the animal was caught off guard.  We watched the pile of lions rest and play after their meal – a pile of nine lions.  I took some video.  My understanding of the everyday lives of prey animals has been morphed this month.  Usually we observe a herd of animals and report that a predator is sleeping in a bush, 1, 2, or 3 kilometers away.  Lately we’ve had front row seats on a number of occasions to the direct interactions of the two.  We watched two male grants gazelles stay bedded as one of the female lions walked towards them about 20 yards away.  Anthropomorphizing her, she thought, “don’t mind me, I’m just going to casually walk this way… and then Bam! She jumped at them at which point they then got up and ran away.  Two hours later, this same lion paced another three grants and was pretty much part of the herd, 5 yards away strolling along in the same direction – it was 8:00 in the morning though, maybe somebody called truce.  

Stitches in Kenya:  1500 shillings, Pain Killers & Antibiotics: 100 shillings, hearing the surgeon say, “These government needles are so dull”, as he’s sewing your hand back together:  priceless.  Don’t panic it wasn’t me - so mom and dad you can breathe.  But it was Paul – hopefully the Schuette family has already been prepped with this news.  He was trying to cut an annoying branch protruding into the road when his machete ‘kicked-back’, flipping out of his right hand and landing blade-first in his left. We called Sam who was in Nairobi and she assured us that the hospital an hour down the road was a good one.  And it was, sterile, professional – except for their lunch hour we had to wait, good doctors.  Joel came with us and we were both in the room as Paul got his stitches.  After the above-mentioned comment, the surgeon and nurse were talking in the Swahili that I don’t understand - mainly all of it  - and Joel told us later that they continued their discussion about the needles and said that these needles were meant for rough, farm working hands, not these smooth city ones.  

Kereng'ende

In high school I wrapped my back car door around a tree – I blame a friend taking too long closing his door.  The mechanic went to the junkyard and got me a new door, but it still cost me $400.  A couple of weeks ago we got the truck washed and someone managed to do the very same thing to the passenger door, but replaced the tree with a pole.  Two days later the truck was good as new, better than before actually, and they didn’t need to replace the door, they bent it out perfectly and applied a new coat of paint for about $80.  I would like my $320 back. 

Dinners in the bush have started to come with live entertainment.  Opening with a duet between two lions, the act was followed by the alert calls of baboons and ‘The Grudge’.  Did you ever see that movie?  If you haven’t this will be hard to explain, but I believe the writers poached their ghost sound from the Colobus monkey.  We don’t often see Colobus, let alone hear them, so when I first heard this noise I started looking around for a freaky ghost that is known best for being captured on surveillance cameras at night in eerie buildings.  Closing for the primates, was a fake buffalo calf and fake lion and hyena fight provided by yours truly in another attempt to add lion number 5 to our resume. 

Lion number five - Kereng’ende (Karen-yen-day) ‘dragonfly’ in Swahili.  She’s the largest collared female and she had puncture marks and scratches from another lion on her back.  The good rains have changed things and the predators seem to be fighting over the best places to call home.  We weren’t sure which pride she belonged to at the time, but have since seen her with Esipata.  Twice now we’ve found her in a tree and the second time, one by one four other lions followed her lead.  The fourth lion that inched up the trunk was Esipata.  The fifth lion wasn’t in the mood to snuggle and tried options two and three before settling on a tree’s trunk that was more like an escalator.  The lions awkwardly slumped over the branches and showed mild interest in a herd of passing zebra and wildebeest.  After a few hours, the last lion walked back down her escalator and came within five yards of the truck, sniffing the air and then settled down into the 2-foot tall grasses in front of us – hardly remaining visible.

Adding more drama to the lion soap opera, Mwanzo and Ren were caught breaking pride lines and spending some exclusive time together.  We don’t want to think about it, but this probably means that the cubs we saw her with earlier are no longer, if indeed they were her cubs.  Lions mate about 100 times over the span of 2 or 3 days.  The first day we found them they played hide and seek with each other for the whole 4 hours we were there.  We left them at 8:30 in the morning sitting out in the open with zebra and ostrich and a few grants gazelles grazing about 100 yards away.  Mating time is a free ticket for the ungulates; lions don’t mix the two pleasures.  The second day they barely moved from their napping positions to their mating ones. 

We made a cameo in this soap opera one morning when we ran into a fresh wildebeest carcass.  Pulling up to the scene to check the tracks and investigate, a previously unseen lioness popped up and snarled at us from about 40 yards away.  Paul’s translation, “Hey, I’m not done with that.”

Esipata - Truth (Maasai)

Olkiramatian had their first democratic elections - two candidates for chairman of the group ranch, two lines of support.  The Magadi police were there to make sure things ran smoothly, but basically people just stood there staring into the faces of their opponents until the votes were counted - democracy at it’s simplest.  Each household was allotted 4 votes, the head of household and three other registered members.  Members could be anyone, men, women, even children.  People were registering unborn babies and hoping that they were born in time for the election. The winning party closed all bars to curb celebration and its direct correlation with conflict.  

With elections over the centre can quit politicking and get back to work.  The women have started their first small business through the purchase of three portable solar products (D.Light: www.dlightdesign.com) that are being marketed to rid the world of the kerosene lantern.  A few Stanford grads invented the product and they now sell them in Nairobi.  The Olkiramatian women’s group has become the local distributor for Olkiramatian and Shompole.  Paul first learned about the company online and made the connection between the Nairobi company and the women.  The meeting went well and the women bought the entire stock that the guys brought down that day to sell to the community.  I practiced my Swahili at the end of the meeting and said: Tutanunua moja kwanza – We’ll buy the first one.  During one of our bursary household visits Albert whipped out the brochure and started marketing the product and I teased him that he might need to discuss being compensated by the women for all of these sales pitches.

The last few weeks of research have been great.  Lions killed an aardvark apparently just for fun.  Nothing was consumed, but we saw their tracks and the death grip on its neck. We helped ourselves to the corpse to try and catch one of the lions from the third, uncollared pride.  We call them the lodge lions because they usually sit beneath the $700 per person per night lodge down in Shompole, who could blame them.  But since the rains all the lions have been shifting north, including these, and we saw four female and three cubs on one of our scouting missions.  Another scouting mission led us to spend the night in the truck when we tried to drive through Swamp Cross and became more familiar with the swamp part of its name.  We drove through 5-foot tall grasses to get there in a stretch that was barren the year prior.  The whole place is wild, people have moved away from the west side of the river and the animals are filling in the void.  We were following the signal of Mwanzo, who has 4 cubs now, and rounded a salvadora bush just as a huge bull elephant was doing the same from the other side.  We met in the middle and he nonchalantly maintained his course, which suggested to us that we should divert from ours.  You can add two more elephant, how do you dos, to that and one group of buffalo.  Buffalo sound surprisingly like lions.  They make a low-pitched growl which means - I don’t know what, but before they emerged from the trees this is what we thought they were.  Through night vision goggles we watched 15 of them graze near the aardvark and then group together and chased a hyena away that came to check out the bait.  They moved off a bit and we played a tape of a buffalo calf that’s known to bring in lions – science – and it did bring in the lions, but it also brought back the buffalo.  Coming to rescue a calf that they didn’t seem to have with them in the first place – aggressive animals.  They stopped when we stopped and we stopped long enough to let them be on their way.  The lions came next, but didn’t seem that interested in the aardvark either.  We followed a bit, but the presence of the cubs seemed to make them weary of us.  The older cub seemed used to cars – another reason they are probably the lodge lions – when the lionesses left the road to walk parallel, but in the covered bush, he ignored that obstacle ridden decision and stayed on the road while we trailed him by about 40 yards.

Building has halted a bit with material delays, but we’ve brought the tree count to 71.  I also planted 90 acacia tortillis seeds, but I haven’t been so diligent about watering them.  Google told me to soak the seeds in sulfuric acid though so I think they’re probably used to being patient.  

Miti

24 down 33 up! Trees – miti – not to be discouraged by our first batch of failures, we planted 33 new tree cuttings along the perimeter of camp.  200 mm’s of rain over the period of 4 days led us to believe that it was now or never for our living fence.  It turned out to be a dangerous task and Joel, the baboon researcher, and I both left with thorn injuries.  Joel stabbed himself in the head with one and I stepped on a huge thorn that went straight through the side of my heel.  And then I immediately turned into a little baby when anybody tried to pull it out.  This mzee - old guy - happened upon us and wanted to do the honors, but I just held my hand over my foot and shook my head.  Paul walked back to the truck for his pliers and that’s when I quickly figured out how to pull it out myself.  I think I brought this on myself.  I was pondering a stupid question the day before when Bucket had a small thorn in his foot and wouldn’t let us get it out for him.  I said to Paul, “I wonder why he won’t let us help him, he’s obviously uncomfortable.”  Yeah, point taken Bucket!

Hyenas – negative – instead of catching them we’ve gone to tremendous lengths to practice: Drove an hour away, set traps in an old swamp, 3 hours later while sitting down to dinner in our camp away from camp it started to down pour.  Envisioning our old swamp becoming swampy we drove 2 kilometers through it - knowing that we might get stuck - so that we could trigger the traps and get them out of there.  We’ve never been so instantaneously muddy and wet in our lives.  It was like a scavenger hunt, looking for the reflective tape marking the site, pulling traps and throwing them in the back of the truck, going back to find the next one.  We were efficient – we even allotted time to reclaim the bait.  4-wheel drive somehow got us through it – missed a few trees by hairs – but we made it back to camp just in time for the storm to catch us there.  A quick cup of soup in our duck taped kitchen tent that had started to flood and off to bed – shower by Mother Nature.

Excitement in the air – we had a women’s group meeting to go over all of their plans and present them with the check made possible through the fundraisers we were part of.  Everybody seemed happy and enthused and it wasn’t just because one of the committee members kept blowing ‘snot-rockets’ next to her chair during the meeting.  The women were excited and not afraid to tell us all about it.  One committee member stood up and announced in front of leaders and elders of the community that they intended for the programs of this center to far succeed anything that any man of this community has ever tried to do.  There was timid support of this bold statement, but then the chairman of Olkirimatian School stood up and said, “Ladies, if these programs do succeed, they will.”  I handed the treasurer the check and everybody clapped and then laughed because she had no idea what it was.  The check was in an envelope so she said something on the order of, “this isn’t money, it’s paper.”  Which leads me to the next task at hand – finding basic educational training for these women.  I spoke about the bursary program and hinted at money management and sustainability and closed by saying, “I am making it my goal to find you education so that the next time you are presented with a check you will know what it is and be able to read it yourself.”  I’m not sure how it got translated.  My specially crafted word choices probably aren’t important anyway.  I noticed this at another meeting when Albert asked me to say a few things and I basically stood up and introduced myself, though his translation went on and on and talked about the bursary program and the textbook program and I thought, man I must have missed all of that in my own speech.

Nyanya

31 – I think I’ve miss counted somewhere.  Could it be?  We celebrated my birthday - tried and true - by heading up to Sampu camp for an evening with some friends.  And another repeat – we hiked up a steep incline to calculate how old I was getting, this time the escarpment.  At the top we enjoyed the view, some champagne, and my sweet new phone.  The Samsung C3510 – it’s pretty awesome - touch screen, fast web browsing.  After giving it to me, Paul was feeling a bit sad about his ordinary phone so he would like to point out that mine doesn’t have a flashlight on the end anymore and his is superior in that regard.  New things  – elephants  - there are now elephants in the study area.  I’ve always thought that people were going to tremendous efforts to make me think that there were elephants by planting dung and footprints, but on my birthday we drove up to a bull foraging 30 meters away from us.  Paul has since seen three other groups of elephants while he was out setting camera traps.  Everybody seems excited about the elephants - a Shompole scout along for the ride reported; “we are having a wonderful time.”  

I think 30 was the peak of my wasp phobia - I’m much more tolerant now.  Today I allowed three wasps to fight with each other right next to me and I didn’t even flinch – that’s progress.  Or maybe I’m just more subdued now because I haven’t had coffee in 22 days; or tea for that matter – although I’ve cheated a bit on that.  Tolerant of wasps, but intolerant of something I’m eating and a nutritionist in Nairobi has me on a new diet to figure out what it is.  Caffeine is always the first to go which is a very sad thing.  I’m allowed herbal tea and I drink that while longingly gazing at Paul’s pot of coffee he has all to himself.  I tried to tell him that he should be supportive and cut coffee out of his diet too, but he hardly entertains that even as a hypothetical.

On the community side of things - the women’s group has registered themselves as a CBO, community based organization, and we plan on helping them start their bursary program and other projects they are interested in.  We also purchased textbooks for primary schools on the two group ranches with fundraiser money from this fall.  For more details on these developments you can check out the research blog: southriftccr.blogspot.com.  Building has commenced in camp.  The Resource Centre is renewing its look with some proper buildings to service the researchers, community, and visiting guests.  The plan has been three years in the making and everybody is excited - kitchens, bathrooms, showers, open air meeting and dining halls, a women’s beadwork Banda; I plan on shadowing the contractor for the next 5 months and pointing out any California building codes he may be violating

On the carnivore side of things – the smell of dead animals lingers as we try to catch more hyenas.  The stakes haven’t been set yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know who catch what.   

Paul and I have made Kiswahili a priority since we are embarrassingly bad at it.  I blame the fact too many people speak English and I read in a Times magazine article that you start losing your ability to learn another language at 9 months of age.  But these are excuses and enough people down here casually saying, “huh, you come to Kenya and you don’t want to learn Swahili,” has bluntly suggested to us that we must learn.  Maybe you can learn with us.  Lesson 1: nyanya means both grandmother and tomato.

Mnyama

A baboon attacked Monster.  Apparently, Bucket experienced the same fate while we were in the U.S. though he shows no signs of this history.  Our non-vet diagnosis was certain death.  She couldn’t lick her wounds because they were on her neck and she didn’t care for us to try and wash them either.  Infection seemed inevitable, but each morning Monster would greet us looking slightly better than the day before.  I’m not sure if Bucket tried to help or not, he seemed worthless whenever I saw the two of them together.  Six days later all her wounds had closed up and we were celebrating the amazing recovery of this mnyama (animal).  Then on the seventh day a snake bit her.  Another non-vet diagnose – though it was surely a poison of some kind.  Whining outside our tent and unable to walk, she appeared to find the sensation in her face very peculiar.  I prepared myself for another good-bye to Monster and just when I thought each struggled breath would be her last, Paul came home and the sound of the car stirred in her an energy fueling her enough to get up and go to greet him.  She fell over once she got to the truck, but then hobbled to the kitchen tent and drank some water and ate some food.  We are stuck in Nairobi with a broken clutch so I can’t report on her condition right now - if you hear nothing else of her you can assume the nature of things.  I’m told that she won’t necessarily die from snakebite - it would depend on which snake and where it bit her.      

We’ve located 5 of the 6 collared animals - Mwanzo threw us a welcoming party by leading us into a mud pit.  Two hours later, our lion got impatient with us and moved out of range.  Three hours later we managed to dig ourselves out.  The mud was thick clay and every once and a while we would dig up a scorpion in our efforts to be free. We were careful about this during hours one and two – by hour three we were scooping up mud by hand and waiting for a sting, which never came.  Always prepared to sleep in the car if we must, being stuck is an annoyance, but not a fear.  Though the movements and protection of the truck give you an invincibility that sheds itself once this convenience is taken away.  On our victory drive back, two hyenas ran straight through camp.  If this keeps up we won’t need this convenient truck anymore because we won’t have to leave the premises – our study animals keep wandering by.  We aren’t the only ones they have been gracing with their presence, in our absence a group of lions attacked four bomas and ate about 12 goats.  This doesn’t make people very happy.

Day jobs, night jobs - whichever way you want to look at it – Paul and I might be quitting ours soon.  We had our fifteen minutes of fame by playing tourists at Sampu camp for a promotional video for ACC.  An Italian filmmaker with a flare for being all things Italian directed us for our minor role in this film.  Our voices won’t be heard so we were told to chat about anything and then pick up the binoculars and pretend to look at something.  I haven’t seen the edited clip so I can’t report on our acting skills - I’m sure they were superb.  I’ve also made the Social Scene of the Kenyan newspaper – a picture of Sam and I taken at Dr. Western’s awards ceremony.  Pretty soon I’ll probably be a movie star – 30 is a good age to start down that path right?  

Soda Baridi

I blinked and all the caterpillars turned into moths and our lush green camp settled into a dusty memory.  There’s a plethora of wildlife still around though - we collected 30 poop samples in one morning alone.  That’s a fourth of the entire stock from last year.  With the rains and the people moving to the other side of the river, everything is coming a bit closer to camp – even the lions.  Our camp watchman, Merkiti, ran towards the river one morning, waving his hand back in my direction.  The language barrier makes our communications rudimentary, although I was pretty certain that the scooping up of air towards oneself in a quick, curt motion means the same thing in English, Swahili, even Maa.  Get over here!  There was soon excitement on both sides of the river and by the time I got over there he was so excited that he had forgotten about our communication limitations and he was very enthusiastically telling me that something was right down there.  He was pointing towards the river and I never heard the word simba, but that was what he was trying to convey.  It was 10:00 in the morning and there were three lions walking up the river - that was translated to me in plain English.  We got out the tracking equipment, but none of the lions were collared.  Soon we had about 15 guys in camp, bravely walking down the bank to have a closer look.  Presumably the lions were not in a big hurry to encounter people and they kept changing directions, as they would approach an area where there were a lot of voices.  “Now they are going that way!”  Someone on the other side of the river would yell and everybody would run in that direction.  Maybe the Maasai were more anxious because their livestock were grazing nearby, but as long as the lions stayed by the river, I didn’t feel the need to keep them at arms length – until that night.  As Paul and I were walking to our tent we experienced a renewed vigilance that habit had almost completely dissolved.  With a dim flashlight and the dogs we made our way from kitchen to bed in usual stride until the dogs barked at something and backed up behind us.  We tried to wait for them to lead, but they kept insisting that we go first, so much for guard dogs. 

Two more of Paul’s cameras went missing – this time the whole set: camera, cage, and post.  Three meetings later a search party was released and 20 men combing the area looking for evidence.  They never recovered the cameras, but a few pieces were found and one of them happened to be the memory card.  Once again we had photographic evidence of the scene of the crime.  I’m not sure what will happen this time – we haven’t heard anything about another caning attempt, but the boy was older this time so we’ll stand by for word on the appropriate community punishment.  In two years, we’ve only had problems in one area with camera destruction.  The leaders and local men reinstated their support of the research and are looking for ways to help ensure that the theft stops.  Teenage boys are the same everywhere though I guess, which is why I move for the world to be taken over by women – all in favor?

Baridi, cold, nairobi (nairobi is actually the Maasai word for cold) - All these words describe a temperature I’ve come to forget.  The charcoal fridge – though probably not constructed and watered correctly – has provided us with a meager example though it serves as a better delusion than temperature control.  So when Dr. Western remembered that he had a gas refrigerator sitting in his storage we jumped on the invitation.  Well Paul jumped, I, on a sugar low, thought it would be great if it were already sitting in camp working properly.  But we brought it down - it’s a full sized refrigerator – and hauled it into the kitchen tent, hooked it up, AND……..it didn’t work.  Didn’t – a word of the past.  Does – the word today.  And Will – hopefully – the word of the future.  We had to go to Nairobi to deal with permitting issue number 354 and on the way back we picked up a couple of refrigerator repair men and brought them down with us.

While we were in Nairobi we attended an awards ceremony for Dr. Western.  Small world - he was awarded the World Ecology award by the Harris Ecology Foundation and the University of Missouri – St. Louis.  He will be accepting the award at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis on May 7^th (for those living in St. Louis, feel free to attend).  But the African Conservations Centre had a recognition party at a swanky hotel near downtown Nairobi.  Wangari Maathai (the Kenyan woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her Greenbelt Movement – tree planting) was the guest speaker and at the end of her speech she sang “For he’s a jolly good fellow” since, she said, Dr. Western is an Englishmen, although he’s actually a Kenyan.  Dressing up here is called dressing smart and for Paul and I that meant jeans and a dust free shirt – it’s hard to do.  With life here and life in Montana, I’ve pretty much lost my sense of fanciness - lip-gloss and a few bobby pins has become my going out look.  But Nairobians are always looking smart so I tend to feel like a scrub when we arrive back in town.  Our refrigerator repairman even pitched up in a white button down shirt and grey slacks.  To be fair though, he had never slept in a tent and probably didn’t know what dusty conditions he was getting himself into.  So the frig - baridi, cold, nairobi, all words to describe the water we’re drinking right now, the cheese and tomato sandwich we will be eating tomorrow, and the fresh food, maybe even a little meat, that will have more than a moments breath day in and day out.  

Karibu Kenya

4 carts, 14 bags, and 4 people – we dispersed our goods and made it out of the airport no problem.  Paul and I had rehearsed our list of contents in case we were asked.  Last year, we stumbled over our words and told them that we were carrying spotlights in all ten pieces of luggage.  “That’s a lot of spotlights,” the customs officer had said.  “Yes, yes it is.”  But this year we were traveling with two friends and we made it out smoothly.  Karibu Kenya – welcome to Kenya.

I’ve never been one for maintenance, preparations, or anything that you have to do over and over again - I’m a, check things off the list, type of girl.  So jet lagged and on the flipside of two weeks of Christmas vegetation, it seemed like a respectable idea to head up to Mt. Kenya and hike to the top of the peak first thing.  Hands down, the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  Of course it wasn’t the routine sitting sessions and frequent trips to the cookie jar over the last couple of weeks that made it this way, no, fault rests fully with the altitude of course.  Day 1 – 3 ½ hours of steady incline – we saw some baboons and the remnants of elephant presence, it was about a two honey shot day.  (Energy boosts)  Day 2 – 8 hours of incline and reluctant decline – we saw a rock hyrax and our guide began making me set the pace for the rest of the group since I was the slowest.  I questioned his time estimates one time and he replied, “Well yes, it will take us this long because you are slow,” it was a four honey shot day.  Day 3 – the first step was taken at 3:00 am so that we would make it to the peak by sunrise.  Our arrival was slightly tardy, but that didn’t matter much because it was snowing and sleeting and you couldn’t see anything but the Kenyan flag waving victory back at you.  Dazed and standing at almost 17,000 feet I happily checked this task off the list and directed my wobbly legs back down again.  Perhaps I found energy in the reclaimed oxygen or the anticipation of the end, but we left the snow and walked another 9 ½ hours through a bog to our final base camp situated even lower than the camp on day one.  We collapsed and let the last hour of the day’s sun warm our sore feet and promptly slept for 11 hours, it may have been a rest of the bottle of honey shot day.  In the morning we followed the road for another 2 ½ hours out of the park and drove back to Nairobi, no honey was consumed.

Kenya received a lot of rain in the last month and the drought seemed to be all but erased down at camp.  Our paths of travel were overgrown, the beach at our little swimming hole was completely flooded, and some of the badly rutted roads showed no signs of ware - great for our environmental impact.  All those lovely thorns that we were stepping on last year had sprouted and now you had new ones scratching you at about ankle level.  The ground was covered in about a million caterpillars of various shades and sizes and at every meal Paul seemed to be dressed in at least 4 or 5 of them.  The only stagnant growth seemed to be in the 23 trees I had planted.  I had told Sam that I expected them to be towering over me upon my return, but only one showed any signs of life.  Perhaps my optimism wasn’t well received by reality.  What has been growing quite nicely are Sam’s plant plots and partnered with the animal counts that we do every six weeks, we went out with her one day to count grass. The Maasai are usually a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the particulars of their environment so Sam asked this one man herding goats nearby if he could come and identify a plant species for her.  Perhaps he didn’t know how detailed she wanted him to be, but he told her it was called “grass” in Maasai and “grass” in Swahili.  With the rain came the grass and with the grass came the animals and transects this month showed huge herds of wildebeest and zebra that had survived the drought.  Wildebeest populations in other areas of Kenya seem to have been decimated so this was great news for our study site.  The carnivores are almost all accounted for, but two of the four collared lions are evading our search efforts thus far.  Esipata has been a faithful find though she hasn’t yet willingly accepted us as a part of her life.  Monster had puppies while we were away and contrary to our belief that the Maasai don’t really have affection for their dogs, the four puppies were famous and everyone was fighting over them.  Both Monster and Bucket are to be adopted as a pair and moved to Nairobi sometime soon, but in the mean time they have accepted us back into their life and stubbornly try to follow us whenever we leave camp. 

Before we left last year, I gave Kijalo, Michel’s wife, a bunch of beads to be creative with.  I didn’t intend for them to come back to me, but she used some of them to make gifts for Paul and I and our two guests.  Pink is becoming the new red in Maasai land and all the men are sporting new pink wraps.  This may help explain why the necklace that was made for Paul had a huge pink bead in the center.  The rest of the beads in his design were a mix of traditional Maasai beads and some pearl like beads from a broken necklace of my grandmothers.  Kwa bwana mkubwa. (For the big boss)  I like to call him fancy Paul now.