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.