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.