A long overdue update

I know it’s been forever since I last posted an update, but here it is…hope you enjoy. I’ll begin with an update on the chimps. Yesterday we discovered a new chimp group that is only a 10 minute walk from camp! The other group that we’ve been following for the past 2 months is a 4-5 kilometer walk from camp depending on where the closest fruiting tree is at the moment. Alex and I are quite excited about this, and it only adds to our knowledge of the chimps of Busingiro. This work, while very demanding and slow at times is so rewarding when we find out large chunks of new information…it’s like unlocking the mystery of a very complicated puzzle.

How did we come to discover this new group of chimps? Well first I must back up a bit and explain to you in greater detail the personality of our field assistant, Kennedy. I’m not sure how in depth I’ve gone in my writings about him, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned much about him. Kennedy is a classic case of Dr. Jeckel, Mr. Hyde. He literally has 2 personalities, though neither is very pretty. Alex and I have named these two sides of him, one is doom and gloom, and the other is Eeore. Doom and gloom is his mean, nasty side where he yells at us and becomes enraged about little things. Alex and I have not been able to figure out what sets these outbursts off, but they are frequent…sometimes several times a day. His Eeore side is the side of him that Alex and I pity sometimes. He basically mopes around all day, every day like Eeore from Winnie the Pooh, like he’s always feeling sorry for himself or something. And sometimes, Alex and I do feel sorry for him, but then two seconds later he’s yelling and lying and scheming, and we remember there’s not much to pity in the man. Kennedy is also an avid smoker and alcoholic and will blow his entire salary on cigarettes and alcohol within a few days of receiving his salary. Already, Alex and I have had to lend him 20,000 Ugandan shillings to tide him over until payday. Kennedy even told us before his first paycheck that he asked Zinta to hold on to it until the very end of the month, otherwise he would spoil it. It seems that he spoiled it anyway though. So to sum it all up, and I used to feel bad about saying this, but now I’m just fed up with a lot of things, not all of which are explained here, is that Kennedy is a major pain in my ass…pardon my French.

All this leads to us finding the chimps because doom and gloom made an appearance last Thursday when Kennedy casually mentions to us that there is a male, female and infant chimp that have been sleeping close to camp almost every night since we arrived. Alex and I were excited, but angry at the same time, that only now, 2 months into our work does Kennedy feel this might be an important piece of information to share with us. And he didn’t even think it was important, as I said it casually slipped out in a conversation we were having…it wasn’t like he was making a point of telling us this. So Alex and I explain to him that he should have shared this information with us sooner, and we had to explain how our work was to discover all we could about all the chimps living in Busingiro forest, no matter how many groups there were. He obviously had not internalized this at all, even though Alex and I have been trying to drive this point home since we arrived. Anyway, this doom and gloom fighting and yelling, ended in Kennedy appearing to get the importance of what we said because on Sunday he comes running to find us to tell us that the female and infant are feeding in a ficus tree just next to someone’s house up the road. Now Kennedy said the female and infant were still in the tree, however, when we arrive at the tree and find no one there suddenly Kennedy says he watched them leave the tree before he ever even came to get us. He constantly contradicts himself like this, which makes it very difficult for Alex and I to keep up with what’s truth and what’s not….so frustrating at times!!!! So we never saw the female and infant that day, but we decided to return to the tree Monday morning to see if they would return, as the locals told us they had been feeding on that particular tree every morning for the past week at 7:00am. Unfortunately on Monday we did not see them, but we did hear a group a chimps calling from the forest very close by. We waited an hour for the female to come to the tree, but she never did. For the whole hour, though, the chimps were calling from the forest. Finally the calls started getting farther and farther away, so we went into the forest and tried to find the chimps. We never did find them, so we haven’t actually seen this new group yet, but hopefully we will someday soon. There’s a possibility that they are part of our original group, however, I feel it is unlikely because they are quite far from where we always find the others, but we won’t know until we can track them better.

With our other group, we have become much better at tracking them and have been discovering new paths that gives us better access to them. Unfortunately as we continue to explore new areas in the forest as we follow the chimps, we continue to find more and more logging sites. The entire forest that our original group of chimps live in is beginning to look more and more like clumps of trees connected together by logged sites. We’ve found almost 100 logged sites since we arrived and these are only the sites that cross our paths, I’m sure there are hundreds more. There’s no doubt we will exceed 100 before we leave here. Interesting though, is that for the past week our originally group has been nesting only a few hundred meters from several major, active logging sites. And when I say active, I mean there are 12 plus men that are logging them everyday. There is a fruiting tree just near the logging sites, so I suspect this is why they are sleeping so close to them, as there are not many fruiting trees left in the forest, so when they find one they must utilize it. However, I find it very curious that there is a ficus micusu tree right next to an old logging site, that people aren’t at everyday anymore and the chimps will not feed in this tree, but they do feed in a tree close to a site with active logging. This forest and these chimps just keep yielding so much fascinating information everyday….I LOVE it!!

So let me share a funny story with you all, though I did NOT find it funny at the time. About a week ago I was standing in the hut, bent over the bunk bed, putting some clothes away. Now keep in mind that it’s pitch black, and all I have is my dim headlamp, lighting the narrow view in front of me. All of a sudden I feel a thud on my head, like something just fell onto it. I reach up, about to touch my head to brush off, what I assume is some grass from the roof above, when all of a sudden one of the tarantulas falls off my head and onto the floor in front of me, directly in the spotlight of my headlamp! It took me a minute to register what had just happened, but as soon as I did I ran right out of the hut screaming. Even though it wasn’t on me anymore, my instincts set in I guess and I ran like hell. It was hilarious, in retrospect. Alex had no idea what was going on, but she knew that something had just happened that should be feared, and so she came running out of the hut after me asking what just happened. She thought that it was a snake! Thankfully it wasn’t and it was just one of the huge spiders (you all saw the photo), and luckily it didn’t do anything to me…just freaked me out a bit.

Just as I was getting over the scare of this event, and started feeling comfortable in the hut again, another spider fell from the roof on to my back, again when I was bending over putting something away. Only this time I thought it fell on me and then right off onto the ground, but I walked out of the hut and was aggravated by the incident, telling Alex what happened, when all of a sudden Alex gets this horrified look on her face and starts reaching towards my neck. Right then I felt the spider crawling up my neck, and again I let out this horrific scream. I don’t know whether I brushed it off or it jumped off on it’s own or Alex brushed it off or what, but thankfully it came off me, again without any harm. Though this time the spider fell on me 5 minutes after safari ants had come through camp and we had pour paraffin everywhere so they wouldn’t take over camp. These ants will eat things alive and they are the worst ant bites ever, so we did NOT want them in camp at all.

Okay, so there’s so much more I could write about, but this is already long enough. Next week Alex and I will be in Kampala, where I will meet with some people about possible job opportunities/discuss my idea for a master’s thesis. While there I will try to make some more posts, or at least catch-up on emails. Please forgive me for not responding to emails quickly…it’s difficult to use the internet sometimes. I hope that everyone is doing really well. I will keep you all updated on how things pan out in Kampala. I still don’t want to leave here at all, and I only have 16 days left on Zinta’s project….ahhhhh! Hopefully all will work out for the best. Miss you all so much!

The Sad State of Things

Today’s post is a lot more somber compared to last weeks, however the topic I am about to discuss is one that has been weighing on my mind a lot over the past week. I feel this is an important issue to discuss. Hopefully this post will give you all an idea of the situation the chimps and many other wildlife here are facing.

The chimps that live in the forest around our site are living in a forest that has been heavily logged, and until just the past week I had no idea how heavily logged their territory really was. For the past week, Alex, Kennedy and I have not been able to find the chimps. While we have been hearing many vocalizations from them, and often very close by, we have been unsuccessful at actually seeing them. Sometimes their calls sound like they are directly beside us, unfortunately, since they are not fully habituated, as we move closer they also move, but farther away from us, making it impossible to actually capture a glimpse of them. This situation has been somewhat discouraging, but so goes field work…you have good days and bad days and some weeks are harder than others. I’m just thankful that I get to spend every day in the forest!

Anyway, back to our issue at hand, logging. Alex, Kennedy and I have been walking through the forest a lot more over the past week in our search for the chimps, therefore becoming more familiar with the terrain and territory of our group. I have come to realize that their entire forest is actually many small patches of forest connected by grasslands and logged areas. Yesterday we came across 13 different logged sites, and 5 of these were all within several hundred meters of each other. If logging continues at the rate it has been, the forest will soon become smaller and smaller patches and the grasslands in between will widen, making it not only difficult, but also dangerous for the chimps to move among the forest patches. Let me explain the difference between the grasslands and the logged sites. The grasslands are large open areas in the middle of the forest that are now completely covered by grasses. The logged sites, on the other hand, are areas still within the forest patches; however there is a large open space in the canopy where you can see the sky clear as day. There is still undergrowth on the forest floor in the logged areas though. These logged areas are usually approximately 20 to 50 meters in diameter, whereas the grasslands can be as wide as 500 meters or so.

Not only does/is the logging affecting the chimps in terms of destroying their area to live and move in, loggers are also heavily targeting fruiting trees, and many of these trees are ones the chimps feed on. As the chimps lose their feeding trees, their territories actually have to expand in order for them to encompass enough fruiting trees to feed the group. This loss of trees, also leads many of the chimps to crop raid in an effort to supplement their diet with enough food for survival. Naturally, the local farmers are less than please with the crop raiding, and often they are driven to secretly killing the chimps in an effort to temporarily deal with the crop raiding problem without a large expense.

As the chimps lose their feeding trees this also makes our job, as researchers, more difficult because it means the group often divides into many smaller groups in order to feed in different areas, ensuring enough food for the group. This often means the chimps do not stay in one area very long, and therefore, it becomes a huge guessing game for us as to where to look for the chimps each day when they aren’t consistently coming to a feeding tree everday. How do you guess where the chimps might be when they aren’t calling in the morning and their home range spans 7 kilometers or more? This is the question I’ve been trying to solve everyday for the past week. Sometimes we get lucky and guess right, and other days, like today, we fail.

The issue of logging has been fascinating me for the past week; therefore I have been discussing this issue a lot with our field assistant, Kennedy. I’m trying to learn all I can because the measures that are currently in place to try and prevent/stop the logging do not appear to be working very well. Yesterday, Alex, Kennedy and I chased after 3 different groups of loggers in the forest. This was one of the most exhilarating and yet terrifying moments of my life. In general, the loggers are more afraid of us than we should be of them, as they don’t know who we’re working for and automatically assume we must be with the National Forest Authority (NFA) here in Uganda, therefore they run as soon as they see or hear other people. The forest we work in is a protected reserve, and therefore all logging is illegal…however this gets a bit more complicated which I will explain in a moment. Of course, Alex, Kennedy and I are not with the NFA, but apparently they also fear muzungus (white people) and especially researchers. I kept thinking to myself though, as we were running through the forest, darting trees trying to chase these groups of men…what would they think/do if they saw that we were actually only 2 small white females and an even smaller Ugandan man?…would they be so afraid or would they just take a ponga to us to prevent us from reporting them. Kennedy says the loggers are nothing we should fear, and that they would never harm us. They know they’re in the wrong and they apparently are afraid of the tracking gear the muzungus come with (our GPS), so I was holding this high as we ran, just so they would know we can track them and the exact site they were at. Thankfully, the loggers just ran and hide yesterday, and we reported the sites we found to the NFA. Hopefully they were able to come and take the wood, and destroy the cutting tables before the loggers were able to transport the wood out of the forest and sell it themselves.

Now here’s where the story becomes murky. First off, when the NFA patrols the forest, and they come across a logging site, they take the wood and then sell it themselves. Now I suppose, what do you do with a tree that has already been cut down, right? You can’t stand it upright again and call it a day, acting like nothing happened and hoping it grows back again, so the NFA takes it, sells it, and then supposedly puts the money from the sale back into the NFA (salaries for rangers, up keep of buildings and such). Somehow though, this just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. Here’s the best part of the NFA’s rules though. While the Budongo Forest, where we work, is a protected reserve, the only tree that is 100% illegal to cut down is the Mahogany tree. All other trees in the forest can be cut down if one has a permit for this act. And the permits are very easy to obtain!! All one has to do is walk into an NFA office and request one, no questions asked. Unfortunately there is quite a lot of logging occurring that is done without permits, but the permits do help increase the amount of logging that occurs.

The story doesn’t end here though. The majority of the logging is conducted at night. Eight, ten, twelve men will come in at night with hand saws and axes and take down enormous trees. Then a few nights later they’ll transport the cut wood to the forest edge where it will be loaded onto a lorry and carried away by the truck loads to Kampala in the middle of the night when the NFA isn’t watching. The NFA never has rangers patrol at night! They know this is when the majority of the logging is occurring, but they don’t deploy their rangers at this time. It is beyond me why they wouldn’t find it important to invest money in night rangers. In addition, the loggers out smart the NFA in a sense. They will watch the movements of the NFA rangers, and if they watch a ranger go through the site on Wednesday, they know he will not be there again the next day, so then they come on Thursday and cut all the trees down. How can the NFA, not be on to these scams? They should sit and wait, hiding, at these sites, when they come across them, waiting for the loggers to return…they always do. Even yesterday, only 40 minutes after we chased one of the groups of loggers away, they were already trying to make their way back to the logging site to finish the job. Thankfully we chased them away again.

As you can see this is a major issue, and there is no simple solution, but it seems to me that more can be done, and I’m not sure why it’s not! Now, I know it’s easy for me to sit here and judge the work being done, and of course I don’t have the full story, as I would need to speak with many more people, including the NFA to get the whole picture, but in many ways I feel that the problem boils down to a combination of laziness and inadequate funds for the NFA to properly conduct their job. Also, there are many people, as I explained last time, which work for the NFA, but are actually in cohort with the loggers, and therefore are cheating the system to make extra money. And, wow can the money be good. One slab of Mahogany goes for 30,000 Ugandan shillings, which is about $18 or so US dollars. One tree can be cut into 20 or more slabs. This is very good money for most people here. I’m not sure what the solution is right now, but I would love to spend some more time actually studying this for real and trying to create better ways of protecting the forests here, otherwise our chimps, and the other Ugandan wildlife may soon find themselves with no where else to go…

On a lighter note, other than being discouraged at our difficulties in tracking the chimps I am still doing very well and am loving my time here! Time is moving way too fast for me, I know I’m not going to ready to leave when the time comes. This is such a beautiful and friendly country!

Hope everyone is doing well. I miss everyone like crazy! I’m trying to post more photos…I have lots this time, so look for them on snapfish.com.

Will write again soon!!

Happy Birthday Baby Chimp!!

Wow it has been a full and busy week! I have so much to tell. Let me start with the most exciting and biggest news. Yesterday Alex and I saw a female chimp just after she gave birth to a new infant!!! This is a HUGE event for us to see, as it is vary rare to witness births and deaths in the field. In the 40 years that Jane Goodall studied the chimps of Gombe, she only witnessed this event TWICE! Alex, Kennedy and I are only the second people to see this in the Budongo Forest in Uganda, so you can imagine how ecstatic we are that we were fortunate enough to experience this sighting. Zinta said that if we take really good notes on the mother over the next several months, then we can possibly publish this event as an editorial or note in some journal, since so few chimps births are documented in the literature. I took notes like mad yesterday and will only continue to if we can find this mother again. Unfortunately we haven’t had much luck winning the females over yet, they are still to afraid to be close to us. Yesterday was actually the first day that we saw this female, and she may only have stayed around with us so close by because her placenta was still attached, therefore, she couldn’t move around much until it falls off because it would get caught on branches and such. Hopefully though we can find her again tomorrow!

When we first found her and realized her placenta was still attached, we knew she must have given birth sometime that morning, possibly even just minutes before. There was a male seated directly beside the new mom, grooming her and curiously inspecting and grooming the infant. This is a bit unusual, as female chimps typically do not let ANY males near them or the newborn for awhile after birth. However, sometimes experienced mothers will allow males to get close, so perhaps our new mom is an old pro at child birth and rearing. Also, perhaps this male is the father. After about 45 minutes from when we arrived the male casually wandered off somewhere in the forest. We did not follow, but stayed with the new mother instead. She didn’t do much of anything for the rest of the day, just rested in the tree we found her in, also probably the birthing tree. As I peered through my binoculars at her she looked utterly exhausted like she could sleep for days. Unfortunately she seemed a little nervous to fall completely asleep, probably because she seemed shaking 60 some meters in the air with this brand new infant, also probably partly due to her awareness of us standing below. I will be sure to keep everyone updated on mom and baby’s progress over the next several months.

Unfortunately with good news, there is often some bad news as well. Thankfully though, this unfortunate news has improved somewhat since it first occurred. Four nights ago, Alex’s and my tent was broken into by some children that were staying in camp that night. One of the employees of the camp we’re staying at brought his family and all his children to the camp for the day and night. They were very curious and intrigued by Alex and I, so much so that Alex and I finally had to politely ask them to leave and explain that we were trying to do work. The children were starring at us like we were animals in a zoo Saturday night, as we were packing our field bags for the next day and getting urine and fecal samples ready. After they left we locked all our windows and the door to our hut because they appeared way too interested in all the “things” we have. Anyway, to try and make a long story short, the next day we went out into the field and when we returned that night we noticed that our tent was filthy inside and that everything was moved around. I stupidly left my cell phone and laptop in the tent during the day and we had not locked the tent. I had been telling myself all morning remember to take the items out of the tent and lock them up inside and then we ended up getting rushed for work and I completely forgot. Thankfully, the children did not steal these items; they only turned them on and changed some settings on them. Unfortunately they did steal Alex’s alarm clock and a small LCD flash light of Alex’s. This story has improved because these items were returned to Alex last night.

Alex and I were extremely angry and upset the night this happened. We felt so violated and creped out that people had been inside all our personal things and laying in our sleeping bags. Alex and I have since placed a lock on our tent and always remember to take any valuable items out in the morning that we may have brought in the night before. So the break-in was partly our fault, but it still was a very unpleasant experience, and we have definitely learned our lesson! I think too that part of this was a difference in cultures. I couldn’t understand at all how someone could even think it would be alright to just go into someone else’s space and things without asking, but then I realized that I think may people in this culture do not have a concept of “mine” and “yours” in the sense that we in America do. I think when someone has something here it is available to the community if need be and doesn’t necessarily just belong to one person. Plus they were children, though most were old enough to know better, but children often don’t understand when they can’t touch something. Thankfully everything has turned out ok in the end, and now Alex and I are feeling guilty for bringing the incident up because we fear the children may have been beaten for what they did. At the same time though, we had to say something so that it wouldn’t happen again.

As a very quick wrap up, some of the other highlights of the week are as follows. On Friday, Alex and I attended a going away party for one of the researcher’s at Zinta’s field site. It was a ton of fun. We played games and I got picked for one of the teams and won a sack race, where I had to get in a sack and jump to the finish line. Overall, my team came in second. After the games we had a huge feast and then there was a dance at the local forestry college that we stayed at our first few nights here. The dance was so much fun. It was so nice to have a chance to relax and let loose for the first time since we got here. On Tuesday our tent flooded and we had to set-up Zinta’s tent which she gave to us as a back-up in case our first one flooded. It flooded because our tarp fell on top of it for the second time…I think we have since fixed the problem so hopefully this will not happen again. It was a torrential down pour though for the entire day!! Everything, including ourselves was completely drenched!

Other than that we have had a pretty good week overall with the chimps. We finally are finding them consistently everyday, and many of the males are becoming comfortable with our presence and we can usually follow them for at least a few hours. We’re finally obtaining some data…yea!! Hopefully things will continue to progress as well as they have this week. There has been lots of good and a few frustrating and angering things, but Alex and I are still surviving well, and are really enjoying out time here. I can’t believe though that September is already half over…time is really flying by. Oh and one last thing, snakes and cockroaches are now added to the list of creatures that our inhabiting our hut, so the tent is going to definitely be our permanent sleeping quarters. I have no idea where the cockroaches came from because we do not keep any food in our living hut or in the tent or anywhere near these places! Oh well, we’ve accepted that the hut does not belong to us.

Hope everyone’s doing well. Miss everyone tons!!!

The difficulties of field work

On Monday, August 27^th, Alex and I slept in a bit before we began the longest day we’ve had since we arrived. Today was moving day, we were finally going to get to move to our site, Busingiro out in the middle of the forest, but first we had some shopping to do. We packed our stuff one last time and then hauled everything to Masindi (in the opposite direction of our site) because we had to buy items we needed for our site, such as pots, pans, sheets, dishes, candles, matches, towels, etc. By the way, Alex and I have negotiated with JGI to let us take the money we spent on items for the field site off of our rent because they will get to keep all these items once we leave. We were very excited that they were so accommodating to this request. At 8:15, Alex, Josie (Josephine), Zinta and I, along with a car load of other people headed for Masindi, where we spent the entire day running from shop to shop buying all the supplies we needed and using the internet before we would be without email access for awhile. Finally at 4:15pm we loaded the car with our literally van load of gear and headed for the forest! It began pouring rain shortly after we left Masindi and Alex and I were starting to worry that our first night in camp was going to be a soaked one because of the leaking roofs on our huts. And then, we remember that when we had visited the site the Saturday before we had left the mattresses out in the sun to let them dry out and we never put them back in the hut, so we were expecting to arrive to drenched mattress as well and were worrying about where we were going to sleep.

An hour later, we reach Busingiro and find that our mattresses have been brought inside. There is some water on the floor of our hut, but not much, so we aren’t too displeased…yet. Now the real fun begins, and please understand that I cannot begin to put into words Alex’s and my reaction to our hut as the sun began to set. When we first arrived and were assessing the leakage from the roof, one of the guys that works at the field site was saying something about putting another tarp up on the inside of the roof to secure the hut more from the water, as well as from rat droppings. At this point Alex and I realize we have a rat family living in our roof…we weren’t too excited about this. Then when everyone left and we were unpacking we find a termite nest in the hut, a wasp’s nest and the most gigantic spiders you have ever seen in your life started coming out as it got darker in the hut. Alex and I had made up one of the beds and had decided that we would both try to squeeze into a single bed for the night because neither of us wanted to sleep alone if creatures were going to be crawling all over the very tiny hut all night. We felt better being close to each other. After making up one bed it was too dark to do much else, so we decided to finish unpacking the next day when we could see what we were touching. We headed to go find some food for dinner. During dinner we decided camping was a step up from what we were about to sleep in. Right at that moment, we both looked at each other and said at the same time, let’s find the tent and set that up before it get s much darker and sleep in that for at least tonight. It seemed like a better option than having little scary creatures crawling all over us in the night…a mosquito net doesn’t exactly protect you from huge rats and spiders with ENORMOUS pinchers!! We were a little uncertain of what exactly lives in the forest around camp, but we wanted to take our chances with those animals over what was inhabiting our hut. Though we were a little scared, as the tent Alex brought is a very small 2 person tent, we’re basically sleeping on top of each other, and it’s very flimsy… a big gust of wind would topple the tent in a second. We made it through the first night safe and sound though, and have since found out that there is nothing living in the forest that can harm us, so the tent has become our permanent sleeping quarters for the next 2 to 3 months.

The next day we cleaned out the 2 huts we have (1 for sleeping and 1 for our kitchen) as best we could and finished unpacking. We bought tons of Tupperware because everything has to be covered to keep it safe from the mice, rats and ants. We also covered everything in our “sleeping” hut, including our clothes, which we keep on the bed we made up, under a mosquito net; otherwise you wake up and find insects nesting in them and rat feces covering everything. So it takes some extra time to get into things we need and lots of memory to remember to cover everything again after you use it. And because we have no electricity and it is difficult to move around camp after dark, it takes some pre-planning as well for everything before we do anything. Sometimes Alex and I feel like the day is ours, and the night belongs to the insects, mice and rats.

After we had set everything up, we went to talk to some of the guys that work in camp. These guys are guides, night watchmen, park rangers, and some are teachers/educators, as we are living at one of Jane Goodall Institute’s (JGI) education centers, where school children come to learn about conservation. As we were explaining to the guys what we are researching, they started laughing hysterically that we wanted to try and find the chimps. Apparently the chimps are pretty elusive and very difficult to track. A year ago, JGI stopped the chimp trekking that used to occur at the site because they felt that the ecotourism was actually harming the chimps, but now they are not so sure this is true and so they wanted to attach themselves to Zinta’s project to see if the presence of humans was negatively affecting them. Therefore, since no one has been following the chimps for over a year, all the guides no longer know where to find them. About once a week they hear from the villagers around the site that the chimps are around because they have been crop raiding, but no one knows were their feeding trees are anymore or what there typical path is each day. Alex and I will probably be spending most of our time trying to habituate chimps that for the past year JGI has been trying to unhabituate. The guides have been telling us too, that even if we do find the chimps, they most likely will charge and then run off, so it will be very difficult to follow them once we do find them. And then, yesterday, they told us that if we do find them we will not be able to consistently find them every day. Alex and I are somewhat frustrated with this, but so is the nature of field work. I am definitely up for the challenge, but it does make it difficult to know that once we finally start making some progress she and I will be leaving and new assistants will get the advantage of seeing them more frequently with less effort. Plus if JGI doesn’t really want the chimps permanently habituated, we are trying to habituate them for only a 9 month period and not for long term study most likely, which is also a bit discouraging to know you’re working so hard for an unknown goal. It will be so great though if we can habituate them enough that we can collect the data we need to and to identify all the individuals in the group, as right now, no one knows any of them individually. If we can do this, Alex and I will have accomplished something none of the other assistants on Zinta’s project have done, and something Zinta herself has never done.

We will see how everything turns out… for now I miss everyone! Wish us luck. I will write again soon, with some funny stories, as Alex and I have had lots and lots of laughs since we arrived. Sometimes all you can do is laugh about things that happen here.

Overall, though everyone in this country is so nice and so willing to go out of their way to help us. We have been learning how to make fire, local foods and how to find fruit when it’s not fruit season and we’re not close enough to a major town where fruit is imported. Without the help of some of the guys in camp, Alex and I might not have been eating for the past few days. We were supposed to have a gas tank for out 2 burners to cook with, but the tank has been broken for the last week, and has just been fixed today, but there is no one to bring the tank to us, so we have been sharing the one fire in camp with all the guides and rangers. It’s been too wet to build a second fire. We certainly are learning the local ways and how to survive without much, which has been frustrating at times and even more rewarding at others. I’ve learned how to start a fire by blowing on embers!! I was so excited when I figured this out.

Love you all!!!

Hello...Life without Ammenities!!

Where to begin…as was the case in Kenya there is so much that happens in the first few days of arrival that I couldn’t possibly talk about it all. I’ll do my best to highlight the things I feel are most important. Before anything else, let me say though, that I love everything and have already learned so much! Overall, everyone is so nice, I really like the project, and life is very primitive, as I will get to, but it’s actually really nice to be in the middle of the forest without much…I’m sure by the end my opinion of this may change, but it’s refreshing for now. There are minor things here and there that are aggravating me and Alex, mostly in terms of expenses we are responsible for, but most of this is due to the fact that life in the field never goes the way you initially plan, and so you have to have plan B, plan C, plan AZ. Alex and I are trying to go with the flow on these things, but stand our ground on some things we think are unfair. I will not waste time talking about these minor irritants though, because the majority of my experience here, to date, has been very positive, and I think will only continue to be.

Let me bring everyone up to date on what I have been doing for the past several days. On Thursday we took the Post Office Bus to Masindi, it was about a 6 hour ride. Alex and I were absolutely exhausted, as we had only slept a few hours the night before. The hotel we stayed in had something in the beds that was making both of us itch terribly. We were afraid that it was bed bugs or something of the sort. Alex fix for this was to cover her pillow with a plastic shopping bag, to keep the bugs locked in the pillow and away from her face. Now this is a good plan, in theory. I, myself would prefer to sleep on the bugs as opposed to a dirty bag that had been all around Kampala, but this seemed to work for her, sort of, though we really just ended up not sleeping. And every time I tried to fall asleep, I’d hear her plastic bag crunching underneath her head. It was very amusing... I’m laughing hysterically just writing about it now. You probably had to be there to see the humor in it, but I think sleep deprivation made us both a little giddy that night as well, which made everything hysterical to us. We were able to perked up a bit, the next day though, and Alex and Josephine (one of the other volunteers) fought hard for 4 seats on the bus. It’s pretty much a mad dash for seats with elbows flying and lots of pushing…thankfully they were able to save 4 seats for us all, while Zinta (the woman we’re working for) and I loaded ALL our bags onto the bus. Once we arrived in Masindi we had lunch at a local hotel and then went shopping for some items we needed, after several hours we finally made our way out to the field site Zinta is working at, Sanso, had dinner and went straight to bed. Yesterday we slept in a bit and then met with Zinta to go over the data collection methods. After hearing, in more detail, what we will be doing, I am even more enthusiastic about the project and think it will be a profitable study…hopefully!

I got to see my first live chimp in the wild yesterday!! It was amazing…though my heart hasn’t been stolen away from the monkeys yet. We have blue monkeys, redtail monkeys, black and white colobus and baboons all living in the same forest as the chimps, and I found myself drawn to them a lot more than the chimps. I’m passionate still about what I’m doing here, but I think I just might be a monkey girl, as opposed to an ape girl (hahaha, I know you’re all laughing at that), we’ll see by the end of this experience though.

We heard the chimps screaming in camp while we were going over the data collection. While Zinta spoke with a woman and we had a break, we walked up the trail a bit to see if the chimps were on the edge of the forest. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed in the forest yet. The Budongo Forest Project has a rule that people have to be quarantined for 5 days before they can enter the forest with the chimps. This precaution is to make sure the people acclimate to the new environment here and don’t get sick. Thankfully by tomorrow we have past that time and none of us are sick yet! Alex, Josephine and I walked up the trail a bit and there they were, 3 of them peacefully feeding in a tree. We all crouched down and watched them for awhile. The rest of the group, still in the forest, began screeching again and the 3 we were watching all started screaming back and jumping in the trees, it was really incredible to watch.

Today (Saturday) has been a pretty relaxing day. Alex and I have mostly sat around all day talking, which has been nice as we have been running around and moving every night since we got here. We had the opportunity to go out to our field site today though, to see it and what supplies are there so we know what we need to purchase. As I mentioned briefly in one of my emails, it is a very, very basic set up. We have 2 cement huts with no electricity or running water, an outhouse toilet, that doesn’t flush, and bucket showers. However, our camp is in the middle of this beautiful forest, with not much else around. It is so beautiful and quiet, very relaxing. I’m sure Alex and I are going to get bored at times, but overall I think we’re going to really enjoy our time there. Unfortunately right now the roofs are all leaking on all of the huts and we are just starting to enter the rainy season, which is not good. The roofs are supposed to be fixed sometime before September 17th, which probably actually means they won’t be fixed before we leave. Alex and I are not too happy about this, especially since we have to pay rent to live in a non-functioning place, but we’re going to see what we can negotiate because of this, also taking into consideration when the roof actually gets fixed. The leaking roofs and the fact that it is going to be pretty difficult for us to get food (there’s no villages close by and we have no vehicle) may make the living experience more difficult and unpleasant than we perceive at the moment, but we’ll have to see. Overall, we are very excited and cannot wait to arrive at the site on Monday and finally settle a bit.

This is a lot for now, so I will leave you all with this and will write again when I can. Please be patient as I the lack of electricity and our physical distance from internet will make it very difficult for me to be in touch often. I’m doing really well though and hope everyone is also. Miss you!!

Good-Bye Again!!

I hope that everyone has a wonderful few months. I will be in touch as soon as I can with an update on my journey to Uganda. I'll send information on my phone number and address then as well.

I'm going to miss everyone so much! However, it's time for, as Mike put's it..."take 2" of my journey to Africa. Hopefully this trip will turn out better than Kenya!!

Will write more soon. Good-bye!!!!

Fight on a matatu and a close encounter with death...

I wanted to share two stories that are slightly more interesting than the previous update entry. I will begin with the fight on the matatu. About a week ago, Crista and I boarded a matatu on our way back from Malindi (the larger city near where we live). As we got on I noticed that there were 3 guys starring at us and watching everything we were doing. I felt a little uncomfortable, but didn’t think too much of it as we usually get lots of stares. After about 3 minutes I realized that they were all still starring. They all had never taken their eyes off of us for even a minute since we got on. Then suddenly the one said hello and asked us where we lived. Crista replied “Watamu.” The guy then said very rudely, “obviously Watamu, where specifically in Watamu?” Every time someone asks us this that we don’t know well our standard response is “why do you want to know.” Usually people don’t know how to respond to this and just leave us alone then. Instead this guy became very upset and starts screaming “I thought we could be friends, but I guess not…why can’t you just tell me where you live, do you think you’re too good for us?” He kept going on an on, leaving no room for Crista and I to say anything, not that we wanted to say anything anyway, because he obviously was crazy and a very angry person. He continued to go on saying that he doesn’t even understand why people like us come to their country, detailing how they didn’t *ucking need us in their country, yelling that we weren’t wanted and that everyone from our country was obnoxious and mean and that they had thought we were a friendly country, but that we just disproved all of that. I should note that we had told them we were from Canada, as we also often say this to people we don’t know well, because Americans are not always well received. Now I mean he was screaming and flailing his arms and was very upset.

A young Kenyan guy boarded the matatu in the middle of this guy screaming at us and thankfully placed himself in between us and the guy and said something to the guy in Swahili. Crista and I aren’t completely sure what he said, but we are pretty sure he asked the guy why he was bothering us and what did we do that had provoked his anger. The guy who had been screaming at us now started screaming at this guy and began slapping him in the face very hard. He slapped him over and over and over again, and the guy just sat there and took. Which probably was the best thing he could do, as this guy was very scrawny and could never have taken one of the guys alone, let alone the 3 of them together. Thankfully the screaming trio debarked a few stops later still yelling and throwing arms.
Crista and I said nothing for the rest of the trip back to Watamu. We were both stunned by what had happened and weren’t really sure what to say. We felt terrible that this poor guy who was probably trying to help us had been drawn into this fight and was physically assaulted. I couldn’t help but think how we just drastically changed the events of the day merely by boarding that matatu. There have been many occasions where people will not board a matatu when the see a mzungo on it or they refuse to sit next to us. There have also been times where a local person gets charged more for their matatu ride because the conductor charged us more and he doesn’t want us to see that we are actually right that the ride costs 30 shillings instead of 40 shillings when he only takes 30 from the locals after just charging us 40. It’s very hard to know that you just made life more difficult for another person merely because of your presence somewhere. Crista informed me that she had never experienced something like that before in the 9 months that she had been working in Kenya, which is comforting to know, but makes that event stick out all the more. I’m just thankful that the guy never became physical with us because it was obvious that no else, other than the guy that did say something, was going to get involved or stop this guy from doing whatever he wanted to us. Thankfully I can say this is the only time so far that any of my matatu rides have turned violent.
And now for my close encounter with death. It is my first day in the field alone and I am excited but nervous as well. I was on my back to S group, which lives deep in the forest. It was in S group's territory that we found the dead, hanging monkey and ever since that day, combined with the fact that no one ever really goes back to S group’s territory I have always been a little anxious working with them, much preferring my days with K group. Anyway, as I was walking back to find them early in the morning the thought crossed my mind that I needed to remember to ask Crista for the phone numbers of some of the guys that work at the ruins in case I were to ever get bitten by a snake and couldn’t get myself back to the office on my own, or just in case anything bad were to happen to me and I needed some assistance. Literally a minute later I am walking down one of the trails deeply hidden in the forest and out of the corner of my eye I suddenly think that what I thought was a root looked a little scalely. Thankfully I stopped with foot in mid-air and looked down before stepping and sure enough I was just about to step on the most enormous black mamba I’ve ever seen! A black mamba is one of the deadliest snakes in Kenya. Its venom will kill you in half an hour. Now there have been very few cases, if any at all, where a black mamba has struck a person who was just walking through the forest, not bothering it at all. They typically strike when someone steps on them, as I was about to do, or the lay on the ground and wait for something to walk by and they strike, also what I was doing. The snake was laying across the path, half wrapped up a tree and half lying in the path. I initially had thought that it was just a root of the tree as that it what it looked like from the corner of my eye since the snake was wrapped up the tree, probably what it was hoping some poor, unsuspecting victim would think. This snake was huge, approximately 4 inches thick and about 6 feet long. I’ve never seen a snake this large in the wild before, only in captivity.

As soon as I realized that it was a snake I was torn with wanting to stay a moment and just stare at it, as I’d never seen anything like this, but at the same time I was completely terrified and knew I was already close enough to it that it could strike me at anytime, and this would certainly mean death. Therefore, I turned around and ran as fast as I could, hoping my monkeys were down another path. There is a snake farm in Watamu where I live and they have an anti-venom for every snake in the area, so there is a small chance of being saved if you do get bitten. The unfortunate thing is that the snake farm is about a 15 minute drive from the ruins, where we work, and that is if someone got in their car the second you called for the anti-venom. Now this seems fine because you have 30 minutes before death ensues, but there’s a glitch, the snake farm only brings the anti-venom to you, you then have to get yourself to a hospital which is a 20-30 minute drive away. So we are talking about 35-50 minutes before you could actually get the anti-venom injected, and guess what, you are out of time! Therefore, the moral of this story is always, always carefully watch where you are stepping because that could be one of your last steps. I’ve come to the realization after this incident that it is better to lose your monkey by looking down occasionally as you walk than to never see a monkey again because you stepped on a black mamba. Can anyone guess how I feel about working with S group now? Naturally I like working with them even less than I already did…their territory is a scary death trap. :-)

As a quick update to previous posts, I know everyone is curious to know what happened with the dead monkey and Maisha, the kitten. We never did figure out how the monkey died and it has since been eaten by ants and other forest creatures that have left nothing of it’s remains except for it’s skull, which we have taken. It now resides in our office. As for Maisha I have found her a good home with one of the guys that works at Mwamba. He has 2 other cats and 5 children whom he thinks will be great playmates for her. In particular he has a six-year old son who is ecstatic about receiving her. I am taking her over to his house today where I must say good-bye to her. It is going to be very hard to say good-bye as I have been her mother for the past month and I am the one who nursed her back to health, but in the long run I think this is the best thing for her. She is in excellent health now though. She has grown so big and has been perfecting her hunting and pouncing skills in the recent weeks, as well as playing and running all over the place. She has made a complete 180 since I first rescued her. The first 2 weeks she hardly moved at all, sleeping all the time and never playing. Now that she has receieved some proper nutrition and a little TLC she has become a drastically different kitten. Francis the guy taking her lives very close to the ruins so hopefully I will still get to see her often enough. Even though saying good-bye will be hard, I am very grateful that I was able to give her a second chance at life!

A Busy Busy Month!

First let me apologize for the length of time that has past since I last posted a message. I have been extremely busy, so it has been hard to find time to write. I will try to post updates more often in the future.

A lot has happened in the past month, so much that it could probably fill 6 pages or more of stories, so I am going to try and briefly summarize some of the events. Unfortunately much of what has occurred since I last wrote are unpleasant events. Where to begin, I suppose I will begin with my move. About 2 weeks ago I moved out of Mwamba, the field station where I had been living since I arrived in February. I had found this place that was just up the road from Mwamba that eliminated my need to take a boda boda everyday. This meant I only had to take a matatu to get to work, which was nice. The place was a very nice guest house with 3 bedrooms and I was going to rent one of the rooms. The man who owned the place was from Germany and seemed very nice and welcoming the several times I went to see the place before deciding to take it. So I packed all my stuff and moved myself as well as the cat to this new home. After being there for several days I began to feel very uncomfortable living there for several reasons. One of the major problems was that there were 2 guard dogs that roamed the plot at night and you couldn’t get in or out of the plot without them trying to escape, and they were not allowed outside of the gates! The first day when I came home they did escape and ran all the way down the driveway, across the road and down to the beach. I had to go chasing after them and basically drag these huge, unwilling dogs home. Upon informing the owner of what had happened and asking what I was supposed to do in the future he became very angry with me telling me they can never be let out. As if that’s what I had done, opened the gate and encouraged them to leave! This incident made me never want to go home because I did not want to have to deal with the dogs every night, especially after working12 hours.

In addition to the dogs I had been locked out one afternoon, as the owner had locked one of the locks he hadn’t given me a key for. I also began to realize no one had stayed at this guest house in a very long time, as all the dishes were filthy and dusty. I was suspicious as to why no one would have stayed at a place that upon first glance appeared so lovely and was so close to town and all the touristy things to do. Soon it became even worse when I saw the German man (the owner) bring back local prostitutes to the house every night. This was the final straw, as I did not want to be living anywhere where this was something that was practiced and I also felt very uncomfortable just being there upstairs when I knew what was occurring below me. Therefore, I decided to move back to Mwamba, where I currently am living again. I am going to stay living here for awhile, as there is a good support system here and I feel much more comfortable living with a bunch of other people until another researcher arrives, as I am currently on my own at work now.

This brings me to my next trial. Kelly and Crista have both gone now, leaving me on my own to manage the field site and both groups of monkeys. Kelly left a week and a half ago and Crista left on Thursday. There are about 20 people that work at the ruins, but they do not work with the monkeys and have nothing to do with our research so they are not people I can discuss work matters with. Though it is nice to know they are there, as they are people to talk with about things outside of work. Being on my own is quite stressful, as I have taken over both groups of monkeys and am flipping back and forth between each group everyday, which has proven to be quite difficult. Getting to work by myself everyday is also a lot different than going to work with other people everyday. Women almost never go anywhere by themselves here and they certainly do not work alone, so I draw quite a bit of attention and comments, now that I’m not only foreign, but am now foreign and alone. When Crista, Kelly and I would go into work together we rarely ever were bothered by people trying to sell us tours or diving trips or just attaching themselves to us to chat. Now that I am alone I have a new friend or two who walk to work with me, and home from work with me, trying to sell me everything under the sun or just trying to get me to go home with them or for a ride with them. This is very hard to deal with as I just want to walk to work in peace and I don’t want to have to deal with trying to politely say please leave me alone. I thought being on my own might bring less attention, since I would be only one foreigner as opposed to a group of foreigners, but instead being alone means I have lost my guard. A group of foreigners talking together is a support system that is much more difficult for people to penetrate, breaking the conversation. But when you are alone and have no one to talk to, suddenly everyone feels you must have someone to talk to and so they cling on. It doesn’t help either that the guys at work keep asking me everyday if I’m scared being by myself. They said that a woman alone is a vulnerable target. And they keep telling me women aren’t strong but men are. I’m not sure what all these comments are supposed to mean, if they’re just having fun and trying to scare me or are actually serious. I’d never felt unsafe going to work in the past, but sometimes I am nervous going to work now. Thankfully one of the guys at work walks me out most nights, which is very nice of him to look out for me like that.

It’s been very hard for me to be alone here not so much because of work, but mostly because I had become very close to Crista. Now that she has gone, I feel that I have lost a friend. In actuality I know I have gained a friend, but I have lost having that friend here. It was nice having someone here to talk to and hang out with. It’s just nice to have another researcher to talk about work with. I miss having someone around that I feel completely comfortable around to just talk about anything with. Most of my talking throughout the day now is to strangers on the street and to short term guests at Mwamba explaining for the millionth time what I am doing here and what the research project I am working on is all about. Basically I have the same conversations everyday! I’ve lost my support network here in everyway you can think of a support network and it is really starting to wear on me. So naturally you all would think that I am ecstatic about the new researcher who is supposed to be coming to join me at the end of May beginning of June. Not quite, this brings me to another obstacle.
I recieved word from Steffen (the guy I’m working for) that a girl named Kate will be arriving in late May early June. I had known since before I left the States that a girl named Kate was supposed to be coming at some point after Crista and Kelly left, but that was all I knew until about a week ago when Steffen informed me of Kate’s last name. As I read her name I was thinking that there was something very familiar about it, and then I realized it was the name of a girl I had worked with in Costa Rica 2 ½ years ago. There were about 20 of us working together in Costa Rica when I was there and of these 20 people there were only 2 that I would prefer to never have to work with again, and unfortunately this girl is one of them. So instead of being relived that someone had finally confirmed they were coming to join me, I am now feeling that I would prefer to be by myself and deal with the stress of that instead of dealing with the stress of working with someone you dislike. Kate is a nice girl; she just partakes in some extracurricular activities that I do not agree with and her work ethic in less than stellar. Normally I would not care, but it’s hard to work with someone else on the same project when the other person cares more about their social life than their work and when you have to live with that person. The working and LIVING together is what is bothering me the most. Normally if I merely worked with her, her social life outside of work would not affect me, but since I will be sharing a room with her suddenly her weak work ethic and her habits at home will all interfere with my life. I am trying to give her the benefit of the doubt and hope that she has changed and matured a bit since we last worked together, but it is very hard to break first impressions sometimes. We’ll have to see how everything pans out. Hopefully things will improve, instead of become even more difficult. I’m really struggling lately to see the good in things here, but it has been difficult since Crista left. The first few weeks here were amazing and fun and suddenly life isn’t what it was those first few weeks anymore.

On an up note I am enjoying work a lot more now that I am actually getting to collect data and not just staring at monkey faces all day, everyday. However, there were a lot of things that Crista and Kelly were not able to go over with me before they left because of time, so I am having to work a lot of things out on my own and teach myself a lot of the data collection, which does make the work day difficult at times. I am just glad that I have been working on behavioral research projects for the past 3 years, so I feel I have a good base to draw upon. Now that I’m collecting data I am really starting to see the personalities of each of the monkeys, which is my favorite part of behavioral research. It helps make the research more personal and can often be the driving force for getting through the day if it’s a particular hard day at work.

The largest upside to being on my own here is that it is teaching me a ton about time management and how to run a field site. Essentially I am running this field site for the next year, as I am the only one here right now and as new researchers arrive it will be my job to train them and I will end up taking on the role of head researcher, as Steffen will only be here for a month or so in July. This has been a very cool feeling. Steffen has entrusted a lot in me, and even though there are times that I don’t enjoy working for him or working on this project I feel I have a personal goal to live up to…to prove to myself that I am capable of working with minimal supervision in a foreign country on a research project, while not just surviving, but while doing my very best at it all. I will definitely know the true strength of my character by the time I leave here, and hopefully will leave knowing more about research than I do now. For the next month to month and a half it’s just me, the monkeys, and hopefully some fun adventures, as the fun has drastically dwindled in the past several weeks. Stay tuned to find out what happens next, as there is never a dull moment here!

A Day in My Life Here

I thought everyone might be interested to know what a typical day is like for me here. The days begin at 5:20am when I get up, get dressed, eat breakfast (toast and jam), feed the kitten (will explain later) and make lunch. At 6:45am Crista, Kelly and I head out the door knowing it will be about 12 hours before we will return again. It takes about an hour to get to work, traveling by 2 modes of transportation. We first walk down our hilly driveway, which is quite long and not shaded in any way. It is usually here that we begin to feel the horrendous heat of the day already taking over; however, there have been many mornings lately where you can already feel the immense pressure from the heat while you are sitting and eating breakfast before you have exerted any physical energy. Upon reaching the end of the driveway we begin looking for boda boda drivers which we take to get to our second mode of transportation. A boda boda is a bicycle with a padded seat on the back. The driver pedals you and himself kind of like those child seats that can be fastened to the back of bicycles, only not as secure, there are no backs to the padded seats we ride on. It can be tricky at times to get used to balancing yourself. Especially when your driver wants to race with his friends as cars are coming head on towards you at 90 mph and you have no control because you’re not the driver of the bike and you don’t know much Swahili, as most of the boda boda drivers do not know a lot of English. We take these boda bodas approximately 4-5 kilometers where we then get off and board a matatu, which is a van that acts as an above ground subway in a sense.
Riding a matatu is an experience in and of itself. There is a driver and a conductor. The conductor is responsible for flagging down people who want or need a ride, for collecting the payments from everyone for the rides and for helping people to load large or heavy items they may be traveling with. The conductor’s job appears quite difficult to me, as there are no official stops to board or debark the matatus. One can get on and off anywhere they like, and often there are many people that just stand on the sides of the roads talking or hanging out, so it can be difficult to decipher who needs a ride and who’s just mulling around. In addition there are different prices for the ride depending on where one boards and where one gets off, and they pack these matatus full of people. There are 14 seats on the matatu, but often they will cram 20+ people into these vans. You are basically sitting on top of one another at this point, and the conductor has to keep track of who’s paid, where they got on and where they are getting off so he charges them correctly. These conductors do this job with ease and even manage to haggle us almost every time, trying to charge us 10 shillings more than it actually costs for the ride, even though Crista has been going to the ruins where we work every day for 8 months and they know her, they still try to charge us the Mzungu rate because they think we don’t know any better like the tourists in the area. Let me say though that fighting with the matatu drivers for the correct change gets to be one of the things I dread the most each day because it takes so much out of you, especially at the end of the day. We take the matatu another 7 kilometers where we debark and then walk our last kilometer to work.
By the way, Mzungu means white person in Swahili. Mzungu is yelled at us almost anywhere we go, and it’s funny because we would never dream of yelling out the color of someone’s skin to them in America, but here it is not meant in a derogatory way, it is just meant more as a way to let us and everyone else know they notice us.
Once we arrive at work it is often another 20-30 minutes before we are even through the gates of the ruins. This is because there are usually 8-10 guys who work at the ruins lounging around the gates chatting and waiting to begin work. Let me explain, the field site we work at is actually a tourist site that is part of the National Museums of Kenya. Many tourists visit the site everyday to see the ancient Arab ruins that are preserved throughout the forest. A Muslim city used to inhabit the forest in 1399 AD, where they had constructed huge stone mosques and buildings, including a palace for the King and his family.
Getting through the gate takes so long because we must greet all of the guys and chat a bit. Now greeting here is not like in the states where you just say hi and then move on. Here greetings can take 5 minutes or more. You ask how the other is doing, how yesterday was, how today is so far, how the family is, ect… and they ask all the same of you. After we get past the greetings there is often some Swahili teaching, until finally Crista, Kelly and I have to say ok we will see you all later, breaking the conversation cycle so we might actually get some work done. Some days this is fun and I really enjoy it, as everyone that works at Gede ruins is very nice, but some days you just want to slip out because you are tired, aren’t feeling well or are just having a bad day, however just quietly slipping out is never an option. The same greetings have to be exchanged every time we pass through the gates. If we want to go out for lunch we know it will be at least a 2 hour lunch to account for the greetings on the way out, the time to walk there, eat and then the greetings on the way back in. And then of course when we leave at night these same greetings are exchanged again, even if they’ve already been done 3 times previously in the day. It is just part of their culture to greet in this manner and it is considered very rude if you pass someone you know and do not greet them.
After finally passing through the gates we walk to our office and settle in. We then rest for a few minutes outside the office because it is way too hot in the office, where we gear up for the long day ahead. Typically we will spend 4-5 hours in the field in the morning and then take an hour to 2 hour break for lunch. Most days we pack a lunch, which for me usually consists of a sandwich, some biscuits and a banana, however we occasionally go out for lunch. After lunch we return to the field for another 4 hours before packing up and going home. Our trip home is the same as in the morning, though in the reverse order. We have to say goodbye to everyone that works at the ruins on our way out, walk a kilometer to the matatu stage, take to matatu to the boda boda stage, take a boda boda to the end of our driveway and then walk up the driveway to Mwamba, the field house we live at. Usually we arrive back at home around 6:30pm.
After reaching home I shower, rinsing away all the sweat and dirt from the day that has piled on. My whole body feels like it is covered in layers of sweat, dirt and oil that can be peeled away. Dinner is served at the field house at 7:00pm, so usually right after cleaning up and straightening up my room I go for dinner, which is served family style. Dinner typically consists of either a rice dish or a potato dish, some kind of beans, a cooked vegetable dish and salad and for dessert is fresh fruit (papaya, mango, pineapple, oranges or watermelon), the best nights are when you get fruit salad which contains all these fruits. After dinner we clean up, everyone helps to wash, rinse and dry all the dishes and then we either watch a DVD, write emails, read or sleep. I have been exhausted ever since I got hear, and with the long, hard days of work, I often find myself going to bed around 9 or 10pm. And soon the day begins all over again.
I do get 2 days off a week, but they can never be 2 consecutive days. This is because there is only one research assistant working with each group right now, and Steffen, the principle investigator, feels that if we miss 2 days of work in a row we might miss something big, like a new birth, the disappearance of a monkey, the overthrow of the male in the group or an terrible fight that lead to a serious wound, etc… There are several things I do on my days off, and often many of them are chores or errands, so I never feel like a truly have a day of rest. I will do laundry, every day I have off. After that I will do a combination of trying to get to email, swim, go shopping for groceries or other items I need or go into the larger town, Malindi. I also will spend time reading, sleeping and watching DVDs. I have today off and am in Malindi doing email, shopping some, looking for kitten food and later I will be going to look at an apartment. I am trying to move out of the field house soon into a cheaper place and a place that will allow me to keep my new kitten…please see my next blog for this story.

A New Kitten...

I’m sure no one will be surprised to know that I have found a sickly kitten who has made her way home with me. Last Thursday Kelly and I went to work as usual and as we walked in we noticed this large safari like SUV with a ton of large duffle bags sitting beside it. I figured that some people had probably camped in the ruins the night before and that probably the group was traveling all over the continent of Africa or at least all over Kenya. Kelly and I hadn’t seen the people yet, but we were very curious to know who the people were and what they were doing. Finally we see these older people loading things into the SUV. I would say that this group of people were in their mid to late 50’s. This peaked Kelly’s and my interest even more because we were expecting the people to be in their late 20’s to early 30’s. We eventually made our way over to them and asked them if they’d spent the night in the ruins, which they had. We began talking to them and discovered that they all were Canadian and that almost all of them were some type of field biologist. There was bird person, a mammal person, and several others. Kelly and I were fascinated with them and their story. They had been in Kenya for a month already and were traveling all over the country in their SUV. Anyway to make a long story short one of the women in the group finally says that there is a kitten in the bathrooms and that she looks very unhealthy. She wanted to know if we would go and look at it. So we talk some more with the people and then finally make our way over to the bathrooms to look for the kitten before heading out to find the monkeys. On our way over I hear the kitten meowing at the top of its lungs, so I begin running, thinking it was in danger. All of a sudden I see this tiny tiny black kitten at my feet completely terrified. I hesitated for a minute, not wanting to touch her as I wasn’t sure if she had mange or some other disease that I did not want to get. Finally I made the decision that she needed help and that she was probably too young to have any serious diseases yet, so I bend down to pick her up.
I had her in my hands for less than a minute when I suddenly realized that she was covered in safari ant heads. She had 50 to 100 safari ants stuck in her paws, all over her stomach, in her tail, whiskers and head. Safari ants are these vicious ants that eat small animals alive. They travel in groups of millions, when you see them on a path they have usually dug a trench with thousands of solider safari ants on either side of the trench guarding the females and their eggs that are passing through the trench, ready to attack anything that gets close to them. This poor kitten must have accidentally wandered into the trench and was too weak or paralyzed from fear to get out of the trench right away and so the ants had time to climb all over her. The soldiers just crawl on you at first until you make a move that scars them and then one bites. As soon as one bites then all the others bite and their heads stick in you. You have to pull each head and body out of your skin to stop the horrific pain. Two days before we had seen a dead kitten covered in safari ants; all you could see was white fur and its skeleton underneath a million or more ants. Most likely this poor kitten also traveled into the trench, but couldn’t get out and was eaten alive. I couldn’t let the same happen to this kitten, so Kelly and I sat down to pull out all the ant heads. The kitten had already chewed off all the bodies. I have no idea how long the heads had been in her, at least a day or two. It took us an hour to remove every head.
Once they were all removed I gave her a bath in the bathroom sink to try and disinfect some of the bites and to get her clean, she was absolutely filthy. As I was giving her a bath I noticed that she had flees. At this point I made the decision that she had to go to the vet and that she was coming home with me because I couldn’t live with myself if I just released her back to the forest. There is no way she was going to survive, and she obviously came to where there are people to get help, the feral cats that live in the forest never get close to people. While I finished washing her Kelly called the director of our field house to get the number for a vet, whom we called and made an appointment for an hour later. We had to go all the way into Malindi to see the vet. When we got there he looked at her for about 30 seconds and said she looks good. I explained to him that she had flees, and his response to this was “yea, animals here have flees.” I explained to him that I knew this but that I was taking her home to a place where there were 2 dogs who did not have flees so I couldn’t bring the flees home to them. He continued to resist giving her medication even though I was looking at a wall full of Frontline, flee repellent. I asked if he could give her a flee bath and he said that she was too small, that giving her a bath would make her too cold and possibly giver her the flu. I explained that I had already given her a bath that day and that she dried right away in the heat, asking again for him to give her a flee bath. He finally says he has some flee shampoo he can give me. At this point I beg him to give her the bath, as she has flees on her head and I don’t feel comfortable washing her with such harsh chemicals. He finally agreed to giver her a flee bath and basically said that she had a skin infection that came from her mother’s milk not having enough nutrition, but that it would clear up in a few days and that her rectum had been distended, but that it retracted back inside her and was still slightly distended, but that that too would be fine in a few days.
It is now 5 days later and she is currently living at the field house with us. She has put on some weight, though I would like her to put on a lot more. She was just skin and bones when we found her. Her skin rash has not gotten better and almost looks worse to me, but her rectum has retracted back completely and looks good. She has a lot more energy now and is running and playing which is a very good sign. However, her fecals are as black as she is, and from my experience, black feces are not a good sign and often indicate worms or parasites. The vet had given her a deworming medicine while we were there, so I’m not sure what’s wrong with her, if anything is at all. I am going to call the vet tomorrow and see if I need to bring her back in to get looked at.
I’m sure everyone is wondering what I am going to do with her. The plan was to bring her back for a week and have me look after her, but then a couple that people at the field house know is moving up country and are looking for a kitten, so the directors of the field house were hoping that they would take her. Now I was not thrilled with this idea as I have put a lot of time and money into caring for her and I have become attached and naturally want to keep her myself. My original plan was to keep her for the year I am here and then to get all the necessary paperwork and bring her back to the states when I return. This is still what I would like to do, however there is one minor problem. The directors of the field house will not allow her to stay once she is large enough to hunt birds. The great majority of the work that they do is bird conservation work and apparently domestic cats are responsible for killing millions of birds each year, so they feel having a cat live here would go against their work and what the organization stands for. I understand this but desperately want to keep her as well. As the practical side of me says it would be easier and maybe better for her to stay living with someone here in Kenya, so I am very torn on what to do. Most likely if I move out of the field house I can keep her and my original plan even before I came here was always to move out in order to save money. However, there are major advantages and disadvantages to staying in the field house and to moving out so I am also torn on that decision. I guess only time will tell what will happen, but I thought everyone might get a kick out of this story. I will post pictures of her soon, as well as of the place I am living and some of the monkeys. I have named the kitten Maisha, which means life in Swahili, since she rescued herself in away by finding humans to help her and fought the safari ants for her life. It may still be an uphill battle, but I am confident she will survive.
To come soon is a post on my trip to Mombassa and other fun and weird things that have happened since I arrived. Hope everyone is doing well. I miss you all!!!!

My Frist Days

I had pre-written a whole thing on my travels to Kenya and my first 2 nights here, but forgot my flash drive at home, therefore I will have to catch everyone up on those adventures later, as I have a lot of other things to tell you all about today. I'm going to give you all a little background on what I'm doing so that future posts will make sense.

My first task for the project is to learn all the individuals by distinct features, such as face, ears, brows, tails, nipples, etc... There are 2 separate groups of monkeys I have to learn, and I am the first volunteer on this project that have to learn both groups. Usually each volunteer only learns one group, but since I will be here for several weeks by myself I have to learn both so that I can teach Kate, the other monkey volunteer coming in May, one of the groups. The 2 groups are K-Group which is comprised of about 50 individuals. The second group is S-Group which has approximately 20-25 individuals. I am learning the adult females first and then will learn the juveniles and infants. After I have learned to recognize each monkey then I will begin learning the data collection methods, though I have already started on this a little. Apparently I am learning the monkeys much faster than anyone thought or has before, which is very good for me, since the 2 volunteers here with me now will be leaving in mid-April. The other 2 volunteers are Crista who works with K-Group and Kelly who works with S-Group.

Now let me begin some of my stories. My first story is a rather disturbing one. I must begin by saying that my first few days in the field were going very well. I was spending half the day with one group and half with the other just trying to learn distinguishing characteristics of each monkey. Nothing too exciting happened my first several days here, other than meeting a lot of new people, taking care of errands, learning the monkeys and Swahili and of course swimming in the ocean after work! On Thursday things began to get more interesting. Thursday morning I spent with Crista and K-Group. Now let me preface with this, K-Group spends a good portion of their day out in the open, and only some of their day in the forest, but rarely deep in the forest. And when they are in the forest it is in the middle of it, not on the edges which border farms with crops like corn. S-Group on the other hand spends 95% of their day deep in the forest and the majority of their territory borders these local farms, where S-Group raids the crops of these farms frequently.

There is one other piece of information I must share before I begin the disturbing story. On my first night here Kelly was telling me how she used to follow S-Group into the farms when they went there, but doesn't anymore. I asked her why she no longer does. Her reply was because she found a scary note in the fields last time she went back there. The note was written in English, not Swahili, so it was purposely intended for her to read. The note said: "Private Property, Trespass again and one day XXXXXXXX." Kelly has found several of her monkeys in traps that have been set by the farmers for the monkeys to kill them so that they don't keep losing their crops. Kelly has freed the monkeys every time she has seen this. Freeing the monkeys is probably not something that she or any of us should be doing, but it is a major moral dilemma for us. It is very hard to walk away knowing that you could have saved the monkey but didn't. At the same time though you are interfering with these people's livelihoods by freeing them. Then again hunting/killing of any species is illegal in Kenya, so technically the farmers legally cannot set these traps.

Now for my story. So Thursday morning I was with K-Group and around 11:30am Crista gets a text message from Kelly saying: "Dead monkey in the forest, very bizarre, meet me at the office." Crista and I go running out of the forest to meet Kelly who was very shaken up. She tells us the monkey is not one of her's, it's one from another group that also lives in the forest we work in. We study 2 of 6 groups that live in the forest. Kelly proceeds to explain that the monkey is hanging in a tree upside down dead. She informs us she has never seen anything like this, and she thinks it may be tied up in the tree, which would mean a human came into the forest just to kill the monkey, which is very illegal and means they were the one's trespassing this time. Kelly wanted us to go back and look at the monkey with her. Crista and I did not want to go, but we did to provide support for her, and because we were slightly curious. When we arrive at the scene it was the oddest thing I have every seen. Animals do not die in the position we found the monkey in, and what I am about to describe cannot possibly do justice to how it actually looked.

Basically the monkey was dead in a handstand pose. It's right hand was fully gripped around a branch (which was the oddest part of all this), one leg was sticking straight up into the air, the other was sticking straight out to the side and the tail was not limp and hanging, but was also sticking straight up. It looked as if the monkey died and rigormortis took place immediately, which is not possible as far as I know. So we tried forever to figure out what happened, how she died, ect... We did not see any twine or rope holding the monkey up there, but it seemed too hard for the body to just be balancing on the branches. She had a large gash on the back of her right calf, a slash on her neck and a small wound on her tail. We determined she probably died from the gash on her leg that had cut a major ligament, causing death. We all went home that day trying to block the whole scene out and still utterly confused as to what happened.

On Friday (yesterday) I spent the entire day with S-Group and Kelly. Her group traveled past this dead monkey again, and it was still hanging in the tree upside down, however rigormortis seemed to have passed as all limbs were now limp, except for one leg that was still sticking straight up in the air. We decided that we had to bring the monkey to the ground in an effort to determine how the monkey was hanging there in the tree. If it was humans that tied her up it was clearly a message to us and we were not going to stay back there or go in this section of the forest again. Kelly found a large branch and cut it to use to shake the monkey out of the tree. She prodes and prodes and the monkeys sways but does not fall, so she keeps prodding, finally the monkey falls to to the ground with a loud thud of dead weight and on the way down huge chunks of skin and hair fall off everywhere. Decomposition had really taken force over the night and the face and body were badly mutilated by flies and other insects that had begun eating the flesh. The smell was putrid hanging heavy in the forest from the extreme heat of the day. From this we discovered that she had been hanging there by a branch was stuck straight through her calf, holding her firmly in place. Now it is possible that she fell and accidentally landed on this branch and was too weak from the wounds she had to free herself. However, monkeys fall through the trees all the time and never get stuck on branches like this. And the branch her leg was stuck on was sticking out to the side, not straight up, so for her leg to pierce the branch would be impossible from the angle she would have fallen at.

As I looked at the wound on the back of her leg I also began thinking that only a ponga (a machete type tool here) could have made this gash, not teeth from another monkey. We originally had thought she got in a bad fight with a monkey or was bitten by a snake and fell because she was so weak, grabbed the branch she was clutching and couldn't free herself because she was too weak and just died there. The gash on her leg was just to large and long to be made from a tooth, and if it was from a canine that dragged along her leg as she tried to run, there should have been a mark from the other canine as well somewhere, which there wasn't.

Honestly we don't know what happened, but more and more things are pointing to human intervention. Regardless, it was one of the creepiest things I've ever seen and now I'm completely terrified every time I go back into that part of the forest because we aren't sure how the monkey died, if this was a message to us, to the other monkeys or was just an accident. We'll have to see if more develops over the next week...

Off to Kenya!

I'm leaving today for Kenya to begin my year long adventure. I'm going to be working for Steffen who is a doctorate student at Columbia University. He has designed a multi-variate study on Sykes monkeys, where he is primarily studying the stress levels of these monkeys due to increased human presence in the area they live in. He is also researching the behavioral repertoire of these monkeys as very little research has actually been completed on this sub species. Sykes monkeys typically live in very dense forests that make it difficult for people to study them because visibility is so poor. The monkeys Steffen is studying have settled in an area of ancient Arab ruins, where there are fewer trees compared to their normal habitats, making the various groups ideal candidates for behavioral research.Sykes monkeys are found all over Africa, and thankfully are not endangered. Steffen is hoping to build a model from his research with these monkeys that can be applied to species that are endangered.While in Kenya I will also have the opportunity to design my own study. I am still in the process of refining my work and will post an update once I have a clearer idea of details of my study. In addition to researching the behavior of these monkeys I also hope to learn more about the Kenyan culture and landscape. Hopefully I will have many fun and exciting stories to report throughout my stay in Africa. And hopefully I will have the opportunity to visit and see many places outside of Kenya.Now I must be off! I will write soon and let you all know I have arrived safe and provide an update on my trip over. See everyone in a year or so!!