Nearing the End

My feelings about leaving are bittersweet. I love being here and enjoying this experience in Kenya but I am very ready to go home and see my family and friends. I don't think the sadness about leaving will hit me until we have to actually leave camp on Sunday. Directed Research presentations went really well. It was less stressful than I thought and there was a decent turn out. My group presented second. One of our staff members was a translator for the presentations which made the presentations about 40-45 minutes compared to the 20 minute presentations we prepared. After the second presentation we provided everyone with sodas as a break/intermission (this is really common during long activities or presentations in Kenya, it seems). We provided lunch after the final presentation. I got to see my Maasai mama that I stayed with for my homestay. It was great to see her again but the communication barrier is very difficult. It was a great day and a great experience. On another note,  it is awkward to be doing all of these closing activities because I'm not feeling as sad about leaving as everyone else is just yet. We will see what happens on Sunday when leaving gets really real.

Directed Research

Directed Research has been quite an experience so far. We started off with ten days of field work which went by so fast. Every day in the morning we went out into different towns in the area to interview agriculturalists and pastoralists with a 75 question questionnaire that we had helped create. We asked the locals questions about land tenure, how they use their land, conflicts with wildlife, cultural aspects, and privatization. It was actually really interesting to hear all of their different answers but also hear about the similarities. We spent from about 9am to about 1pm walking around to farms and bomas conducting interviews. One or two groups a day would go around to the areas and collect GPS points of farms and town boundaries. Everything was going great until on Thanksgiving (we celebrated on the 28th) I had moved my computer to help decorate the dining hall and didn't realize until the end of the night that water had dripped from somewhere and gotten on the bottom of my laptop. That has made things really difficult because after a few unsuccessful attempts at drying it and turning it on Sam told me to put it in rice. It is still on rice after two days because I tried to turn it on after one day and it just started blinking and didn't turn on. My only concern is that I hadn't backed it up in about two weeks and it had about 80 data entries from our questionnaires on it and some of my most recent pictures on it. My group was super helpful and all pulled together to re-enter data (since I was the main data person before). There couldn't possibly be a worse time for this to happen because I will need to continue borrowing computers to read articles and write my paper while everyone else needs to use their computers to do the same. Fixing our data formatting and data analysis started yesterday. Communication is difficult between us and our professor sometimes so after we thought we were done he made us change a lot of things. Due dates are coming up fast and our final papers are due on the 7th, which is super stressful and scary. I know it will all be worth it in the end when I have my senior capstone paper and presentation pretty much done before next semester! Gotta keep a positive attitude and enjoy my last two weeks here. It is going by so fast!

Kimana Wildlife Sanctuary

I'm sorry I have been slacking on posts recently, directed research, food, and sleep have taken up the majority of my time the past couple of days. Last week we went to the Kimana Wildlife Sanctuary. It was a very impressive sanctuary with a bunch of antelopes, warthogs, zebras, and wildebeests. The weather was perfect for a safari! The main reason I wanted to post about Kimana Wildlife Sanctuary at all is because of the picture above. Although the wildlife sanctuary is supposed to be a peaceful place with plenty of habitat and food for animals and accommodating to people at the same time there are real issues that still go on. We saw this elephant on the side of the dirt road we were driving on. It was even more horrific and disturbing in real life than it is in the picture. This elephant had been shot with a poison arrow or spear from outside of the sanctuary but made its way into the sanctuary before dying. It was unclear whether the face was cut off by a poacher to sell the tusks or by a member of the Kenya Wildlife Service who also took the tusks but did so to keep poachers from selling them. Either way, this is a real issue that happens all over Kenya and Tanzania and it is so sad to come across. Things like this remind me why I decided to study abroad in Africa in the first place. It is insane to see how such an enormous animal could be the victim of a crime committed by such a small creature in comparison and it is so important to teach people that this is not an okay way to treat wildlife.  

Maasai Homestay

Yesterday we had our Maasai home stay! It was super fun. We got there around 8:30am and started off trying to chat and drinking chai. We went to the shamba (garden) and they showed us how they take care of the garden and we got to help a bit (some damn hard work!) then we came home and made lunch which was ugali and cabbage which Manasi and I got to help make. After lunch we relaxed and the mamas braided some of my hair the way the Maasai do. Then we did some dishes really quickly before we went out and got firewood. Basically they go into the land around their houses (sometimes a little far away) and chop branches off of trees with machetes. I got to try and I was awful at it. My mama had so much strength and could just chop the branches off so easily, it was super impressive! After that we carried the kuni (firewood) wrapped in bundles of rope with our heads! Basically you bundle the wood in rope and leave slack so that you can use the slack loop to put on your forehead to carry the wood. It was interesting and really heavy! Then we made some more chai and got to play with the kids a bit and try to have conversations with the mamas again. It was such a great day! I wish I updated sooner because I didn't get to go as in depth about my experience but be assured that it was super amazing! Work has just been piling up and we've been really busy. Luckily, we just passed in two assignments that we had to do and we have a final exam on Saturday and then we start Directed Research. Time is flying so fast and I am nervous and excited at the same time! The picture below is a picture of one of the kids, Stella, from my home stay. She was precious and adorable!

Lake Nakuru National Park Expedition

Lake Nakuru National Park was breath-taking! The drive up was interesting because of all the traffic and how crazy people drive here. They don't really have stop lights or anything, people kind of just go when they want to. We got right into things when we arrived at our campsite. We stayed in hostel-type rooms that held about 15 people each. They were super simple but it was great to have a mattress to sleep on. We did game drives and travelling lectures during the days and just hung out at night. It was super fun! Like the Serengeti, the days often blended together so I am not sure what animals I saw which days. Lake Nakuru National Park was so lush and green compared to the other parts of Kenya and Tanzania I have seen. It seems that this is not normally how the beginning of the rainy season is but we have gotten a bit of rain, so there is no reason the park should be so lush. I have seen a bunch of cool and weird-looking birds that I never knew about. Water birds are such interesting looking creatures! I saw a bunch of the usual animals, buffaloes, giraffes, Tompson's gazelles, water buck, zebras, and impalas. Lake Nakuru is known for its many birds (a ridiculously high number of bird species can be observed throughout the park) but also for rhinos which we didn't see too many of in Tanzania. It was amazing how many rhinos we saw! I actually saw mostly white rhinos (which are much more rare in general than black rhinos) but also one black rhino on the last day. Rhinos are such interesting looking animals! The picture for this post is of a mother and baby white rhino that was literally just in the grass to the left of our car. They were probably the coolest thing I saw during the trip. The same two rhinos crossed the road in front of the train of cars we were in. That was super cool. The car I was in saw a complete rainbow from end to end! (there was no pot of gold though, unfortunately). It was amazing and so bright and just seeing a whole rainbow is something that I never thought I'd see ever. We had the option to do a morning game drive and I went on one of the mornings. We tried to see the sunrise but because of the roads and all the stops we wanted to make along the way we missed the start of it. It was still beautiful, though! The sun and the clouds and the sky all look so much more beautiful here than at home, probably because I know I will only see it temporarily. There were many flamingos out in the morning (which may be my favorite bird after this trip). The wetland areas in the park (which is a large area of the park) are so beautiful! I would have never expected to see them on my trip here. One of the days we drove up to this amazing waterfall. The water was all brown and dirty but it was flowing nicely. It was such a relaxing place to take a break and enjoy. We went to a lodge on the second to last day for lunch and swimming. It actually started pouring so I didn't go swimming but I had a burger and fries and a few African named delicious drinks. On our way back to KBC we got into a lot of traffic but made it to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust which is an organization that takes care of orphaned elephants when they are young and let them go when they are ready to be in the wild. We got to see them feeding on milk and eating leaves from branches. I also got to touch one of the elephants! The texture is so weird and elephants are surprisingly a little bit hairy. It was so cool! We made it back to KBC in good time (we left at 6:30am and arrived at camp after all stops at 5:30pm) and have all been tired but had a wonderful day off today. We have Maasai homestays on Saturday which will be super exciting and another interesting thing to write about!

Kilimanjaro Bush Camp

We arrived at Kilimanjaro Bush Camp a few days ago and from the beginning, I loved it! I has been a great past couple of days! The camp itself is big and beautiful, located in an area with a lot of wildlife. We have baboons and vervet monkeys coming in and out of our camp all the time and so many awesome sounding birds. It is hotter here than in Tanzania, but there are more places to chill in the shade. Our chumba acts as our dining room and classroom and basically all around meeting room. We have a gazebo to hang out in and a gazebo that has darts and a ping pong table. There are two fire pits in the camp. The bandas are thatch-roofed and awesome! They are big and house four people with no bunk beds. The picture is of some of the bandas and the gazebos. The camp is so amazing! We had some time to unpack the first day but got right into activities the next day. There was a community service day at an HIV/AIDs clinic that is helping many people in the area become aware of their status. The day was a preliminary visit to see how we can help in the future days when we visit. It seems like there are some positive ways we can help them. We also visited a Disabled Children's Rehabilitation Center down the street from the clinic. It was really sad to see the children with clubbed feet, mental disabilities, etc., but it seems that they are treated very well and get a decent education at least for primary school. Hopefully we will do some community service there too. Finally, yesterday was Halloween and we actually got to celebrate here! We have a social committee that plans social events and they made Halloween super fun. We dressed up with really creative costumes (whatever we could find in each other's closets) and had a scavenger hunt around the camp, pumpkin carving  (with an attempt at pumpkin seeds but they burned in the oven), banda trick-or-treating, and a costume contest. It was really great to still be able to celebrate and enjoy the holiday even from a country with a completely different culture. On Saturday we leave for our 5-day expedition to Lake Nakuru National Park. It is very exciting that it is coming up so soon, but that means that Directed Research is soon as well, which will be exciting and challenging! I am really looking forward to the coming weeks!

Amani Orphange

Yesterday was our second to last day in Tanzania. We had the pleasure of of visiting Amani Orphanage in Mto wa Mbu where we played with the kids and painted a mural on one of the walls of their buildings. It was a super fun yet exhausting day! The kids were so excited to see us and play with us. It is amazing to see how happy they can be about the littlest things even though they don't have much. Mainly we had a few groups that would swap in and out between painting the mural (we even included the kids, which was super messy!), playing with the kids, and helping the orphanage build an office building. The orphanage had recently moved from a location a little ways down the street where the government needed their land so they don't have many buildings and are doing renovations everywhere. Currently the boys and girls are sleeping together in one big room with sheets separating the room while the other bedroom is being used as a classroom because the classroom is being built. There are 38 orphans at Amani. They sleep three to one mattress in bunk beds, which seems insane. The kids loved being carried around on our shoulders, backs, and even just picked up and rocked. We got to help get their lunch together which was really sad because they put all of it in big buckets and scoop them out of the buckets with their plates and all they had was beans and rice. Their water was in one of the buckets as well. It was great to be able to brighten their day a bit by playing with them. Luckily this orphanage treats the orphans very well compared to many other orphanages. The kids were truly an inspiration for growing up this way and I am glad we got to help them in any way that way could. It was a great experience that I will remember for the rest of my life.