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!