2/4/09-2/5/09: MONKEYS WHO KNOCK, SCHRODINGER'S GOAT, AND ACCIDENTAL FEMINIST STATEMENTS

Three or four days in and we’re settling into a bit of a routine . . . hard to believe it’s only been that long! Maybe because of those four days, I’ve spent at least three and a half awake? But I’m not tired and I don’t know why that is, either. It’s probably the mountain air drifting down, or the constant invigorating scent of chai . . . Kenyans drink a lot of chai. a LOT. Also a lot of Cadbury Coffee-Carmel Luxury Powdered Drinking Chocolate (With Free Spoon) . . . we’ve gone through at least three containers since I got here (I know because several plastic purple Free Spoons have appeared among the regular silverware).
Soon, when I’ve lived through a few more of them, I’ll try to write up a runthrough of a typical day in my program. Normal things (showering, laundry, walking) tend to be pretty interesting here. For now, though, I’m just going to give you some highlights from the past couple days!

First of all, my list of sighted wildlife keeps getting longer! Last night Alex spotted a baby black mamba, that most unintentionally deadly of snakes, on the side of the path, so of course we all had to gather around it and peer (its head was underground, so we felt relatively safe, though in retrospect I’m not really sure where our heads were). Less exciting, but still notable, was a fairly average-looking toad who decided to chill out in one of our frisbees. We agreed that we’re all getting jaded – any toad at all would get some attention if we ran into it at home, but here we all just felt let down by its lack of exoticism . . . it didn’t have horns or funny colors or anything (UNTIL IT TRANSFORMED . . . only kidding).

Daniel leads nature walks nearly every morning at 6:30, which tends to be the morning commute hour for wildlife. Today’s got progressively more exciting as it went along. We started out looking at some plants and some giraffe scat (which is surprisingly tiny, in case anyone would like to know – being constantly surrounded by people who are rabidly interested in such things, I no longer have any idea whether or not the average person is). Then I saw a stickbug that looked EXACTLY LIKE the plant it was on, which was very exciting for me. Dad, I think you would like to have a pet stickbug, or maybe a pet robot stickbug. Next, we got a pretty good binocular’s eye view of the troupe of vervet monkeys that live in the yellow fever trees at the edge of the bandas. Mom, I think you would NOT like to have a pet vervet, but they are very cute. Daniel then took us across the small stream that runs underground all the way from Kilimanjaro to where we are, and then asked us if we heard “that sound.” There are a LOT of sounds going on all the time here, so we were all ready to be affronted that he expected us to only be able to hear one of them, but then we heard it and we understood. It was kind of like a laughing monster and it was very difficult to ignore, and it turned out to be the call of the Verreaux’s Eagle-Owl, two of which Daniel quickly found in a nearby acacia. THEY WERE GIANT. Apparently they are known to drop out of the sky and carry off dikdiks (little antelope) for dinner. The occasional SFS student has even been lucky (?) enough to see one scoop up (and, soon after, tear up) a cat. After watching them swivel their heads most of the way around until we got the uncanny feeling that they were watching us and sizing us up, we got out of there and headed towards a small hill, where we found dikdiks! We tried to follow them in order to get a closer look but were distracted by another unignorable sound, this time an impressively deep hoot (the animals don’t follow the rules, Dad). IT WAS BABOOOOOOOONS!

Daniel’s lived here his whole life and even he still gets excited about baboons. So he teased them by imitating their “go away” call, and we all got scared and moved backwards and then got excited and moved forwards again etc. etc. for a very long time while the two giant male baboons swung around and yelled at us, and the three babies wrestled with each other and ate fruits and to all appearances quite enjoyed the attention (there were probably more baboons there, but the rest were hidden in the trees). Daniel told us about how smart baboons are and then demonstrated by putting his walking stick up to his shoulder like a gun and aiming it at one of the males, who immediately hid behind a branch. It was cool, but if you think about what must have happened around that baboon in order for him to know to do that, it’s easy to understand why he wanted to keep all of us humans away from his babies.

I got a sort of vindictive thrill out of storming the baboondocks because of a situation they (unintentionally and indirectly) got me into the other night. Because sleeping’s been difficult, I’ve been hanging out in the chumba (the classroom building) a lot late at night so I don’t keep my roommates up. I was heading back from there to my banda, fairly freaked out because even though it’s a really short walk it’s easy to let your imagination scare you late at night here, and looking forward to getting under my mosquito net and staying there until after the sun was up. A hitchless and reasonable plan . . . OR SO IT APPEARED. My roommate Chelsea had woken up a little earlier and needed to use the chu (bathroom), so she walked over there, got herself all freaked out, compounded the freakout on the walk back (it’s very hard not to), re-entered the banda, became convinced that baboons and/or vervets were climbing all over the banda, became also convinced that I was in my bed (or, understandably, just didn’t think about the fact that I might not be), locked the door in a bit of a panic, and lay in bed letting that panic simmer around for about 15 minutes until I (or, from her point of view, Something Outside) started trying to open the door. At which point the panic started to bubble. It reached full boil when I knocked on the door. Luckily, although her first thought (she reported to me later) was “MONKEYS CAN KNOCK!?” Chelsea retained the presence of mind to make an inquiring noise (which she insists was some kind of normal question, like “who’s there,” but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t) and I said “I think you locked me out” and she got up and let me in and I don’t think anyone has ever said “you’re not a monkey!” with such relief (at least not to me). Then we laughed for about nine million years. So yes, the surrounding primates have caused me all kinds of trouble.

For the record, Chelsea’s concern was warrented. The line between “outside” and “inside” here is pretty thin, and animals cross it a lot. She and I and about 1/3 of the rest of our group relearned this lesson the other day when we went to visit a traditional Maasai boma, or homestead (it was a real privilege to be able to visit a real boma . . . there are a lot of fake bomas people have set up as tourist attractions, but our Maasai neighbors actually live in this one for most of the year). I’m going to save writing about the boma itself for later . . . at one point during the program we’re all going to be split up and sent off to different bomas to live as a Maasai for a day (hopefully I’ll know more Swahili by then) and after that I’ll be a lot more qualified to talk about it (though still not very qualified at all).

I am EXTREMELY qualified to tell this story, though, because I was there. The mamas decided to show us the interior of one of their houses. Each house is probably about the size of an American bathroom and has walls made out of hardened cow dung and a roof made of a mixture of thatch and scrap materials like metal and wood and plastic. The houses are used primarily for sleeping, so they’re very dark inside and most of the room is taken up by two large beds, one for the father and one for the mother and children. When the mamas led us inside, we couldn’t see anything, so they sort of politely forced us down onto stools or the ground or, in the case of my program-mates and friends Ryan and Coral, one of the beds. These particular mamas could speak English, so they began explaining some things about the house we were in. Although I can’t say Ryan and Coral were visibly uncomfortable because I couldn’t exactly see them, they did seem kind of restless and I wasn’t surprised that, when one of the mamas mentioned that their pet dog sleeps under the house, Ryan (very politely) interrupted to ask “does that dog happen to be in the house right now, under this bed?”

“No, the dog is outside,” the mama reassured him. “Nothing is under the bed.”
Ryan: “There is definitely something underneath this bed.”

Mama: “You’re just feeling the dog from outside.”

Ryan: “I don’t think so, because whatever it is, it’s chewing on my pant leg.”

Well, we’d just spent several days learning about all the things that can kill us while we’re over here, so at this point everyone got pretty actively nervous, and nervously active, and it’s a good thing that cow dung makes for really strong walls. Eventually one of the mamas got through the ruckus and pulled a baby goat out from under the bed, at which point everyone in the house started laughing (laughter is turning out to be a theme of the trip). And the goat went outside and so did we and we milled about quietly for a little while thinking about the unique challenges that arise when you’re required to (and want to) be respectful and give the benefit of the doubt to your hosts even in a potentially dangerous situation (Coral summed it up best: “It was licking my ankle the whole time, but the mamas said there wasn’t anything there, so I believed them.”) THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING!

The rest of the boma visit went really well, too . . . the mamas decided to greet us by doing a traditional Maasai song and dance. It was really beautiful and we all ended up dancing with them. In return, we’d prepared a traditional American song and dance – an exceedingly well- and efficiently-choreographed and arranged version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, with two-part harmony and a rap breakdown in the middle (“TELL ME WHAT KIND OF JUNGLE?” “THE MIGHTY JUNGLE!” etc. etc.). It went over very well (if you don’t believe me, it will definitely be on the internet soon. yup, me and the Maasai, breakin’ it down, on youtube). After the house tour, we got to practice our bartering. Now that I know more Swahili, especially the numbers, I’m much better at it. Most of what I got is of course a SURPRISE but I do want to mention my new and hard-drivingly-bargained-for walking stick because a. it’s the greatest thing in the world, I feel like I have regained a limb I didn’t even know I’d lost and b. by owning it I am, according to one of the askari whose name I don’t know yet, “changing the culture single-handedly” because Maasai walking sticks are supposed to be only for men. Which I did not know at time of purchase. But there is no turning back now because everyone who isn’t calling me Carabash (“Calabash Cara” has been appropriately abbreviated) is calling me “walking stick girl” (hey, when you get nicknames, you know you really belong! now we’ve got to hope I don’t confuse the two and bash anyone with the walking stick). And I asked Daniel and he told me that it isn’t disrespectful for me to use it (the askari said the same thing, pointing out that a decade or so ago it would have been unthinkable to see any woman in Kenya in pants).

Tomorrow is one of the many Days We’ve All Been Waiting For . . . we’re off to Amboseli National Park to see all the big charismatic things that made us want to come to Africa when we were kids. We’ve been learning about how the park is in decline, so I’m going to try to keep three parts of my mind active at once – the tourist part can go crazy for the lions, the scientist part can look for signs that the lions are dying out (or, as we’ve started saying in class, “the Mufasas are going over the cliff” . . . our camp’s common language is supposed to be Swahili, but for now it’s effectively Lion King references), and the politician part can look for the ways in which the government and the park are trying to hide the fact that the lions are dying out. And the blogger part’s probably going to have a figurative field day as well as a literal one, just to warn you.

tutaonana kwa leo,
Carabash

p.s. this was written several days ago but I just got internet now . . . amboseli was pretty great, and today we had our first field lecture. also, tomorrow I am . . . wait for it . . . "MOD", aka MWANAFUNZI OF THE DAY! "Mwanafunzi" means student; I have no idea why the rest of the phrase is not in swahili, i did not make that decision. anyway, i get to turn the solar panels and ring the bell for meals (the bell is a rusty bicycle wheel that we hit with a slightly less rusty metal stick whenever anything important is happening) so stay tuned because i'm sure i will have at least six pages of things to say about it.