2/8/10: A TYPICAL DAY ON

Mzuri usiku rafiki!

As usual, since we last spoke, I have experienced many firsts: my first good night’s sleep in Africa (that was nice!), my first Kenyan banana bread, my first “Mwanafunzi-of-the-day” day, my first day off, my first visit to Club Kimana (what is Club Kimana, you ask? Wouldn't you like to know), my first (semi-accidental) banda sleepover, and my first late-night encounter with a pair of mating bushbabies. Do you want to hear about it?!?!?! If not, I recommend you go here instead: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1648 and learn some fun facts about giraffes.

As I think I’ve said before, we don’t have ordinary weekends here at KBC. Like most institutions, what we DO have are acronyms, and lots of them. A brief dictionary: KBC = Kilimanjaro Base Camp (where I live); CWMS = Center for Wildlife Management Studies (more resumè-friendly name for where I live); SFS = School for Field Studies (the program I’m on); WM, WE, EP, and SSC = Wildlife Management, Wildlife Ecology, Environmental Policy, and Swahili and Socio-Culture (the classes we’re all taking); FL = Field Lecture (ex. climbing up Olosoito Hill and sprawling out around our EP professor, Tome, as he points off into the distance at the real physical mountain ranges and group ranches that the map on his portable easel represents . . . I like field lectures); FE = Field Exercise (ex. driving out to Amboseli National Park to work on large mammal count sampling/population estimation, which we’re doing as an WM assignment later this week); DR = Directed Research (the research projects we will spending almost all our time on once we go to Tanzania, halfway through the program).

Because we don’t get weekends, sometimes we get days off in the middle of the week (NPDs, or “Non-Program Days”). Yesterday (Tuesday) was one of those days, so I felt pretty lucky to be MOD on Monday, because it was a FRIDAY EQUIVALENT. I took it upon myself, as one of my less-(bordering-on-un)-official MOD duties, to remind everyone of that throughout the day. I am now also going to take it upon myself to describe that day in detail, and posit it as a typical day at KBC.

My more official duties on Monday started at 6:00, when I woke up to the gentle calls of the neighborhood ibis flock (these guys wake me up every morning. They sound, actually, the way that I imagine Tacky the Penguin sounds when he yells “WHAAAAAAAT’S UPPPPPPP” . . . I’m not sure if the Tacky the Penguin books have entered the collective consciousness yet, and I apologize if they haven't, but I really hope they have). I was very relieved when my alarm went off 10 minutes later. I got dressed (we had a field lecture scheduled for later, so I got to wear SAFARI CLOTHES . . . I look like Jane Goodall all the time here, with the addition, often, of a David Foster Wallace-style bandana). I tried not to wake up my bandamates, Chelsea and Lia . . . it’s hard because I sleep right across from Chelsea, and I have to walk by Lia to get out the front door, and I’ve lost the fight against the little thorns in the soles of my shoes so now whenever I walk across a hard surface it sounds like I’m tap-dancing. But I made it out, and across the dewy grass (I try to appreciate the dew here because it’s gone REALLY quickly) and to the solar panels, which I turned toward the sun (I’m not entirely clear on what the solar panels power, exactly, but I know that if I’m the one responsible for a lack of internet later in the day, I will probably be “accidentally left behind” in lion country at some point later on in the semester).

My MOD day happened to coincide with my day on KUKARU! Which is what I have started calling “cook crew” because that’s how Arthur, the head cook, says it and it makes him laugh. There are five students on each cook crew, and they’re named after tribes found in Kenya (I’m on Turkana Crew, named for a tribe from Northwest Kenya that raises camels and wears/fights with wristknives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Turkana-WristKnifeDemo.jpg) and they rotate through so each crew is on duty once every five days. So far I’ve had it twice – this time I made sure to be on time, because the first time (the second day here) I accidentally set my cell phone alarm for 6:00 PM and so overslept and had to be woken up by my friend/crewmate Becca, and Arthur glowered at me until I won him over again by fearlessly peeling scalding hot sweet potatoes with an enormous knife and my bare hands (he let me do it for a while before reminding me that I could run the potatoes under cold water first if I wanted to). My other friend and crewmate Max (don’t worry, all of you many Maxes in my life! This Max is short for Maximilian, and also we call him Mambo . . . name games again) had teamed up with me the first time and we made ridiculously good pancakes, so I was hoping we would get to do that again, but instead I was put in charge of cracking 160 eggs. I am now really good at producing perfect glistening shell-less (and shellbitless) eggs. Then Arthur had me peel the sweet potatoes again. I asked if I could use a wristknife, but he said no.

When we were finished, I got to ring the bell for breakfast. Which I did, of course, with great gusto.

Our cutlery-armory consists of a whole lot of tin plates and bowls, assorted silverwear (some with interesting things scratched into the handles . . . mostly acronyms again, mysterious ones), and about ten thousand white ceramic mugs. Most of the plates and bowls look as though they’ve been put into a cement mixer with a bunch of hammers and driven around for a while. And when everyone gets together right outside the chumba after breakfast to wash dishes (basin of hot soapy water with sponges -> basin of cool soapless water for rinsing -> plastic trash cans full of water-and-bleach for the dishes to hang out in until the next meal . . . it’s practically a dish spa), it sounds like . . . probably a cement mixer full of hammers and tin bowls and plates. I’ve tried to start a metal-on-metal percussion ensemble, thus far in vain.

The first class on Monday was a field lecture for Wildlife Ecology, which meant that Kiringe, our professor, wearing his signature lab coat (a student a few years ago made it for him, it has African birds drawn all over it in magic marker), led us outside and showed us all the places in the camp that we can “find science”, as he put it. That turned out to be basically everywhere, including an aardvark hole and the nest of a lesser yellow sparrow weaver, but most distinctly and memorably in a bowling-ball-sized piece of dried elephant dung (this week’s catchphrase: “do you know how much science is in this poop?”).
When we got back to camp, we had half an hour until Wildlife Management, so Lia and I gathered a bunch of different types of leaves and made a house for the hawk moth caterpillar she had found (http://www.wordsandpictures.me.uk/imag/img256.jpg). We’re not allowed to have pets in the bandas, so we decided that this caterpillar would instead be a “research subject”. He is doing pretty well so far and prefers acacia leaves. His name is Eli.

Wildlife Management was held outside around the fire pit, where our professor Shem taught us methods for estimating population counts of large animals from small samples. Then was lunch, which was exciting because I got to ring the bell again, and which tends to be similar to breakfast but with different food (usually beans and some kind of cabbage thing and vegetables and something with meat. Ok, I’m bad at describing food, but trust me, it’s REALLY good here . . . Arthur used to work at a 5-star safari resort, but we somehow snagged him. maybe because we’re so good at volleyball). And after lunch ANOTHER field lecture, this time for Maasai class, with Kiringe and Daniel. Daniel talked about how changes in Maasai culture have affected the environment, and let us know that once a Maasai man has passed his initiation, he traditionally introduces himself by saying “My name is ________ and I have killed a lion” (Daniel himself did not kill a lion, but only because it got away at the last minute. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it that much). Then they brought us around and told us about the medicinal properties of trees in the area, (and laughed at the fact that none of us had ever had worms, and described in graphic detail what it is like to have them. At which point we accused them of trying to make us lose our appetites for dinner so that they could have it all, which they did not deny). There’s one tree, Salvadora persica, which is nicknamed the Toothbrush Tree because you can use its mature twigs to clean your teeth (we are all waiting to run out of toothpaste so that we can try it). I also found out that my walking stick is made of the pith of an Acacia mellifera tree (or “Oiti” in Maasai).

After that, class was over, so we all did some homework and milled around the grounds and logged the things we’ve seen that day (part of an assignment for Shem) and generally just killed time until the mood was right for our thus-far-daily series of volleyball games. We all expected to play soccer here, but a very Kenyan combination of ball-killing thorns, visibility-killing dust, and brain-cell-killing lack of treeless space (we’ve had a few bad man/plant collisions) shifted our attentions early on to the volleyball net over near where the vervet monkeys live. We are getting pretty good, I must say. Daniel, Arthur and some askari often play with us, and there’s no better way to get riled up than to have a Maasai warrior in an environmentally-themed T-shirt yell “now you all die!” or “now we are getting serious!” or (my personal favorite) “we will now mess up your political house!” at the other team (or at your team. . . . but I try to be on Daniel’s team). Arthur had us convinced for a while that he had never touched a volleyball and that he was too shy to play, and we kept asking and cajoling over the course of several days, and then one day he ran out in his chef’s uniform and grabbed the volleyball and ran back nearly to the treeline and arced a perfect serve straight past the sun and into the corner of the other side of the court (by the way, ‘court’ = largely dethorned sand and ash pit, every time the ball lands in it we get a big plume kicks up and I think about how that asteroid killed the dinosaurs by blocking out the sun with dust). Now he’s trying to convince us that he used to play for the Kenyan national team, but Tome says that’s a lie too, just in the other direction.

After volleyball I usually go for a run around the fenced perimeter of the camp. I usually have to stop to look at at least one cool thing . . . today something unidentified and furry ran across the path in front of me, and I was hunting around in the bushes but couldn’t find it, and was disappointed until I looked up and saw a hornbill staring right at me (Zazu! which just means that the furry thing was probably Simba, too bad I missed him). Those floral and faunal distractions, and all the Maasai walking their goats around in the surrounding rangelands, who for SOME REASON tend to laugh and yell “Jambo” at the weird mzungu with the Maasai walking stick running around in circles next to their grazing land, make up for the altitude and the heat, and the fact that the path is only a mile, and this is totally the greatest place in the world to go running.

And then I go back to camp! And by this time my body temperature’s finally up enough that I can think about taking a shower. The showers are about the only cold thing here. They, and the bathrooms and laundry sinks, are housed in a couple of little thatched structures called chus, one at the end of each line of bandas (the camp is set up vaguely like an open square, with two lines of 5 bandas each facing each other, with a field and volleyball net and a couple of fire pits between them, and the chumba laid over the top, and the chus in the corners. I wish I could put a picture up, but I don’t think I have enough bandwidth). Showering is a difficult endeavor and there are many obstacles, including the water temperature, the fact that we’re all dirtier than we’ve ever been almost every day (the dust is a high-caliber infiltrator . . . you could stand around in one place in rain gear all day and you’d still probably get a good anthill’s worth out of your boots that night), that we all bought quick-dry towels without really thinking about how “quick-dry” describes a property of the towel itself rather than any skills it might have in relation to, say, a shoulder-length head of human hair, and that the thorns are almost as sneaky as the dust and any time you even hint at having bare feet they attack you for your insolence. But there are always a few people attempting to get clean at the same time, and so we shout war cries and moral support at each other over the partitions (which reminds me, I should learn how to say “this is freakin’ cold” in Swahili, and also “that is a huge spider on my bar of soap” . . . every little bit of practice helps).

After I showered, there was dinner at 7, which we somehow all managed to eat despite the earlier worm conversation. Then at 7:30 it was time for more special duties – every day the MOD leads something called RAP (= Reflection, Announcements, Presentation). For reflection, we’re supposed to talk about something that happened that day, or read a poem or a quote or tell a story or ask the group a question . . . I decided to bring some Marsh CoffeeHaus over to the equator and write a song about the stuff we’d learned over the course of the week. It went over well, and then there were some announcements, and then for the presentation I taught everybody how to play that game everyone has different names for where you write a sentence and then someone draws it and folds the sentence over and then someone else writes a new sentence etc. etc. Which turned out hilariously, as always (eventually I have to do an academic presentation, but I did not feel like doing that this time). After that I was able to finally relax and just be a regular student again . . . no more special duties. So I did some homework and some writing and hung out with people in the chumba, and then, since it was a FNE (= Friday Night Equivalent), we watched Donnie Darko on the projector in the classroom, and then I lay in a hammock and looked at the stars and watched everybody trickle out of the chumba and go off to their bandas and then I went back to MY banda and crawled under my mosquito net and fell asleep pretty quickly, for once.

Now hopefully you know a little more about what it’s like to be a student at KBC. The next few days look to be a lot like I just described . . . I don’t think we have any field trips until Saturday or so. So next time I write it’s going to be about Tuesday, our first non-program day, which was crazy in some ways I expected and even crazier in many ways that I did not. Stay tuned for those bushbabies . . . it’s a good story, I promise.

Miss you all,
Cara