Evening:
Today was a day of lots of driving and long conversations in Kiswahili that I did not understand (kind of goes without saying). Our plan for the day was for Annie to stay in the hostel while Doug and I went to pick up Rama or Halidi, get Lydia (a health outreach professional from the Karatu hospital), get permits for research in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (Doug has been working to get these permits for a year and a half now), talk to some village chairmen about setting up rodent traps, and then set up traps. That’s not quite how it ended up working out.
We picked up both Rama and Halidi, after I helpfully pointed out that the car has five seatbelts (I’m trying to subtly convince Doug that there’s no reason that Annie and I can’t both do fieldwork on the same day). We then drove to the hospital, which looks nothing like western hospitals. Like our hostel, it didn’t have electricity and unlike US hospitals, it did not have a generator. What it did have was lots of chickens wandering around. Rama and I waited for 45 minutes while Halidi and Doug got Lydia.
With Lydia in tow, we drove to Ngorongoro Conservation Area.
At the first gate there was a 10-15 minutes conversation in Swahili during which we learned that the actual office for the NCAA (Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority) was just inside the NCA, up the rode. So we started driving. Doug and I kept expecting it to be just a few more minutes until we got to the office, but it was over an hour drive on bumpy, steep, dirt roads. However, right inside the gate, I saw about two dozen baboons! My first exciting African animal! The picture’s not great since no one else was excited by baboons and we didn’t stop.
As Doug drove us up towards Ngorongoro Crater, it got super foggy and there were several dicey moments where we’d see safari vehicles (coming from either the crater or the Serengeti) barreling at us just in the nick of time. Visibility was pretty low due to the fog.
I smelled elephants and saw elephant poop, but did not see any elephants. Halidi saw a buffalo, but by the time he mentioned it, it was gone. Finally, we made it to the office. I oozed out of the car and was told not to wander because there are dangerous animals. I walked out of the office area and took a photo to give an idea of the mist:
I puttered around while Halidi, with Doug (who doesn’t speak much Swahili), had an hour long Swahili conversation, and became very familiar my hiking boots’ tread marks. From the conversation, we learned that the guy who approves permits was out of town, but his assistant assured Doug that he would call us June 31st Huh. When I was little and wanted something I couldn’t have, my dad used to promise it to me on June 31st.
After this we decided to check out some maize sites. Cue two hour drive on the uneven, rocky dust roads as we tried to avoid cattle, goats, and chickens. As Lydia would say, we were “danci danci.” Along the way there were more Swahili conversations.
Once we got to what may have been our destination, we tried to find the village chairman to ask about surveying maize. He was out but we had a half hour Swahili conversation about when it might be possible to meet him (“we” is a misnomer. I puttered around and Halidi, Rama, and Lydia spoke in Swahili, and would ask Doug for his input occasionally in English). We then drove awhile to see if there were good maize sites close to the NCA forest for pairwise experiments. More Swahili conversations were had with people about using their cornfields (I should mention for a moment that these are extremely poor people making less than a dollar a day, living in houses made of mud poured onto sticks and corn, usually with thatched roofs, or corrugated tin. There is no electricity or water). The five of us (Halidi, Rama, Doug, Lydia, and I) traipsed around the shamba (farm) and tried not to destroy people’s food. I wish I’d taken a photo because this particular farm had a patchwork of plants and they looked beautiful because they were growing red and orange flowers. Doug later explained that the flowers are grown for seed because evidently flowers grown in Tanzania are flown overnight to Europe, where they are sold at a huge profit.
After walking around, there were more conversations in Swahili because, even though none of the sites were ideal, Doug was trying to see if we could stay near them while we trapped so that we wouldn’t have to make the long drive on a daily basis. The farm owner seemed somewhat reluctant and he kept explaining (in Swahili) that he was concerned because there is no electricity, water, bathrooms, etc. Doug agreed to call later if he thought we were going to crash there, although he was warned that although the family had a cellphone, they had no way of charging it, so calls often do not go through.
We got home to find Annie, who had been left by herself all day and had been charged with making some photocopies and buying bread. She was napping on the couch and I think may have been suffering from cabin fever because she had very little to do, and you don’t really wander around middle-of-nowhere Tanzania by yourself if you’re a young mzungu woman.
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