June 29: Fieldwork!

Last night I dreamt about baby elephants. They were pink and fuzzy and wanted to be my friend and it was the best dream ever. Doug told me to lay off whatever I was drinking before bedtime, but if I could find a way to dream about fluffy pink baby elephants every night, that would be ideal.

Anyways, while I was doing nothing yesterday, the rest of the team was hard at work. They settled on two maize fields in Tloma to trap on (we can’t trap their accompanying forest sites because we don’t have the NCAA [Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority] permit. The hope is that the permit will come through in the next day or two so that the forest sites can be trapped ASAP, to control-ish for time) and painstakingly set up a 100m x 100m transect, putting labeled flags and hidden, baited traps every ten meters. Evidently the little kids that live on the shambas stole several of the flags for toys (they are excitingly neon colored). I think as long as none of the Sherman traps that we use to catch the mice go missing, all is well.


One of the maize fields, image taken by Annie

Doug, Halidi, Rama, Annie, and I started off the morning by returning to the maize fields. Each of us took two transect lines (per field) and walked the transect, picking up and folding the traps that remained open (which means they hadn’t caught anything), and putting the closed traps into our bags. Since there were presumably mice in these traps (although sometimes the traps get tripped by wandering gusts of wind or falling maize), I was ridiculously careful in picking them up and refused to put them in the carrying bag and instead cradled them in my arms. I wanted to peek at the animals in the traps but I was scared that I’d accidentally liberate the mice. Anyway, this carrying method works well for the first trap or two, but after that it becomes pretty difficult to carry them. At one point I think my gentleness was undone because, since I had carefully stacked so many traps in my arms, I couldn’t see the ground and I tripped on a piece of maize and face planted. Sorry mice. Between that and the dirty wetness of the traps (they’d been sitting out all night) and maize, by the time I was done, I was a hot mess of red-brown dirt.

In case you were at all confused, the traps we use (called Sherman traps) are designed to catch, not kill, mice. Sherman traps are rectangular cubes with one side that can open. We bait the traps with oats and peanut butter (meaning the mice eat better than we do!), and when anything crawls in and steps on a latch, the trap’s door closes. Here’s a photo that Annie took of a baited trap:



I met back up with the others (who had prudently chucked all their traps, including ones with mice, into their bags). All my care was further undone as Halidi and Rama took my traps from me and shook them vigorously to make sure the mouse was at the bottom of the trap before they opened the top to look in. One of my traps had a seriously adorable zebra mouse in it. :) I didn’t think to take a photo (story of my life in Africa), but it was a little light brown guy with dark stripes and good sized ears. Cute!

Next up is processing the mice. This involves determining the species of the mice (Halidi and Rama are amazing at this), sexing it (Halidi and Rama are amazing at this, too), weighing the mice, combing the mice for fleas and mites (this is the mice’s least favorite part), taking blood samples (this is my least favorite part), and ear tagging the mice so we know if we recapture them later. After this undoubtedly traumatizing experience, we put the mice back in their traps. Later in the day, we release the mice back at the exact place they were captured (this is the farmers’ least favorite part).





Processing the mice takes a ton of time, but when we finished there was still time before we had to reset and bait all the traps in the two maize fields. Thus, we took the opportunity to do vegetation surveys and dung surveys of one of the fields we were working in. Having this information is important but man are veg surveys extremely boring and time-consuming.

In the late afternoon/early evening, we reset the fields, putting 100 baited traps in each maize field (and making sure the traps were well hidden to prevent theft). And that was my first real day of fieldwork!

I also should note that Halidi and Rama are both hilarious. As we were processing mice, Halidi kept giving us jaded love advice (“sweetyfriends” are acceptable, but getting married will just ruin your life) and Rama kept dozing off (but would deny it). They’ve both been teaching us a little Swahili, and we have a super unusual vocabulary (I can say “hello,” “I do not like onions,” “how are you,” “ticks,” “rats,” “fleas,” etc.). On our drive back at the end of the day, Halidi told me and Annie something like “napenda panya, sipendi watoto.” That roughly translates to “I like mice/rats. I do not like babies/children.” Good to have that phrase on hand!

June 28: A slow day in Karatu

Today was my day to stay in the hostel while Doug took Annie out with the rest of the team. My to do list was to check whether the data sheets we had matched the data sheets Hillary had (they did), install the internet dongle on my netbook (it installed but didn’t really work anyway), purify water using the SteriPEN I splurged on at REI, get more toilet paper from the front desk, and take out the trash. With the exception of the internet dongle, I did all of this before Annie and Doug left. I had to wait for Doug to leave and be done with his laptop before I could grab the dongle (heh). The rest of the day was spent doing extremely little. I tried to go to the post office in Karatu, but they were closed for an indefinite period around lunch.

I’ll use today’s entry to briefly tell you about Karatu. Even I can be brief about Karatu because there is really not that much to Karatu.



(photos lifted from Annie, who was smart enough to take a photo of the place we were living for three weeks)

Don’t let the fact that this is a paved road fool you—this is both Karatu’s only paved road and only road, period. It’s paved because if you drive for another 25 minutes, you’re at the gate to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and you need to drive this road to get to both Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Karatu is a dusty, dusty one-road red dusty town. Off to either sides are shambas and other communities.

Karatu has the aforementioned post office, banks (mainly for people passing through on safaris), and a couple tiny souvenir stands, one of which is named “Obama” and the other has a sign naming it “Hillary Cington,” with the “g” crossed out. When Annie and I wander around without Doug, we tend to be accosted by the souvenir people. Every conversation we have starts off something like this:

Them: Hello! Mzungu! What is your name?
Me & Annie: Hi...we’re Pasha and Annie.
Them: Oh! Where are you from?
Me & Annie: The United States.
Them: Oh! Obamaland!!

There are a few little restaurants, all of which have plastic Coca-Cola chairs, plastic Coca-Cola tables, and their signs are on Coca-Cola boards. They all have flies, too. They all serve beef (chicken on a good day) with rice, ugali (staple food in Tanzania), or chips (French fries), but if you order the chips, be prepared to wait a long time.

Doug, Annie, and I have made ourselves regulars at the “Paradise Café,” which is, unsurprisingly given the nature of Karatu, right down the road from our hostel. It’s open-air and often has traveling socks salespeople wandering through it, which is a little different. The Paradise has a menu with probably about 20 items on it, but don’t be fooled. Doug asks what’s actually available and ready, and the answer is inevitably “rice, ugali, chips in 15 minutes (lies), roasti, and chicken,” although sometimes either of the meats are not available. Usually Doug orders first (“rice and roasti” = rice and beef + a Fanta passion*) and then Annie and I get the exact same thing. Neither Annie or I are accustomed to eating that much beef, but it all works out because I have befriended the cutiest adorablefaced kitten that appears to lurk around the Paradise at all times. She eats all the beef that I carefully feed her under the table and is just the cutest thing. I feel like the ability to befriend random cats makes my $606 worth of rabies shots totally worthwhile.

*it must be said that Tanzania has an amazing variety of Fanta flavors.

June 27: Long car rides and Kiswahili!

It’s 6:30am and I’m sitting on the couch blearily listening to the morning chorus (punctuated by roosters) and feeling like death. I never did fall back to sleep and between only sleeping for a few hours and the nausea from the doxycycline, I sure feel ready to take on the world today. On the upside, around 5:30 in the morning, I started hearing jackals, I think.

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.

June 26: To Karatu!

Once we get into the swing of things, I probably won’t do daily entries, or if I do, they’ll just sort of be short digests of funny things that happened. Until then, enjoy this far-too-detailed description of my day:

Arusha was loud, but not nearly as loud as Nairobi. The main noise was music from the market and praying. There are rolling power outages in Tanzania (government rations), so all our time in Arusha today was in the dark.

When Annie and I got up, we wandered down to the hotel’s restaurant and discovered that breakfast is complementary (well, discovered is a misnomer. Doug showed up and told us). Evidently this is the case in all of Tanzania, where someone decided that breakfast is bread, jam/peanut butter/honey, fried pancake/crepe-like things, watermelon (fun fact, watermelon in kiswahili is “tikitimaji” if our taxi driver is to be believed), omelets (every hotel or hostel has identical Spanish omelets and they are all very fried), and fried hotdog-like sausages.

After breakfast (and after we navigated six flights of stairs with our luggage in the dark), we met Rama and Halidi, field technicians from Morogoro with twenty and ten years of experience, respectively, working with rodents. Doug told Annie and me that one of us would probably have to stay in the lab each day and not go into the field because there were two of them (Doug had only intended to hire one field technician). We’ll see if I can’t convince him otherwise as I think things would be way more fun if Annie was also there.

Doug hired a surly noah driver to take me, Annie, Rama, and a bunch of our stuff to Karatu, while he and Halidi followed in the rental car with the rest of our field gear. Doug instructed me and Annie to make sure that our driver didn’t lose Doug, although we couldn’t see out the back due to how much luggage we had.

Me: Oh yeah Doug, we’re going to shake you and party it up in Karatu without you.
Doug: But if you lose me, you won’t know where the good mice spots are!

:)

Anyway, the drive to Karatu was beautiful. We saw lots of Maasai people with their cattle. It’s a really striking sight to see a sparsely vegetated landscape, dotted with tall, slender Maasai in their colorful, flowing cloth robes. As we were driving, Doug evidently saw a giraffe on Annie’s side of the road (her window had a self-applied tinted cover that rendered it useless). Wtf, we need to work on Doug telling us when he sees cool things. Although we didn’t see wildlife, an hour or so into the drive, I started spotting baobob trees. We drove past Lake Manyara National Park where there were tons of baobobs and a great view of the lake. Otherwise the drive was uneventful, except for some unhappy-looking woman pelting our car and Doug’s car with something.



We moved into the Karatu Lutheran hostel, which is no small task given the epic amount of stuff we have. Doug booked a suite (a hostel suite, which is a strange concept) for me and Annie, and it’s HUGE. We set up our lab in the big living room and it was nice to finally unpack. The electricity had been out in Karatu all day, so you can imagine our delight when Doug found mystery meat and cheese in the room’s minifridge.

Also! I nearly killed Doug! He and I were strapping a carry case to the top of the car and we wanted to string something through the windows, which were up. Since he was partially standing on the back of the car, he tossed me the keys. Evidently Doug hadn’t put the car in park (it’s a manual) or put on the parking break, because the second I turned the keys in the ignition, the car leapt backwards and I nearly ended Doug. Whoops. I felt pretty bad about that.

Walking back to my room, I met Kristen and Pidge, who were chilling in chairs in front of their rooms (there is only one floor and you walk on an outside path to all of them. Damn, I should’ve taken a photo of the hostel). I am pretty sure they will be regulars along the walkway. I learned that they are here with a non-profit group and they are interviewing students for scholarships.

We re-joined Halidi and Rama to talk logistics for our fieldwork, which starts tomorrow. Evidently in the forest sites we catch a lot of gerbils in our rodent traps (I forgot that gerbils are actually wild somewhere) and we have to be careful of the buffalo and elephants in the forest! We are going to be retroorbitally bleeding mice, ahhhh, although not killing them (until we take a few samples the last day) because we’re doing a mark-release-recapture experiment. We also trap on farms (man, at some point I should explain why I’m in Africa and what I’m doing, shouldn’t I?) and the farmers like it when we trap rodents since they’re a problem for the maize, but they’re not psyched when we release them. Halidi said we should tell the farmers that we’ve injected the rodents with a “medicine” that will kill them.

We got back to the hostel and Annie crashed. While she napped, Doug and I mixed rodent bait (peanut butter and oats) and I charged lots of batteries after the power returned around 7pm. This was more exciting as you’d expect as several of the bags I was mixing bait in had holes in the bottom of them and exploded the bait into my lap.

A little later, Doug delivered bananas (“ndizi”) to our room (a safe fruit because you peel it yourself and grown locally). I showered to get the peanut butter off of me and crashed before 9pm.

I woke up at about 1am and after lying in bed for an hour and a half wide awake, I got up to change the batteries charging. Annie was awake too, so we turned on the lights and snacked on bananas and weetabix. Now it’s 3:30am and Annie’s reading and I’m writing this.

June 25: To Tanzania

[this was one of several entries that I thought I posted while in Tanzania, but didn't actually upload]

I wrote my notes for this while on the shuttle bus from Nairobi to Arusha (Tanzania), where we will be spending the night. Hillary is off to Mpala (Kenya), and Annie, Doug, and I are on our way to Karatu (Tanzania). Originally, the plan was for the three of us to drive to Arusha, but there is an impossibly vast quantity of gear (or something in boxes and suitcases) so Doug is taking some of it with him in a car with a driver and Annie and I are taking a bunch more with us on the bus. All of the luggage is strapped up top in a somewhat precarious looking fashion. Annie and I are sitting near the back, so if our stuff falls off, at least we'll probably know it happened?

Around 8am this morning, we said goodbye to Hillary at the bus stop, where we were instructed us to text her often and to remind Doug that we need to eat and sleep and do more than science sometimes. Annie and I will be in Tanzania for three weeks with Doug, and then we're going to relocate to the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, where I'll stay for a month and Annie will stay for a week.

The bus is a great way to see the countryside, and I befriended four Aussies (two from Sydney, two from Perth) and two Brits. The road is pretty dusty and bumpy, punctuated by sudden stops and swerves to avoid stray goats and cows. The drive took maybe six? hours and the entire time, there was a show playing on the bus’s screen which can only be described as a Kenyan telenovela.



There are tons of flat-topped acacias, which are exactly what I picture when I think of Africa, courtesy of the Lion King (I'm a cool kid, I know). Closer to Nairobi, there were huge storks in the trees but as we got further out I stopped seeing the storks and started seeing hornbills and iridescent blue birds with bright orange either on their sides or under their wings. Doug says they were probably starlings [note: they are superb starlings]. We passed tons of villages and saw people in beautiful traditional clothes, often herding cattle. You can see my best attempts at photos when I post them on facebook, but they're pretty bad. With my photography skills and my slow camera, coupled with the bouncing speeding bus, I didn't stand a chance. (although Doug, in the car, evidently saw an elephant in the distance. Jealous!).



Speaking of cameras, mine is totally outclassed. Annie and pretty much everyone else on the bus have beautiful SLR cameras that make that impressive camera clicking (shutter) noise when they take photos. Annie has been taking lots of photos as we go so I'm going to try to get them at some point.

Continuing onward, our bus came to a halt at the border crossing, where we had to get out in Kenya to give them our departure forms. While waiting in line, Annie spotted Doug, so we joined him since he knew what he was doing and we very much did not. At the departure gate, the Kenyan officials randomly took my photo and not Annie's or Doug's. I guess I look sketchy like that (it might have something to do with my passport photo in which I like someone you would not let young children near).

After finishing with the Kenyan officials, we walked through a gate into Tanzania and waited in line forever to get our Tanzanian visas. They look extremely fake. They're a stamp and, handwritten in my passport, it says "multiple" [entry] and a few other notes. Huh. We then got back onto the bus and continued into Tanzania, all along the way getting texts from cellphone companies welcoming us to Tanzania and wouldn't we please consider using their services?

At first Tanzania looked the same as the part of Kenya we'd seen, except with more women balancing baskets on their heads. Further into Tanzania, we started seeing more agricultural fields (little farms known as "shamba"s). There was a lot of corn, a good amount of banana, and a few fields of sunflowers (which I later asked about and learned are planted for the oil). Mostly it was corn. I waved hello to some eucalypts that were planted as tree fences.

Once we got to Arusha, we were told to get off the bus, which was perplexing because Hillary told us that morning that the bus should take us directly to our hotel, the Natron Palace. Immediately we were surrounded by taxi drivers and people trying to sell us safaris. We were overwhelmed but then--Doug! Doug was conveniently at the bus station too and convinced the driver to take us and all our stuff + action packers full of equipment to the hotel.

We got to the hotel and washed a couple hundred kilometers of road dirt off our faces and went out with Doug in search of an ATM. While Doug went to a vodaphone store to fix his internet "dongle," Annie and I explored Arusha's main market. Annnie has way more photos that really better show the chaos of the main market, but here are my pathetic ones:




We were the only "mzungu"s (Kiswahili equivalent of "gringo") and, if we weren't already obviously enough tourists, we sealed the deal with Annie's camera and my GPS/compass (I was logging where the hotel was and how to get back). We were everyone's favorite people as they tried to convince us to buy stuff. We let one guy show us to his "mama's" fabric shop, which he claimed was a mere five meters away. Fifteen minutes of walking later, we ooh'ed and ahh'ed over some legitimately beautiful cloth, including a bolt of cloth with giraffes on it. I actually kind of want it, but we weren’t about to buy anything before going to do fieldwork and we were both feeling overly hassled. At least I know to be on the lookout now.

Afterwards, Annie and I meandered back to our hotel and decimated a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. At around 4:30, Annie passed out (we really hadn't slept much). I puttered around the room until Doug got me for dinner around 5:30?

No place here is terribly safe after dark, so we opted to eat at the restaurant in the hotel, which in Tanzania is both an affordable and usually good/delicious option. Intrigued by what I assumed was a typo (and it was), I ordered "potato and pear." Service took forever as we were the only ones there and Doug said that the hotel staff was probably going to the market to buy ingredients. So Doug and I had a nice hour+ chat while we waited for our food.

Immediately after dinner, we crashed.

June 24: Flying to Africa!

(expect the first few entries, as I get them up, to be long and blithery. Eventually I'll start streamlining, but I had a lot of time to write these ones. More photos will be added later, but it's difficult to upload images)

My parents dropped me off at Dulles (airport) around 3:30? for my 6pm flight. The airport was crazy and the Air France lady where I checked in tried to convince me that my daypack and my rucksack counted as two large carryon items and that one would have to be checked because you can only carryon one large item and one personal item. I nicely pointed out that everyone else and their mom was checking in with bigass suitcases as their larger item and smaller suitcases as their personal item, and that, combined, my backpacks were smaller than most peoples’ “personal item.” The lady was having none of it, telling me that it is Air France’s policy. Exasperated (and sleep deprived), I asked if I put the contents of my backpack in a duffel bag (that I was checking) and the duffel bag’s contents in my backpack , then checked the backpack and carried on the duffel bag, whether that would be permitted. She explained that that was fine, even though the duffel bag is a good deal bigger than my backpack. At that point I was like “this is moronic” (phrased differently) and the lady called over a manager who took one look at my stuff and told me it was fine. Take that, Air France lady.

Security was crazy but I befriended a charming guy from London who was going home. He told me to be careful in Africa because some of the cities there are “dodgy.” Love it. After making it through security, I waltzed over to my plane, which then had delayed boarding. I made it onto the plane which then had a delayed take off (and a strange Dutch man in the seat next to me, who I may have befriended?). Still, better than my flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi, which sat on the tarmac for three hours. Lovely lady from Zambia was sitting next to me on this flight, and she told me that she was going back to visit her kids in Zambia but that she worked in Finland but would soon be in Tanzania with her boyfriend to go scuba diving. The flight to Nairobi and the airport in Nairobi were full of missionaries. Everyone seemed to be going on a mission and the row in front of me on the plane was talking church smacktalk about whose church was better (they were also wearing fabulous safari hats which makes me feel marginally better about the amazingly ugly hat my mom got me).

The lines to go through passport control / get a visa took forever and my bags were waiting, as was the driver that Hillary sent to pick me up. The driver, James, was psyched that he was the first Kenyan I had properly met and asked me to invite him to my college graduation. He told me a little about the city, but sadly it was nearly midnight and I couldn’t see a thing except the drivers we nearly hit (or that nearly hit us). Nairobi is not a city I’d like to drive in.

Got to the hotel, met Annie (the other undergrad doing research here with Hillary and Doug), checked in with Hillary and Doug, and crawled into bed. The city was crazy loud (I was wearing earplugs but I think there was a party going on in the street outside our window) so I only think I slept for an hour or two. Around 4:30am, I gave up on sleeping, got up, showered, and started shuffling things around in my suitcases. I felt bad for making noise (my mom puts everything that might even think about leaking in plastic bags, and, as such, my suitcase tends to crinkle), but I was nothing compared to the noise of Nairobi. As it turns out, Annie was laying in bed awake, too.

And on a parting note, mosquito nets make you feel like you’re a princess in bed:

alive and well

I apologize for the radio silence--internet access and computer usage are scarce. I'm keeping notes for a blog in a book so things will eventually get put up here. I may have to make posts without photos for awhile, as uploading seems to be a real problem.

Hello from Karatu, Tanzania!