Kenya Trip - Day 14 (evening)

Dated: August 17th, 2010 (evening)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

I was going to talk more about what happened with the woman and the buffalo but I think I just need more time to process it. Here's the summary though: Africa will never look like the United States. It's not coincidence that all of the most well-developed countries in the world are in the temperate climates; Africa is mankind's ideal range where human populations are kept in check by environmental factors while these temperate zones allow humans the ability to control and exploit natural resources most efficiently. Here in Africa, people are not so lucky; here the landscape controls them, not the other way around.

We were going to have one of K's mentors, a pastoralist specialist named Bilal Butt, lecture us but apparently a cyclist (carrying several crates of chickens on the back no doubt) swerved in front of Bilal's truck and lost control and Bilal hit him. The man was taken to the hospital by Bilal in Nanyuki but Bilal was unable to come and lecture (he had to deal with legal stuff (sometimes people want to sue in situations like this simply because they see someone is white)). Instead, a colleague of Lamine Sagna's named Jesse Njoka from the University of Nairobi lectured about a project of his concerning sustainable pastoralism.

It's been raining briefly every afternoon since last week but tonight it poured. A, Z, K, and L and the master's students got stuck in the mud next to a semi on the way back from Nanyuki and missed the lecture. My converter got fried so no more charge for my camera but I got to check email.


The hyenas were really bad--S, J, and I waited for an ascari for a while and then braved the darkness alone, even though we were sure we could hear the hyenas in the bushes around us. It was so scary.

Kenya Trip - Day 14 (pm)

Dated: August 17th, 2010 (pm)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

I kind of thought this trip would have gotten its act together already (by 2 weeks in) but this morning was yet another mad scramble to find vehicles and drivers to get us all where we needed to get to. We were about to take off with about 13 of us crammed in 1 Land Cruiser with C (a master's student) driving when Julius pulled up with our new driver Edward. Apparently he was a replacement for one of our old drivers, "No Problem" Ben (known for drinking and driving and had recently been fired for getting into a knife fight at a bar). Edward drove us to the Ranch house to meet with R.

We stopped on the way to see the hippo pool. We could see the hippos' heads and they were huge!


R met us at the Ranch House with wet hair. She spouted logistics for the week at us and then Mike, the ranch manager and a Kenyan-born white, told us the history of Mpala and the area surrounding it. It was very interesting to hear about all of this from someone whose family was originally instated in the country during colonizations. At one point, Mike got pulled away and R encouraged us to look through the old books in the library. The books were very cool because a lot of them had been written/chosen by colonialists and ranchers. The house used to be owned by a prince and princess of Austria (they installed the water turbine in the 30s back when the ranch was a dairy) so many of the materials in the library are very old.

A few students went with the master's students to look at the Ranch House's borehole and water system. They came back saying there was some kind of disturbance in the village (there's a village connected to the Ranch House just as there is one connected to the MRC). They heard that there was a woman who had gone up the hill behind the Ranch House and was screaming and wouldn't come down. R said it might be a snake bite--those are common around here apparently (even though we've yet to see even one snake). Mike came back in and said we were going to see his ranch house (which is called Clifford). We all piled in the car and waited for a bit and then R got word that Mike had been detained by the village woman situation so we went back to the library so R could give us a bit more of the current situation and structural details of Mpala. During our discussion, Mike re-entered and asked if anyone had seen his notebook. One student handed it to him and he moved to walk out the door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned back to us and said, "What has happened is a woman has been killed by a buffalo."

He left a silent, shocked room. No one spoke for what seemed like a whole minute. No one could believe it--while we had sat amongst the books in the library, trying to understand this land, a woman had been killed not 200 m from where we sat by a creature we would have halted our Land Cruiser to snap photographs of. I don't know that any other occurence could have made me so acutely aware of the place of people in the chain of life here. Humans do not dominate this landscape.

Kenya Trip - Day 13

Dated: August 16th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

I'm in W's group. I'm not sure this is where my interests lie--I thought I made enough of an effort to show a great deal of interest in both rangeland management and sustainability but maybe I was overlooked? They said you could request a switch, but it's such a small class, I don't want to be a stick in the mud or make somebody else move.

We ended up doing interviews for the morning. We split up to interview John the waiter and Apollo our research assistant. R and W were pretty vague about our goals so most of us took advantage of this as an opportunity to gain material for our personal projects. I was in the group that interviewed Apollo. I'm still formulating my project, so I let me group members ask most of the questions. Apollo, like Nicholas, is from Il Motiok, so I was able to ask him about how many livestock animals are killed by wildlife every year. He told me that last August a pack of wild dogs killed 8 of his own goats. I feel like there was a bit of a language barrier inhibiting us both ways. One of the student in my group tended to ask the most questions and often phrased them in a lengthy, drawn-out manner that I think severely affect Apollo's ability to grasp the question. When he didn't understand, Apollo's method was to cling to a few key words from the question. For example, the question would be "How do you think Ilmotiok's population growth and growth in education will impact further relations with Mpala? Do you think it will be more strenuous for both parties?" And Apollo would go on about how important growth is to Il Motiok and how good Mpala is for the group ranch as a whole. The other group interviewing John talked to him about the referendum to the constitution and literally brought to the table various booklets and a copy of the new constitution in Swahili. Apparently he was very excited about the changes coming to Kenya.

We had a lecture from Lamine Sagna, another professor from Princeton (but originally from Senegal). His lecture was about a course he was teaching entitled "Science, Technology and African Development." It was all about how Africa needs to catch up to the rest of the world developmentally. It was all very theoretical and even posed phases for what Africa should go through in order to become more developed. It seemed disconnected from the Africa I've seen so far--he tended to make lots of generalizations and avoided specific examples, but maybe I'd have to take the course. It was great to finally hear from a member of the African "elite."

Kenya Trip - Day 12 (pm)

Dated: August 15th, 2010 (pm)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


We headed up to the MRC for Andy Hoffman's lecture. It was very interesting but very business- and profit-centered which caused a variety of reactions from the group. He had a lot of good quotes in his slides and I really liked that.

Logistics have finally been figured out for the last half of the trip: it appears that the undergrads will be broken up into groups: one will be social/interview work with W, rangeland monitoring with K, and sustainability challenges with the master's students. K had the actual lists though and she's still talking to the profs at the ranch house (she's even missed dinner) so I don't know which group I'm in.

I asked W about my dog project idea and he admitted that he didn't know how ti might be received. He did say that he thought the project might be too complicated and specific for this trip but it may be something to consider for the future. I think I can hold on to that.

Kenya Trip - Day 12 (am)

Dated: August 15th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


We went on a game drive this morning. Someone had heard that there were lions and wild dogs on the north side of Mpala so we decided to go check it out. We found way more animals than we even saw on the sundowner. We saw plains zebras, impalas, and then came across the wild dogs. It was a pack of around 15-20 dogs.


The ascari tracked the wild dogs and then the cars followed them--they brought us so close! We spent a lot of time circling them and chasing them through the bush.


On the way from there to the borehole, we saw baboons, more impala, plains zebras, hartebeast, Grevy's zebra, and buffalo (spotted by Apollo from almost a mile away!). We were briefly stopped by a large herd of elephants. We were so close to the bull and near the babies I was sure he was going to charge!



The borehole was very cool--the pump drills into an aquifer that provides all the water to the ranch house and MRC (but they have to filter the water because it contains high levels of flouride). The trick with an aquifer is to keep the amount of water being taken from the aquifer at a sustainable rate so that it can be replenished by rainwater--this is exactly what the MRC master's students are here to help with. There's a whole group of Masai that live at the pump house up on the plateau and get paid to turn the pump machine on and off by Mpala. It's very interesting.

W leaves on Tuesday--I have to remember to ask him about my dog project idea--he's spent so much time interviewing people here at Mpala and at the group ranch he will probably have some good ideas about how it would be received and what sorts of challenges might arise.

After the game drive this morning, I'm covered in dust! There's literally a layer on all of my clothing and backpack. I can feel it coating every strand of my hair; it's even in my ears, eyes and nose! I need to clean my camera--there's a layer of it on the lens even!

Kenya Trip - Day 11 (pm)

Dated: August 14th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


We are now halfway through our time here in Africa. It's crazy how time has flown. The other day, someone figured out that it costs the Graham Institute $.03 a second for each of us to be here. That's crazy, too.

The professor J's lecture was very interesting, if depressing. It was supposed to be about disease ecology but for some reason it ended up being about how extinction dooms an unfathomable percent of the species of the world. It was really depressing to hear how many frog species have gone extinct from the chrytid fungus--I thought of the Blue Jeans frog at Raña Roja Beach in Panama and wondered if it might still be there, even though only 2 years have passed since I was last there.

I got to charge almost 3 batteries during the lecture (courtesy of a broken projector). After the lecture, we went to say hi to C and K's friend, a researcher named Andrea who is studying parasite loads in Grant's gazelles (apparently they have parasite numbers that would kill most other species but no one knows why). We got to watch her take the feces from its raw form to a microscope slide so we could see the parasite eggs. It was very cool and complicated but it looked like Andrea had a pretty sweet deal, working with such cool animals, not to mention playing with poop all day. She seemed less than enthused though. K did mention that Andrea's been working in Africa with monkeys for a long time--maybe she finds non-primates boring.

After lunch, W talked about his research which has involved talking to people in various capacities in and around the ranch, trying to gain a comprehensive picture of the social structure here and trying to put together an ethnography of Mpala. He talked a lot about Nicholas' village of Il Motiok.

He mentioned that at the beginning of the summer, he and K heard about a leopard that was killing cattle. The group ranch did as they are required by Kenyan law and called KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) to capture and relocate the animal. It took KWS 6 days to get out there and in those six days, 12 cattle and 5 dogs were killed. KWS threw a dead dog in a cage for bait and caught the leopard. KWS was going to relocate it but the animal was dead the next morning. Initially, it was thought that the leopard had been killed by the cage but as the villagers were skinning the animal (all the skins go to a vault in Nairobi to prevent them from entering the black market), they discovered that the animal had actually been stabbed several times by a spear. There was an outcry in the village--they see this as a potentially hurting their relations with Mpala--but many proclaimed that they were happy that the leopard was dead. I found this, along with another story about a man losing 2 of his 3 cattle to a lion just a few weeks ago to a single lion attack. It was very sad, considering that these cattle are the entire livelihood of many of the people of Il Motiok, but it got me thinking about Laurie Marker (of the Cheetah Conservation Fund) and her work with lion-chasing dog packs given (like micro-financing) to villagers to protect their herds. I started thinking that this would be cool project to see if it could work here.

After R's colonialism and disease ecology lectures (we learned about Q fever and how it will affect our ability to see a cattle dip (kills all the ticks on the cattle; without it all the ranch's cattle would die)), I started asking about this potential project. R was surprised--she said she thought for sure I would be doing a multimedia project. It's funny though--in any other academic situation, I would be looking for any way to turn my final exam into a video project but now I feel like I'd do anything to make this a solidly, unartful and academic one.

We had a huge campfire/party with lots of people from all over Mpala and I got to run my idea by a lot of different people. One person was able to tell me offhand that having one untrained dog barking in the boma reduces predation already by 35%. This is a pretty impressive statistic I'd definitely have to find some solid support for that when I get back home before the conference. I was also told that domestic dogs attract African wild dogs and this could be a problem considering that wild dogs are one of the biggest predators of livestock and I know that these livestock dogs are effective against big cats, but I don't know how they react to the canine variety of predator.

While I mulled this over, someone brought out marshmellows, chocolate, and graham crackers. I was so excited for s'mores but we had to find our own roasting utensils in the bush--and let me tell you, finding a marshmellow stick in Africa is hard because every single tree and bush is covered in thorns! I was excited to eat chocolate and marshmellow for the first time in 2 weeks, but my stomach kind of balked; everything tasted extra sugar and my belly was like "Refined sugar? What?" Regardless, I managed to scarf down 2 even though I was sure I'd get through 4. Call me crazy, but maybe this will cut down on my "sugar whiplash" when I get home.

If the $.03/second is true, than this journal entry (written from 10:35pm to 11:13pm., lasting approximately 38 min) cost $68.40. Crazy.

Kenya Trip - Day 11 (am)

Dated: August 14th, 2010 (am)

Location: Mpala Research Center, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

Everyone is forming groups for the class project today and I'm still not completely sure what I would like to study. I really need to start writing out a list and try to narrow it down to my own topic or start talking to other groups about their ideas and possibly joining up.

We're at the MRC this morning (getting to charge my camera finally--yay!) to hear the professor J lecture (and try to make sense of the dikdik data from yesterday--good luck ;P Our chameleon friend is here too--its living in an outside enclosure by the library. She looks very happy--at least we won't have to worry about her getting eaten!

Kenya Trip - Day 10

Dated: August 13th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

Friday the 13th was . . . interesting.

We got going a bit earlier the morning so we could perfect our animal behavior experiments. My group got assigned the dikdik (a small deer-like creature the whole class has been obsessed with all week) while the other group got assigned the red-headed agama (a type of lizard). Team Dikdik came up with about a dozen different behaviors (fleeing, standing vigilant, laying down, mating, scenting, etc.) that we could potentially observe in the field. The professor J showed up late to our discussion and proceeded to spend 20 min criticizing our observation methods which I think everyone was a bit irritated about.

Team Dikdik broke up into 3 groups of 3 in order to study 3 pairs of dikdik (they are strictly monogamous and are never without their mate). My trio consisted of myself, Z and undergrad K. C dropped us off where we spotted 1 dikdik dart off into the bush. We spent the next 20 min chasing half a dozen of the mini antelopes through the brush. This did not work as it appeared we were not nearly as stealthy as we would have liked to think ourselves. We tried a new approach; K and Z sat in the bushes while I tried to sneak around and flush them out: Fail. (K and Z saw maybe 1?)


Next, all 3 of us hid in the bushes at what we knew to be the edge of dikdik territory (according to the dung mittens--aka piles of tiny dikdik poo pellets): Fail. (We saw nothing except obnoxious zazu birds which proclaimed loudly that we were intruding) We wandered deeper into the bush before we realized that this probably wasn't a very good idea considering we had neither C nor an ascari with us--we didn't even have a cellphone or a radio or a whistle! So we returned to the ranch house where C had dropped us off where we set up another stake out on top of a water cylinder--or rather K and I did while Z napped. Regardless, Fail. Then C showed up and we kind of gave up which he didn't quite encourage but certainly didn't discourage either. I did some yoga on top of the concrete cylinder and it felt very very good; I should be doing that every day.


So we ended up with no real usable data, but a much better appreciation for wildlife observation and for wildlife behaviorists everywhere.

We hung out after lunch in the camp, again. A and Apollo de-dened a huge tarantula in the yard and C finally went to release the chameleon (although we learned later that he gave it to someone at the research center). K and W went to meet with R and the ranch manager Mike and take Nicholas back to the group ranch.


We headed out for a game drive and sundowners at the dam. The big thing was having beers with the profs, but we ended up seeing a lot of "game" (which spawned the phrase "got game?"). The car situation kind of stressed me out--the drivers apparently took 1 of the 3 Land Cruisers to Nairobi so we only had 2 vehicles for all 15 undergrads, the profs and their families. I ended up getting pretty panicked by the close quarters and ended up standing the whole way there and back.


We saw a lot of dikdik, giraffes, elephants, Grant's gazelles, impalas, plains zebra, Grevy's zebras (which it turns out look a lot like donkeys from afar). The class had beers with the profs on a cliff overlooking Laikipia (lie-kip-ee-ah) Valley. We also found some bones.



On the way back, in the dark, we passed through the Mpala gate near the Ranch House and there was no guard, even though it was just past dusk. We rounded a corner into a ravine and the headlights hit this motorbike lying in the left side of the road, abandoned. It was eerie--everyone in the car went quiet while the car behind us was yelling, what's going on? Robert jumped out of our LC, panicked and shouting in Swahili into his radio. The motorbike is the one that is used by the ascari at the gate (just a 100 m behind us) and Robert had heard on the radio that there were elephants very close by--elephants have been know to closeline cars and bikes on the road. With this in my mind, that lone, overturned motorcycle in the road has become the creepiest and most powerful images in my head and the scariest thing I've seen so far in Africa. We waited on the side of the road, shining our flashlights into the darkness, hoping to locate whoever belonged to the bike.

Julius showed up quickly and insisted that we go back to river camp (we were late for dinner). He said he thought that maybe the elephants had grabbed the bike and dragged it from the guard station but he didn't seem convinced. On his radio, he was asking for a head count of his staff. After we got back to camp, Robert listened on his radio and found out that someone had been on the bike and found himself being chased by an elephant. The man abandoned the bike and ran into the bush, hoping to lose the elephant. He made it to safety. Still, the image of the motorcycle laying in the pool of light made by the headlights haunts me--this fantasyland of wildlife and the animals we've grown up personifying in children's books and movies are not as fun and harmless as we would like to believe.

On the way back to camp, the second car saw a leopard in the dried-up river bed about 200 yards from camp and an ascari said there were lions across the river last night--all this plus the elephant incident made us all much more wary walking around camp.

Nicholas, who hadn't made it to the group ranch as planned, stayed for dinner. At the end of the meal, he stood up and said that he so enjoyed talking with us and staying with us, and he shared with us an old saying--something about "mountains (something) and people meet" and that how because we are kindred spirits, he knows we will meet again--if not in this life, then another. I have no words to describe how powerful that moment was.

Kenya Trip - Day 9

Dated: August 12th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

Discussed the interview methods and experiments from yesterday. We got in groups to talk about it and we discussed our interview with W. We were supposed to write about it also. It was awkward because the other groups who had C and K wrote bios about their subjects, and our piece was mostly just about how awkward W was during the interview.

Then we discussed the "participant observation" from yesterday at the soccer game. Then we tried to the feed the chameleon grasshoppers which didn't go over well. Right before lunch, someone brought up email again and tensions rose over when we were going to get a chance to contact our parents. All the students are eager to just send their parents a quick email to let them know that we're ok, and the grad students sent one when we initially landed but it's been a week since then. It seemed pretty reasonable but then we got ripped up oneside and down the other for being too attached to technology--you know, because it's not like we all gave up our cellphones, laptops, and iPods for this trip. Jerk. He knows who he is. I'm over it. I just hope the grad students bother to answer my mom when she emails them--I don't want her to worry--we are in fricking Africa after all.

We sat around for several hours while the profs went to hang out with their families and the grad students went to the MRC. Undergrads found ways to entertain ourselves though. We played around in the river bed (hippos and crocodiles be damned!) and played with our chameleon friend.


In the evening, Nicholas, the secretary of the group ranch to the North called Il Motiok and the research assistant to Dan Rubenstein's student Stephanie, cam to talk with us. The people of Il Motiok are very poor. Stephanie's research is trying to figure out what these people are eating and how they are surviving. She is also trying to introduce a way of surviving that will move these people away from keeping livestock in large numbers as a substitute for money, food, and education. The hardest part, Nicholas says, is that herding is far easier than farming. The group ranch has a collection of bandas--an ecotourism lodge--but it has been run, until quite recently, by some very corrupt individuals. With Nicholas and his friends now elected and in power in the group ranch, Nicholas hopes to spread the bandas' wealth so that the whole community benefits. Nicholas also had some powerful words to say about women and their right to own property and assets, speak in village council, and be people in their own right. It was quite awesome coming from someone in a society that has traditionally traded cattle for women.


Nicholas also talked about the bad drought that happened last year that dried up the Ewaso Nyiro (the same river that runs through camp supplies the group ranch with its water also) and drove many pastoralists in his village to move to Mt. Kenya, far away. Many cattle died, he said, and many more were sold for far far below their worth just before they died (for $50 instead of $300 to wealthy ranchers with access to water and grass who could fatten them up and sell them for much much more). It was all very very sad but Nicholas himself seemed very proud of the progress made and very optimistic about the future.

Dinner was delicious--lamb and vegetables and beans and rice. C had some good ideas about study abroad in Costa Rica over dinner--gotta remember to look those up when I get home!

Fire circle was after dinner. Grad students showed up with beer--specifically a local favorite called Tusker. Didn't drink but good fun.

Kenya Trip - Day 8

Dated: August 11th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

This morning R lectured for about 3 hours about ethnography work, specifically interviewing and interview methods. She talked a lot about Evans-Pritchard's work and appropriately titled book "The Nuer," which I am now attempting to read.

After her lecture, we broke off into groups and interviewed the graduate students C, K, and W. My group interviewed W. We broke up further and L and I interviewed him using semi-structured interview method (which involves having a few basic questions and/or points you definitely want answered). W's research involves interviewing lots of people both in and around Mpala to discover how such a unique institution affects people in all levels and occupations. He also mentioned the referendum and how he had talked to some people about how they thought it might affect conditions in the country and that no one really seemed to know, but they were hopeful. I asked him if he thought Kenya was headed in the right direction in terms of development and he said he didn't know what the right way was. W's research brought to mind the concept of building a country from the ground up as opposed to Western industrialized top-down structuralization. It's an interesting thing to consider.

R is also pushing us to choose research topics--topics we want to learn more about here at Mpala--for our final project. I feel like I'm at a crossroads. There are so many things I want to learn more about here but I worry that I lack the raw intellect to effectively express, first of all, what I want to know and, secondly, pursue an answer or several answers. I really need to talk to someone about this but I feel like the graduate students are already really hassled by having to babysit us, my fellow students are caught up in their own research woes, and the professors are too rarely with us. I guess I can just keep trying to think about it--I've got a few days before I should really have something nailed down anyway.

A few of us went to go see the water turbine that supplies power to the Ranch House. The engineer was there temporarily to help tweak the system (apparently the turbine has been in use since the 30s). It was very cool! I was also interested that the water supplied all the Ranch House's power but also that the turbine was barely running at half its full capacity.


In the afternoon, we went and played soccer in the village. The Mpala team just won a district championship or something and had won a brand new pair of goal posts. The field is set up on the plateau just above the village above the research center. The field shares the plateau with the airstrip and there are no trees so the wind just whipped across in big clouds of dust.

Most of the real Mpala team was working or out of town we heard but it seemed like there were plenty willing to take their place in the game. A few of our research assistants (like Robert and Apollo) and Julius (the head of security at Mpala) played on our team. It was about 20 min in before Mpala scored the first goal and I was surprised we hung in that long. It was amazing how easily the game went even though most of us didn't speak the same language: offsides, out-of-bounds, corner kick, goal kick--these were all things so universal and innate to the game, we didn't need words to make it work. We scored right before the end of the first half which resulted in a chant of "Hail to the Victors" that seemed quite out-of-place.

At half time, we retreated to the sidelines for water and were immediately descended upon by dozens of children. I got no rest as I discovered my potential as a human amusement park. "Cuckoo!" means "grab my hands and spin me around in a circle" and "up" means piggy-back ride, followed by more spinning.

I went back into the game, then came back so that someone else could go in. As soon as I made it to the sidelines, I was ordered by several young girls to sit on the ground. They began braiding my hair. I ended up with about 25 mismatched braids sticking out of my head. The girls tried to commandeer my bandanna and hair tie--I felt bad taking them back but I haven't really packed much and tying my hair back is kind of a necessity in this heat. The boldest girl pointed to a collection of silly bandz on her wrist and asked me to give her some and didn't believe me when I said I didn't have any. The professor J asked me to come join him and R in the car to discuss video ideas. The girl asked me when I would come back and what I would bring her. The interaction seemed odd and contrived--I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. The final score for the game was 10-2 with team Michigan on the losing end.


The professor J and R had a lot of different ideas for themes for the video--I was glad when She-J stepped in to say that they should just pick one. Lots of people don't realize how complicated it is to weave so many themes into one video. In the end, they were still pushing for more than one theme, but at least I have She-J on my side. I won't really know what's feasible until I have more of an idea of what kind of footage I'm getting.

C found a chameleon--it was so cool! When the profs kicked me out of their car, I hopped in C's car and asked what happen to the chameleon. Student he-A said, "Look at [she-A] and see if you can find it!" The chameleon had turned itself completely white and was clinging to her forehead. I got to hold it for the way home and it was really cool--it has a double-split claw on each foot. C and I put her in a box to keep overnight. We'll find and feed her grasshoppers in the morning.

"Kin-yonga" is Swahili for chameleon

Rinsed off after we got back to camp--the layer of dirt covering my skin was ridiculous. Note to self: sweat plus billowing gales full of dust equals disgusting mess. I didn't even have enough water to wash my hair so that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Dinner was pretty small--just a stew and some rolls. For the first time since we arrived, I had to supplement a meal with a granola bar from my bag.

Kenya Trip - Day 7 (pm)

Dated: August 10th, 2010 (pm)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


So charging didn't happen as planned . . . I mean, I got a little bit done but I'll be out by tomorrow . . . I'm a bit disgruntled by the lack of resources and information going on here but doing my best to stay positive cuz Hey, I'm in Africa =)

We compared and analyzed data from yesterday and found that most of our assumptions--that the largest ant colonies were nearest to the glades and that the ants in those colonies would be the most aggressive--were wrong.

Next, we went out in the field with Truman Young--a famous plant biologist and professor from UC Davis--who was basically the first researcher at Mpala. He took us to the research projects (after 1 flat tire) called KLEE. These were fenced-in areas meant to exclude one type of herbivore or another and determine the effects of a particular herbivore group's herbivory on black cotton plant life. I found what he was working on to be very current and interesting but he outright disreguarded Rubenstein's findings for no other reason, it seemed, than that they clashed with his own. Young's project suggest that cattle and wildlife cannot coexist without dire consequences inflicted upon both groups. I loved Rubenstein's findings so much that I wanted him to be the one in the right and this definitely influenced my view of Young--that, combined with the heat at the field site and his ceaseless spewing of facts and experimental data--definitely put his persona down in my mind. For sure, both researchers had an agenda, but I really wanted the one that favored wildlife and societal cooperation to be right.


On the way back to river camp for lunch, we saw a lioness in the black cotton amongst the tall grasses. B spotted her--I don't know how--but she was at least 150 yards from the road and too far for a picture.

We went to the MRC so R could lecture about pastoralist systems and their relation to cultural and political ecology and anthropology. It was a really good lecture I just wish I had had more background; it seemed really dense and there was a lot to wade through. The fact that it was pouring on the tin roof just made everything all that much harder to understand.


We played get-to-know-each-other games around the campfire until late. The days are picking up speed. It felt like the first days I was here were impossibly, exhaustingly long but today it seems like breakfast was just five minutes ago and I'm suddenly in bed again, writing in my journal by the light of my headlamp. I don't want this trip to ever end--I need to find someway to make the days longer!

Vocab word of the day:
"Pride Rock Fixation"-the need to associate everything you see in Africa with Disney's "The Lion King"; example: calling all red-billed hornbills "Zazu"

Kenya Trip - Day 7 (am)

Dated: August 10th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


Something was crashing around in the bushes last night shortly after we went to bed last night--Jody was kind of freaking out and kept telling her (and myself) that it was a dikdik but then it started knocking down trees and we decided it was a hippopotamus. I tried to get some reading done while I was up but I was fading fast and quit at 11. Hippopotamus or no, I blacked out as soon as my head hit the pillow and woke up when my watch went off at 7am; I think the What's-Outside-the-Tent Game: Midnight Edition might be finally done.

Got up early to finally handwash my underwear and socks but for the first morning since we've been here, there was no water in the basin outside our tent! I guess it will have to wait til later--although not too much later since I'm on my last pair of underwear ;)

Right now we're on our way to the MRC (Mpala Research Center) for the first time to analyze yesterday's data and I'm hoping for a chance at email and camera charging (I'm on my last camera battery too!).

Kenya Trip - Day 6

Dated: August 9th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

Slept pretty well thru the night but woke up at about 5:30am and it was eerily silent. I was sure there was something--a predator, a lion--that was stalking outside the tent, making all the birds, bugs, and monkeys go silent. C assured me at breakfast that most animals are either diurnal or nocturnal and that at dawn, about 5:30, many of those animals are going to bed or just getting up so it tends to be pretty quiet. It was still creepy.

We went on our first field project today in the black cotton soil ecosystem. My team was responsible for recording the height, circumference, shape, branchiness, and number of gauls on each tree within a 3m wide x 100m long transect. We planned on having 4 transects, but we ended up not having enough time so we only did 2 and didn't really even finish those.

Acacia drepanolobium

Ant domatia on acacia drepanolobium

At lunch, I had a nice chat with the professor J's wife, also J, about film. She-J used to be a producer for Discovery Channel. The professor J is really excited about the video I am shooting on this trip and potential it has for expanding the program. He has a lot of ideas; I hope I can deliver.

We had a guest lecturer Dan Rubenstein from Princeton University come and talk to us about his work with sustainable pastoralism and Grevy's zebras. His lecture was one of the best I've ever heard! He was amazing! His research concerns convincing pastoral peoples to value their wildlife reminded me a lot of Freakonomics--playing off the idea that people respond to incentives. His program involved paying scouts in one village to observe the zebras and not chase them off. He did an experiment and found that cattle and zebras consume different grasses so they should be compatible. The scouts ended up really changing their attitudes towards the animals.

Plains zebra

Grevy's zebra

Dan says there's still a lot of work to be done on the existing problems with the social structure. One story Dan told was about a community chair named Rhonda who owned a lot of cattle. Villagers told Dan that Rhonda received much of his wealth through corrupt means like bribes. Dan attended Rhonda's wedding to his third wife (as in he currently has 2--polygamy is common in Masai communities). After the wedding, Rhonda pulled Dan aside (they had known each other for several years) and asked if Dan would pay for Rhonda's son to go to secondary school (about $2,000 in Kenya). Dan said no. Rhonda, shocked, said, "Why, Dan? You are a rich man!" And Dan said, "Rhonda, you are a rich man! You just gave 10 cattle for a third wife--that's $3,000!" Rhonda, apparently, was genuinely shocked by this revelation. Dan used this example to explain how most Kenyan pastoralists don't look at their cattle and see dollar signs so to speak; cattle are used to obtain wives for themselves and their sons and education is not factored in. And as much as a good thought as it might seem, the religious and aid organizations' scholarships don't help this situation much.

Dinner was great, as usual, and afterward C recapped Dan's lecture and explained the Tragedy of the Commons, whereby everyone grazes as many cattle as he can on as much land as he can reach, because if he doesn't, someone else will.

I'm really happy here. I can't quite describe it. All of my worries and fears are so far away and I don't just mean 5,000 miles. Everything just feels so right--like right here right now things are coming together--fitting together like nothing else I've ever experience in my life.

Kenya Trip - Day 5 (pm)

Dated: August 8th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

We went and climbed Mukenya, a mountain within Mpala's borders, today. On the drive there, C was leading, driving, and there was this large run-off bed and the long green Land Cruiser got stuck. The ascari car had no trouble getting through the bed. They got out shovels and started digging the car out--it took about 30 min but they finally got it free. They drove it across and then back to the original side and parked it there. So we walked the rest of the way.


The hike was pretty steep and took us up some pretty slippery rock. We had about 6 ascari with us looking out for animals--all of whom were having no problem climbing in sandals while we were struggling with hiking boots on.

The view from the top of the mountain was incredible--I felt like I could see all of Kenya--it was SO beautiful and clear. After goofing around and taking lots of pictures on the rocks at the top, we lunched under an outcropping. We had cheese, meat, tomato, cucumber or peanut butter sandwiches, mango juice, hard-boiled eggs, passion fruit, and potato chips. The hike back down was probably even steeper than the way up! I was very glad for the traction on the bottom of my hiking boots. A few people slipped, but my only injuries were from the acacia thorns I brushed through.


When we got back to river camp, we had a visit from one of the authors of one of the articles we had to read. Rob Pringle got his PhD from Stanford, his post-doc from Harvard, and just got a million-dollar signing bonus for agreeing to a professorship at Princeton University. "Wow" doesn't begin to describe this guy. His work on acacia tree-ant mutualism is legendary and he's been at Mpala for a very long time. The man himself looks like he could have been a hippie/surfer dude back in California--now, he's all long blond hair and cowboy boots and plaid. His research was definitely still a work in progress and he was very mum about a lot of his current work, but he was able to laugh and joke with us and tell us a lot more about Mpala in general.

Dinner was excellent tonight: green beans, pork, mashed potatoes, custard soup, cabbage, and lentils. I finished feeling perfectly contented. This trip has been awesome so far!!

After dinner, C explained our black cotton soil research project for tomorrow. The acacia drepanolobium trees in the black cotton ecosystem provide the ants with food and shelter in exchange for protection against herbivores, which the ants provide. Our goal is to compare the tree-ant mutualisms to the distances from the glade. I am the team leader for the group in charge of taking the measurements for all the trees we study. There's another team in charge of setting up transect and tagging all our tree subjects. There's a third team in charge of shaking the trees to agitate the ants. C guarantees that we will all get bitten by the ants. A lot. Fun, right? Can't wait.

R's daughter is in the hospital in Nanyuki (the nearest city to Mpala) for the night and we haven't seen R since we got here. The professor J has been very active tho--even tho he and his family are staying at the ranch house--he goes to all our hikes and ecological site explorations and comes to the discussions. On trail and site he's always like, "Oh this flower is in such-and-such family" and "That rock formed because of this pressure." He attempted to catch a lizard today but only got the end of its tail and was excited to show us how the tail flopped about wildly for about two minutes after it fell off. He also identified a type of eggplant that, if eaten, makes a person hallucinate vividly until the toxins in the fruit kills them. Interesting.


We were supposed to go to the research center today so we could check email and charge batteries but because Rob came to river camp, it didn't happen. I'm still hoping to go tomorrow--my video camera juice is at about a quarter. The batteries take some time to charge tho too so I'm hoping C or K get that and we get to do that tomorrow so I can continue taking fantastic pictures and video!

Jody and I turned in early tonight. I feel like we're missing group bonding time at the campfire but then again it seems like drinking by the campfire will be an every night thing and I could really use the sleep . . . zzzzzzzzz . . ..

Kenya Trip - Day 5 (am)

Dated: August 8th, 2010

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


Had a really good sleep last night--even though apparently Jody had a conversation with me at about midnight about her suspicions that there might be a hippopotamus grazing outside her window. I apparently told her it was just a dikdik and to go back to sleep. All I remember is my head hitting the pillow and the next thing is daylight and the sound of someone pouring water into the basins on our porch.

I tried the granola this morning. It was very good. I always look at what's laid out for breakfast and think that it's not much--orange slices, papaya, toast, hard-boiled eggs, and granola--but I always end up feeling full before I've even finished.

I left out some clothes on the dry bar outside the tent to be picked up to be laundered yesterday morning and they're still hanging out there. K told me that it was because I had put underwear out there as well; apparently, it is a cultural taboo to wash a woman's underwear with other clothes here, so it looks like I'll be washing my underwear myself.

Kenya Trip - Day 4 (pm)

Dated: August 7th, 2010 (pm)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley


R's daughter is sick from all the traveling so the professor J showed up. We did team-building with the graduate students also living at river camp, C, K, and W. The activities were the stereotypical electric fence (with the criss-crossed wires you have to stick your teammates through so that everyone can get to the other side) and the lava river (with firepit cushions as our safety rafts :).

We then went on a field trip to the red soil and black cotton soil ecosystems, both of which are present inside the conservancy. The red soil has much more biodiversity and we saw lots of giraffes and zebras there. When we got back to the cars, the drivers were like, "Weren't you afraid out there?" And we were like, why would we be afraid? And they were like, "Whenever you see zebras and giraffes in the same place, there's always lions." Just glad we had the ascari with us.

Next, we went to the black cotton soil. The soil there is made of a dark grey clay. There are only 5 species of grass, 2 types of trees, and 4 species of ants. C brought us to a clearing that had greener grass and no trees--a glade. He asked us what had happend here. C's research is about how bomas cause glades which later lead to differences in productivity--so our first guess was that a pastoralist (herder) had corralled his livestock here in a boma at some point and their defecation had brought about an increase in nutrients for that area, but he said no that wasn't it. There were a lot of holes in the ground and a few patches of grey soil. C eventually gave in a told us that there was a termite mound here at some point, and, much like cattle, the termites had brought extra nutrients to the area and deposited them in the clearing. They had also devoured all the trees within a given radius, much like the pastoralist who remove trees from their corralling areas to use as boma fences.


We have a lot of readings to do but I don't yet have a course pack so Jody is letting me borrow hers when she's done with it. The readings are all either about the black cotton soil ecosystem or the livestock-wildlife interactions in Laikipia Valley.

I saw an elephant today. Actually, we saw a lot of elephants today. They're kind of like squirrels are to Michigan here. I saw a squirrel today. Just one.


Dinner was fish, rice, beans, tomato soup, carrots and zucchini.

Jody and I have named the cricket living in our tent Bonner.

Kenya Trip - Day 4 (am)

Dated: August 7th, 2010 (am)

Location: Ewaso Nyiro River Camp, Mpala Wildlife Conservancy, Laikipia Valley

Apparently, there were elephants in the camp last night--Jody and I saw a fresh "patty" on our way to the bathroom at about 11:30pm. The ascari also chased off a hyena. I was awake what felt like most of the night playing the what's-outside-the-tent game. As another student put it this morning at breakfast, "Nature is loud."



Breakfast was toast, mini pancakes, papaya, orange slices, and oatmeal. The cook's name is John and he is very friendly. He brings out the food at 7 and takes our plates away when we are finished. We may not have electricity, but river camp is seeming pretty posh already :)

One student, C, and I bought a mystery fruit at the Nakumatt (Kenyan Walmart, sort of). It was in a bin labeled "Mangos" with a bunch of papayas, but it kind of looks like an impossibly big avocado (just look at it compared to the grocery bag and butter knife below). While waiting for the profs to make it down to camp, we took bets on the fruit and, with much ado, cut the thing open. It was an avocado. We made guacamole. It was awesome.