I cannot explain how incredible, breathtaking, exciting, humbling and heartbreaking it feels to be here. I feel like my heart is bursting like the Grinch who stole Christmas, but its like the more it grows the more it suffocates itself, like I have no more room left to care more, to love more, like if I look into another childs eyes I will burst. Everything beautiful I see makes me dizzy, sometimes on the verge of tears. Every injustice I see makes me sick to my stomach. If I see another malnourished child I might explode. I want to help them all but I know that I cant. And I know that if I help one there will always be another. If I try to reach out to them I will never be sane again, just living my life caught up in the cruel downward spiral of hopelessness. Fighting against the powers that be. You would think I was catholic, I feel so damned guilty. I have spent the past few months on top of the world, with everything I have and everything I have to look forward to. My life rocks. Now I just wish I could send one of them home in my place – switch lives so that they can realize their dreams as I have.
I’m trying not to focus on these things for obvious reasons, and I have work to do. At camp I am somewhat sheltered from these depressing thoughts because people here are so passionate about their work that its hard to think about what lies beyond the forest. There are currently only 3 researchers here – 2 girls in their early 30s and one guy here with his wife and 2 kids (they live off base). Everyone else is either staff (2 cooks, a baboon monitor, a vet, and the four or so codirectors/conservationists who do ongoing research and community programs), research assistants, or students from the forestry college down the road (who only spend a few hours a day here). I found out when I arrived that they have spent the past week practicing how to say my name (none of the local languages use the letter H at be beginning of a word), so they like to use it every time they address me.
The research site itself is perfect – comfortable in ways that matter and different in ways that have helped me understand how people here live. My room, for example, has a lovely big double bed complete with sheets and a blanket, a giant wardrobe where I can stash my stuff and lock up when necessary, and a little desk with lots of room for my scattered papers, books and articles. The curtains are in bold colors and shapes, the typical fabrics seen around womans’ hips as they walk home from the water spouts carrying what looks like 100 kilos of water in a precariously open jug on their heads (I’m surprised their necks aren’t all butch and manly… or broken). A few of the field assistants’ families live here at base, so I can hear the children playing outside my window – their giggles are like candy for the soul. They even have a mozzie net all set up for me so I don’t have to worry myself with untangling the one I brought, which seems to be ripped by my zipper anyway. What it does not have, however, is electricity or running water, same with the other buildings at camp. Its super hot during the day but the forest cools the air a bit, so air conditioning isn’t really necessary anyway. They have solar panels with which to charge computers and cell phones and such. This works from about 10 am – 3 pm. There is a gas stove in the kitchen, and a tiny generator provides light for some of the rooms at night so really the lack of electricity isn’t even much of an inconvenience. Just how it is.
The running water, on the other hand, I do miss. Not because I mind filtering everything I drink or being able to take long showers or hot baths, but for toilet sake only. I have used pit latrines in other countries – India, Vietnam, places in Mexico – but to live with one is a different story. I think its safe to say its harder for women even though the Ugandan men don’t seem to have very good aim. And the flies, ugh. Luckily the pit is pretty deep, so the smell isn’t as bad as I expected. I’m sure I will get used to it eventually – the first few days I unconsciously avoided drinking water so that I wouldn’t have to use it, but now its just the late night callings that I dread. I have to crawl out from under my mozzie net which is confusing when half awake, find my shoes (I have abandoned my love of being barefoot due to the fact that I am sufficiently terrified of the little bugs that burrow into your skin to lay eggs so that the larvae can feed on your flesh – yes, they live here), find my torch, spray some mosquito repellant on and walk out of the house and to the latrine which lies in a little shack on the forest edge. It looks like something out of a horror movie in the moonlight. I know, I know – I’m a total tourist for complaining about this but it’s only been like a week and I don’t know if I even want to get used to it. OH and there are walls and a roof on it but the walls stop at about my shoulders and there is a big gap there. I was out there yesterday morning and a baboon was climbing down the tree next to it and peeked in. I didn’t hear him coming and it scared the shit out of me (no, not literally), so I yelped and got out of there. There was a boy nearby who saw the incident and thought it was hilarious (prick).
Water for cooking and such is collected when it rains, so we fill a big barrel full and bring it into the kitchen in the morning, where we wait for it to filter into drinking water. There is a big barrel which provides water for the showers – it is heated every day at about 5:30, 6:00 by burning wood beneath it, so it is perfect temperature from about 6:00 – 6:30 and 7:30 – 8:30. In between it is scalding hot.
There are 2 ladies who do the cooking, but since Ugandan food consists of rice and beans the researchers usually just get rice from them and then cook their own main dish. I personally have nothing wrong with rice and beans so haven’t done much cooking yet.
My work so far as been mainly sorting out the computer stuff and writing tutorials which I will eventually go over with some of the staff. I went into the forest for the first time today (there is a quarantine period when you first arrive) with the snare removal team, a group of ex-hunters which the project has hired to help them remove the traps from the forest. Before we went out they showed me what the traps look like in the shed where they keep all the traps they’ve collected. I have seen some before – the wires and such that lie beneath a pile of leaves – but I saw my first mantrap and DAMN those things are scary. They are huge and will just about cut your foot off if you step on one. Lets just say when we went into the forest I followed literally each step that the guy before me took.
When we went to town yesterday we saw a chimp monitor staring into a sugarcane field looking somewhat perturbed. We stopped to see what was up, and he said that the alpha male of the community (groups of chimps are called communities instead of troops like baboons and other monkeys) stepped on a mantrap that morning. A minute later we saw a chimp peek his head out of the sugarcane and walk across the street carrying an armload of sugarcane, looking rather guilty. My smile at his adorable demeanor wore off when another male emerged after him, carrying 2 long sugarcane stalks in one hand and a huge steel mantrap in the other. It had snapped around his wrist and which he rested against his chest to relieve some of the pressure, but the poor guy looked pretty miserable. Not miserable enough to keep him from raiding sugar cane, of course. We watched as he humbled across the street and into the forest, looking like a disgruntled little old man (its crazy how human they look, especially when they walk on just their legs). The monitor explained that since he was the alpha, the other males in the group wouldn’t let him get close enough to inspect the wound. Normally under these circumstances the chimp would be darted so that they could remove the trap and then release him again, but there are doubts that the monitors will be able to dart him without putting themselves in extreme danger.
The first week I spent my time away from the computer at the forest edge, hoping to catch a glimpse of some wildlife. No hoping needed – there is incredible fauna everywhere! I spent mornings walking down the road, about 2 kilometers to the gate of the site. It’s a gorgeous walk – there is a breeze that wanders through the trees whose canopies arch up over the road, and the wildlife wanders through, busy in their own tasks. Lots of tiny little birds of amazing colors, and larger ones that mock me as they fly away before I get a good look. I spend a lot of time telling myself to find some kind of book so that I can study up on my birds and trees. It feels like an enchanted forest out of a fantasy book – there are little red and white mushrooms dotting the ground, eiphytes on the trees glisten with dew in the mornings, birds chatter away and there is always some primate or another whooping or screeching, grunting or waooing in the distance. Blue monkeys stay pretty high up in the trees so I haven’t seen them closer than about 5 meters. They make a funny little noise that sounds like a bird chirp or a rock hyrax squeak. I think I was being threatened, but I wanted to squeeze the guy that was chirping and shaking a branch at me. The black and white colobus monkeys are awesome! They have this funny scowl on their face all the time that makes them look like some kind of clown from the depression with a big black frown painted on. So badass, I love them.
Its been really nice to have the baboons around too. I know they are not considered as high up on the awesome chain as chimps because they are not apes, but I still love them. They are a different species, Olive baboons instead of Chacma baboons, but they look much more similar to each other than the other species in the continent (look up the Hamadryus – kinda freaky, eh?). They are also habituated, so you can get about 2 meters from them without scaring them off. Sometimes if I stay in one place long enough the adolescents will come within arms reach, not because they trust me or want something from me, but because they hardly take note that I’m there. There were 2 wrestling with an empty water bottle the other day and chased each other in circles around me like I was a tree. Sweet.
Anyway, back to my first day in the forest. Today was mostly just to familiarize myself with the work that the snare removers do and their level of GPS understanding (not much). They are incredible at spotting things that normal people would not – places where hunters may have entered, areas of leaf litter that are piled unnaturally, etc. I guess being hunters at one point themselves helps a lot. So I follow them for about 5 hours and don’t have much to contribute to the situation except to tell them to wait to write down the coordinates until the accuracy is 18 feet or less. I tried to explain the satellite thing to them but I don’t think they got it. On Monday I will meet with the rest of the team and have a GPS training session so that they will be a bit more comfortable with them. All they really know now is how to turn it on and look at the UTM coordinates displayed on the screen (they write it down instead of taking waypoints). They seem very enthusiastic about learning more though, luckily. They seem to think that it is a tiny computer and carry it like if it somehow drops then it will shatter and they will be forfeiting their salary for the next 2 years. I try to convince them that it is more like a cell phone in its durability and interface. Monday will be interesting.
I will try to write more about my work later – most of it is somewhat boring like filling out grants for software and attempting to round up all files with geographical components for use in the GIS. I’ll be doing some software tutorials at some point, so trying to prepare myself for that as well.
Sorry to write so much without including any photos – I picked up 2 disposables in town yesterday so hopefully I can develop them and include a few once I get back to the US.
I’m trying not to focus on these things for obvious reasons, and I have work to do. At camp I am somewhat sheltered from these depressing thoughts because people here are so passionate about their work that its hard to think about what lies beyond the forest. There are currently only 3 researchers here – 2 girls in their early 30s and one guy here with his wife and 2 kids (they live off base). Everyone else is either staff (2 cooks, a baboon monitor, a vet, and the four or so codirectors/conservationists who do ongoing research and community programs), research assistants, or students from the forestry college down the road (who only spend a few hours a day here). I found out when I arrived that they have spent the past week practicing how to say my name (none of the local languages use the letter H at be beginning of a word), so they like to use it every time they address me.
The research site itself is perfect – comfortable in ways that matter and different in ways that have helped me understand how people here live. My room, for example, has a lovely big double bed complete with sheets and a blanket, a giant wardrobe where I can stash my stuff and lock up when necessary, and a little desk with lots of room for my scattered papers, books and articles. The curtains are in bold colors and shapes, the typical fabrics seen around womans’ hips as they walk home from the water spouts carrying what looks like 100 kilos of water in a precariously open jug on their heads (I’m surprised their necks aren’t all butch and manly… or broken). A few of the field assistants’ families live here at base, so I can hear the children playing outside my window – their giggles are like candy for the soul. They even have a mozzie net all set up for me so I don’t have to worry myself with untangling the one I brought, which seems to be ripped by my zipper anyway. What it does not have, however, is electricity or running water, same with the other buildings at camp. Its super hot during the day but the forest cools the air a bit, so air conditioning isn’t really necessary anyway. They have solar panels with which to charge computers and cell phones and such. This works from about 10 am – 3 pm. There is a gas stove in the kitchen, and a tiny generator provides light for some of the rooms at night so really the lack of electricity isn’t even much of an inconvenience. Just how it is.
The running water, on the other hand, I do miss. Not because I mind filtering everything I drink or being able to take long showers or hot baths, but for toilet sake only. I have used pit latrines in other countries – India, Vietnam, places in Mexico – but to live with one is a different story. I think its safe to say its harder for women even though the Ugandan men don’t seem to have very good aim. And the flies, ugh. Luckily the pit is pretty deep, so the smell isn’t as bad as I expected. I’m sure I will get used to it eventually – the first few days I unconsciously avoided drinking water so that I wouldn’t have to use it, but now its just the late night callings that I dread. I have to crawl out from under my mozzie net which is confusing when half awake, find my shoes (I have abandoned my love of being barefoot due to the fact that I am sufficiently terrified of the little bugs that burrow into your skin to lay eggs so that the larvae can feed on your flesh – yes, they live here), find my torch, spray some mosquito repellant on and walk out of the house and to the latrine which lies in a little shack on the forest edge. It looks like something out of a horror movie in the moonlight. I know, I know – I’m a total tourist for complaining about this but it’s only been like a week and I don’t know if I even want to get used to it. OH and there are walls and a roof on it but the walls stop at about my shoulders and there is a big gap there. I was out there yesterday morning and a baboon was climbing down the tree next to it and peeked in. I didn’t hear him coming and it scared the shit out of me (no, not literally), so I yelped and got out of there. There was a boy nearby who saw the incident and thought it was hilarious (prick).
Water for cooking and such is collected when it rains, so we fill a big barrel full and bring it into the kitchen in the morning, where we wait for it to filter into drinking water. There is a big barrel which provides water for the showers – it is heated every day at about 5:30, 6:00 by burning wood beneath it, so it is perfect temperature from about 6:00 – 6:30 and 7:30 – 8:30. In between it is scalding hot.
There are 2 ladies who do the cooking, but since Ugandan food consists of rice and beans the researchers usually just get rice from them and then cook their own main dish. I personally have nothing wrong with rice and beans so haven’t done much cooking yet.
My work so far as been mainly sorting out the computer stuff and writing tutorials which I will eventually go over with some of the staff. I went into the forest for the first time today (there is a quarantine period when you first arrive) with the snare removal team, a group of ex-hunters which the project has hired to help them remove the traps from the forest. Before we went out they showed me what the traps look like in the shed where they keep all the traps they’ve collected. I have seen some before – the wires and such that lie beneath a pile of leaves – but I saw my first mantrap and DAMN those things are scary. They are huge and will just about cut your foot off if you step on one. Lets just say when we went into the forest I followed literally each step that the guy before me took.
When we went to town yesterday we saw a chimp monitor staring into a sugarcane field looking somewhat perturbed. We stopped to see what was up, and he said that the alpha male of the community (groups of chimps are called communities instead of troops like baboons and other monkeys) stepped on a mantrap that morning. A minute later we saw a chimp peek his head out of the sugarcane and walk across the street carrying an armload of sugarcane, looking rather guilty. My smile at his adorable demeanor wore off when another male emerged after him, carrying 2 long sugarcane stalks in one hand and a huge steel mantrap in the other. It had snapped around his wrist and which he rested against his chest to relieve some of the pressure, but the poor guy looked pretty miserable. Not miserable enough to keep him from raiding sugar cane, of course. We watched as he humbled across the street and into the forest, looking like a disgruntled little old man (its crazy how human they look, especially when they walk on just their legs). The monitor explained that since he was the alpha, the other males in the group wouldn’t let him get close enough to inspect the wound. Normally under these circumstances the chimp would be darted so that they could remove the trap and then release him again, but there are doubts that the monitors will be able to dart him without putting themselves in extreme danger.
The first week I spent my time away from the computer at the forest edge, hoping to catch a glimpse of some wildlife. No hoping needed – there is incredible fauna everywhere! I spent mornings walking down the road, about 2 kilometers to the gate of the site. It’s a gorgeous walk – there is a breeze that wanders through the trees whose canopies arch up over the road, and the wildlife wanders through, busy in their own tasks. Lots of tiny little birds of amazing colors, and larger ones that mock me as they fly away before I get a good look. I spend a lot of time telling myself to find some kind of book so that I can study up on my birds and trees. It feels like an enchanted forest out of a fantasy book – there are little red and white mushrooms dotting the ground, eiphytes on the trees glisten with dew in the mornings, birds chatter away and there is always some primate or another whooping or screeching, grunting or waooing in the distance. Blue monkeys stay pretty high up in the trees so I haven’t seen them closer than about 5 meters. They make a funny little noise that sounds like a bird chirp or a rock hyrax squeak. I think I was being threatened, but I wanted to squeeze the guy that was chirping and shaking a branch at me. The black and white colobus monkeys are awesome! They have this funny scowl on their face all the time that makes them look like some kind of clown from the depression with a big black frown painted on. So badass, I love them.
Its been really nice to have the baboons around too. I know they are not considered as high up on the awesome chain as chimps because they are not apes, but I still love them. They are a different species, Olive baboons instead of Chacma baboons, but they look much more similar to each other than the other species in the continent (look up the Hamadryus – kinda freaky, eh?). They are also habituated, so you can get about 2 meters from them without scaring them off. Sometimes if I stay in one place long enough the adolescents will come within arms reach, not because they trust me or want something from me, but because they hardly take note that I’m there. There were 2 wrestling with an empty water bottle the other day and chased each other in circles around me like I was a tree. Sweet.
Anyway, back to my first day in the forest. Today was mostly just to familiarize myself with the work that the snare removers do and their level of GPS understanding (not much). They are incredible at spotting things that normal people would not – places where hunters may have entered, areas of leaf litter that are piled unnaturally, etc. I guess being hunters at one point themselves helps a lot. So I follow them for about 5 hours and don’t have much to contribute to the situation except to tell them to wait to write down the coordinates until the accuracy is 18 feet or less. I tried to explain the satellite thing to them but I don’t think they got it. On Monday I will meet with the rest of the team and have a GPS training session so that they will be a bit more comfortable with them. All they really know now is how to turn it on and look at the UTM coordinates displayed on the screen (they write it down instead of taking waypoints). They seem very enthusiastic about learning more though, luckily. They seem to think that it is a tiny computer and carry it like if it somehow drops then it will shatter and they will be forfeiting their salary for the next 2 years. I try to convince them that it is more like a cell phone in its durability and interface. Monday will be interesting.
I will try to write more about my work later – most of it is somewhat boring like filling out grants for software and attempting to round up all files with geographical components for use in the GIS. I’ll be doing some software tutorials at some point, so trying to prepare myself for that as well.
Sorry to write so much without including any photos – I picked up 2 disposables in town yesterday so hopefully I can develop them and include a few once I get back to the US.
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