Had a big meeting for the Budongo Football Challenge 2009, or I guess I should say they let me tag along. It was in a little villaige about 45 minutes away, the primary school allowed us to use it to organize the teams for the championship. It was supposed to start at 2:00 but since people here run on Africa time it started around 4:15. And I thought my dad was bad…
Basically the challenge is to promote education about the forest. The project does a lot of community development things – chicken raising projects, goat raising project, a youth center, school programs, whatever. The winning village of the challenge gets 400,000 shillings ($200) to put towards a new program of their choosing. It’s a cool project and the people here are really into their football, so it was fun to be around all the excitement. I think they wondered what I was doing there haha.
(will insert photo of footballers here - internet isnt cooperating at the moment and I only have 5 minutes left of battery)
The chimps have been super active the past few days – turns out that since the community is more centralized than usual that there is an adequate number of males to form hunting parties, so they have been hunting for Black and White Colobus for about 3 days. I believe they have gotten at least 4. Its sad and kind of morbid to watch but its really quite fascinating; its very rare for them to form hunting parties like these, especially in this community, and it’s a normal part of the cycle here. I guess they just need the protien. I’m just glad I’m not the one collecting samples from the remains for DNA work. Ick. Maggots are super quick here – aside from bananas you have to eat your fruit and veggies within a few days or they will be crawling with little worms. So you can only imagine what the remains of the baby chimp carcass looked like after 4 days (the females wouldn’t drop it, they apparently wouldn’t believe it was dead).
It has been super hot and humid here, sometimes I forget how close to the equator I am because the trees make it so much cooler than it would be otherwise, but today was a scorcher. Luckily we are getting into rainy season so there has been a thunderstorm almost every night for the past week. It never rains super hard for long, and the wind isnt all that bad, but they get great thunder and lightning here. Its so nice to smell the rain coming at about this time of day. Oooooh and there is this flower, they call it the night rose, and the smell is absolutely intoxicatingly yummy. I wish I could bottle it. You can smell it from every corner of the camp when it blooms at night. Took me a while to find out which plant it was though - one of those things where it was almost stronger of a scent 3 meters away from the bush than standing right next to it. I wish I could send scents over the internet. Someone needs to invent that.
Basically the challenge is to promote education about the forest. The project does a lot of community development things – chicken raising projects, goat raising project, a youth center, school programs, whatever. The winning village of the challenge gets 400,000 shillings ($200) to put towards a new program of their choosing. It’s a cool project and the people here are really into their football, so it was fun to be around all the excitement. I think they wondered what I was doing there haha.
(will insert photo of footballers here - internet isnt cooperating at the moment and I only have 5 minutes left of battery)
The chimps have been super active the past few days – turns out that since the community is more centralized than usual that there is an adequate number of males to form hunting parties, so they have been hunting for Black and White Colobus for about 3 days. I believe they have gotten at least 4. Its sad and kind of morbid to watch but its really quite fascinating; its very rare for them to form hunting parties like these, especially in this community, and it’s a normal part of the cycle here. I guess they just need the protien. I’m just glad I’m not the one collecting samples from the remains for DNA work. Ick. Maggots are super quick here – aside from bananas you have to eat your fruit and veggies within a few days or they will be crawling with little worms. So you can only imagine what the remains of the baby chimp carcass looked like after 4 days (the females wouldn’t drop it, they apparently wouldn’t believe it was dead).
It has been super hot and humid here, sometimes I forget how close to the equator I am because the trees make it so much cooler than it would be otherwise, but today was a scorcher. Luckily we are getting into rainy season so there has been a thunderstorm almost every night for the past week. It never rains super hard for long, and the wind isnt all that bad, but they get great thunder and lightning here. Its so nice to smell the rain coming at about this time of day. Oooooh and there is this flower, they call it the night rose, and the smell is absolutely intoxicatingly yummy. I wish I could bottle it. You can smell it from every corner of the camp when it blooms at night. Took me a while to find out which plant it was though - one of those things where it was almost stronger of a scent 3 meters away from the bush than standing right next to it. I wish I could send scents over the internet. Someone needs to invent that.
Hanna's dad runs on the only time that makes sense = rock & roll time! : )
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