Another Fortnight

April 18, 2006
Where are the monkeys? Just when we thought we knew our monkeys, we came in this morning and could not find them. We walked around everywhere! We finally decided to sit down and wait, but we could only think of the horrible things that may have befallen them: people with a truck full of bananas luring Maurice in and then turning him to bush meat. We thought this must be what it’s like to have children (albeit, small fuzzy ones). After some reassurance from Patrick that this happens every so often, we went back and waited then gave up and went back to the office to prepare for the day’s main event: an Easter egg hunt!

We brought the Easter eggs we painted a few days ago to hide in the ruins. How cool is it to have your own private Easter egg hunt in the ruins of a 16th Century Swahili town? Katiki, Ziro, and Mwochia, three of the guys who work at Gede, as well as us monkey researchers were in. Just as we were preparing to go, several Muslim men came to the office and asked if they could speak with us, and we told them we would return. We thought this was strange, but there are many strange things. While the others waited, Monica and Scott hid the eggs, took some photos, then hooted for everyone to come. Everyone raced around trying to find the 16 hidden eggs, and it was a great time! We finished after a record 20 minutes.

After the first 10 minutes of the hunt, we noticed the Muslim guys following us, and several of them looked either horribly confused or angry. We took that to be their normal demeanor and kept on with our hunt. Afterwards, we came back, and they were still waiting and looked none too happy that we were late because of running around the ruins to find colored eggs. We left for lunch. It turned out that they were there to collect their winnings from the dhow competition and thought that we were the ones to give it to them! The misunderstanding must have been cleared up, because they were much more relaxed when we returned from lunch afterwards.

April 17, 2006
The day after a vacation day is always tough, though, we did quite well in recovering! It was a great data collection day. When we got home, we went straight to data entering using the new database. It worked well (with a couple of bugs that needed to be eaten), and we finished Scott’s whole notebook as well as most of our maps! The brief time we spent in the dining room, we met a couple originally from Tennessee but now running a school for AIDS children near Lake Victoria. They had just graduated their first class from primary school.

April 16, 2006
Happy Easter! We had a good Easter, and celebrated by waking up early to attend an informal service on the beach with the people at Mwamba. There have been many guests here for the Easter weekend, so there was a good number of people there. We sang and watched the sun rise above the Indian Ocean. It was a good way to start the day, and we came back afterwards for breakfast then went straight back to bed until 11:30. The day was very chill, and we had a good time relaxing.

April 15, 2006
Today continued our week’s downward slope. Monica was feeling ill again and had the extra fun of having something terribly painful land in her eye in the morning, which hurt for the rest of the day. The season has also led to an abundance of small larval stage moths hanging by silk threads from the trees, which like to stick in your hair and crawl up your legs. Monica stopped to talk with Leslie when she came in the late morning and quickly discovered that her day was going much worse: she had never made it back from Ocean Sports after we left yesterday and instead went on a bender to Malindi and wound up waking up with a blisteringly bad hangover in a strange bed not remembering how she got there. Why she came in is anyone’s guess … she ended up fighting to work, but gave up couple of hours later and went home.

Over sodas at the museum shop, Monica, Leslie, and Patrick talked about Easter customs (i.e., Easter eggs, egg hunts, Easter bunny, etc.). Scott joined, and we all decided that it would be fun to paint eggs at Mwamba tonight. With our morale better, we went back to the forest and got 2 more poops (one from Kamili, our new mother, which is a minor miracle!). Monica was sitting in the path staring at the forest when Kamili went and scared some poor Canadian who she didn’t know was behind her with an exclamation of “She pooped!”; that required an explanation that, no, she wasn’t a crazy person staring at nothing and that instead we study monkeys by collecting fecal samples … ok, not much better.

Before we left, we bought some Arabuko Sokoke honey from Salim (there is a honey processing facility supported by USAID there) and got a quick tour of the Kipepeo Project, which supports approximately 700 butterfly farmers around the forest. The farmers can make a substantial amount farming butterflies, while not harming the forest. We then had to delay leaving because a part of the cultural festival was actually going on: there was some very cool Giriama dancing. We took a last data point for the day, and showed Patrick our monkeys near the extreme southern fence, then all went to the museum to watch the performers. It was great to see the different dances of the different tribes.

We made it home slowly, first stopping at Mama Lucy’s for chocolate and eggs. Patrick arrived for dinner, and everyone was happy to see him. He had volunteered at A Rocha before working for Steffen. The food was impressive: a huge baked kingfish and roasted garlic potatoes! After dinner, Leslie brought out her painting supplies, and we brought out the hard-boiled eggs. The spectacle attracted a lot of people: Patrick, Moses, Sarah, Lispa, George, Ben, Liz, Leslie, Monica, Scott, and one of the guests,and we all had a really fun time painting, listening to music, and enjoying each other’s creativity. They were the best Easter eggs ever! Monica paid tribute to Maurice and the monkeys as well as one with the Red Sox. Scott also had to pay tribute to the monkeys and made one with the Boston and San Francisco skylines. It was a lot of fun!

The Easter egg decorating party was so much fun that we all decided to stay in, talk, and play cards instead of going with the original plan of going to the Happy Nite Club to listen to a local band play. We taught each other card tricks and attempted to teach each other card games. We finally sent Patrick home via cab and went to sleep. The day ended up being great after all!

April 14, 2006
The day was pretty lackluster for collecting data, and we had decided to skip lunch, so we could leave to watch the dhow competition in Watamu. We had been told it would be in the bay outside of Ocean Sports, so we went to Gede to catch a matatu and caught a random safari van instead, which took us right into Ocean Sports. We got a table with a great view of the bay, but we noticed there were no people and no dhows and no Leslie, who was supposed to meet us. We also noticed that there were no waiters, but this is a common occurrence at Ocean Sports.

We eventually ended up going up to the waiters in the back room and asking for menus after 20 minutes. The waiters also seem to be very confused when you want to order something and often look at you as though you’re crazy if you actually want food. Leslie came up shortly afterward and was not happy: not only did no one know about the dhow competition but she had gotten a bad henna tattoo instead of getting lunch, and her camera had decided to stop working. It was good to vent while waiting for our breaded fish filet. Our food finally came an hour later with the iced tea we’d ordered. The fish was pretty good and included tartar sauce, and it was great to have real ketchup again (Heinz). The truly wonderful part was the iced tea, iced and sweet and made with lime juice (which led to the equally wonderful inspiration to brew sweet tea tonight at Mwamba)! We finally gave up on the dhow race and went home.

We took a quick swim then sat down to finish our work day with some data entry, which ended prematurely when juice found its way to our laptop’s keyboard instead of Monica’s mouth. To finish off a perfectly bad day, Scott received news that his grandfather had had a stroke a couple of days ago.

April 13, 2006
It was another great poop-collecting day, and we are just a few samples shy of having 4 per individual for the week! I know, it’s disturbing what we get excited about here. We also received the schedule of event’s for tomorrow at the cultural festival: Dhow competition, boda boda race, and the Maulid at the Great Mosque.

We stopped at a mzungu café on the way home for a heavenly treat: brownies! It was delicious. We went next door to the supermarket then went home for a quick twilight swim under a beautiful full moon. Stanley came out and asked us if we’d like to come to a drum rehearsal at one of Colin’s friends up the beach. He wanted an audience to listen to his work before playing at a benefit concert in Nairobi tomorrow.

We ended up arriving 30 minutes late to Plot 8 (the house of Andrew McNaughton) with a car packed full with 9 people and several cartons of food. Andrew is an interior designer with apparently a good bit of notoriety for designing lounges and restaurants in up-scale hotels. He is also an artist and a drummer, both of which hit you like a wall when you step in the door. The house is visually amazing and decorated with his artwork: sculptures, furniture, drawings, and other interesting pieces. Much of the furniture he has crafted from pieces of driftwood he has found on the beach, and his artwork is mainly composed from materials available locally. The sound of percussion was also a treat. He demonstrated his new toy, a Roland HandSonic digital percussion “synthesizer” (though, it is really more of a digital library of sounds with pressure/motion-sensitive mixing). It ended up being a fun night of music, wine, and interesting characters, which ripped us away from our normal live for a brief moment.

April 12, 2006
So today was a rough day for Monica. She seemed to wake up with the same symptoms Scott had a couple of days ago when he was sick. Scott stayed home to take care of her and ended up mostly completing the monkey database. Despite a few bugs, it is close to being ready for data entry. Monica spent the day lounging on the roof in the breeze between frequent trips to the bathroom.

The best thing about today was browsing through Patrick’s portfolio of art. He is our fellow monkey watcher, but we found out that his real passion is drawing. We enjoyed looking through his work, and it made the whole day better. Monica was feeling well enough to go out for a walk, so we went across the street to Dongo Kundu to find a fundi to repair Scott’s pants, whose zipper on the convertible pant legs broke unexpectedly (definitely sending those back to REI) leaving him with a single pair of pants. After coming back, we went through the nature trail on the A Rocha property, which winds through the underbrush on the west side of the property past the old camping ground when the place used to belong to Ms. Simpson.

Tonight was Katie’s last night, so after dinner was a tasty cake and a very odd set of speeches. It was clear that several people were not sad to see her go. Moses had skipped her send-off all together. The farewell speeches were … interesting, and Katie was in typical form with her foot-in-mouth disease. Stanley said it best, though: “Katie, you have been very … what’s the word? Entertaining.” As an ode to Katie, here are some of our favorite Katie moments:
1) The Little Red Riding Hood monologue
2) Her obsession with her cereal, which always bore the epithet “Eat and Die!!!”, as well as screwing with her by attaching the “We ate some of your cereal. Hope you don’t mind!” note
3) Waking up to hear Katie’s screams in the middle of the night about bugs crawling all over her along with other mefloquine-induced screams
4) Katie’s legendary foot-in-mouth disease, including such favorites as:
i) Talking about how horrible she thought it was to see overweight people in tight, skimpy clothing when one of the guests sitting next to her was overweight and wearing a tank top and shorts, completely ignoring the 5 minutes of “shut up” looks we kept giving her
ii) Coming in to dinner after a happy hour at Pole Pole when a group of foreboding church matriarchs from the surrounding area were sitting in dead silence and trying to get them to tell her whether they knew any embarrassing stories about Stanley from when he was little (like him running naked through the village or picking his nose and eating it); after several minutes of no one saying anything and incredulous stares from the church women, she finally acknowledged “maybe this is inappropriate”
iii) Singing the “everyone has AIDS” song from “Team America” out loud in AIDS-ravaged Africa is tasteless enough, but she took it to a whole new level by singing it with Beatrice nearby the night before she was leaving early for Nairobi to attend the funeral of her 4-year-old nephew who had died from complications of being positive.

April 11, 2006
On our way to the ruins today, we finally saw the snail that belongs to these 7” long “sea shells” we keep seeing in the forest. The snail was an impressive 8”(-ish) long and looked terribly awkward with its lop-sided shell, as it was trying to cross the dirt shortcut to the ruins. We watched it for a few minutes, since we’re easily amused, and got a kick out of how the snail will move forward about an inch while its shell stays stationary and then it will move its shell forward, gouging a little trail in the dirt to its right.

We have been watching the week-long transformation of Gede Ruins from brown and desiccated to lush and green. Where there had been dust covering all of the ruins, there is now grass and other plants covering just about every square inch. It’s amazing how much a little rain can do. The monkeys have been enjoying the change, too, as it has also brought a huge increase in the number of moths and other insects as well as more buds and leaves to eat. They have finally stopped their 5K walk and are now much more content to take it slowly. That is good, since Monica has been running a fever all day and not excited about walking a lot.

Kamili’s new baby also has lived the night and seems to be doing well, though, the poor new mother is very tired and has been taking a lot of naps. We also saw a large bushbuck come within a dozen yards of us in the forest today.

We met some Americans on the matatu ride back and told them about places to stay and about Mwamba. They liked it enough to come stay at Mwamba tonight and came with us on our night out for Katie’s second to last night in Kenya. Monica’s temperature had spiked, but she decided to come anyway after doping up with some fever reducing medicine, which worked great. We finally tried the African pizza place next door to Kukuchoma. African pizza is a mixture of egg, minced meat, and onions fried inside of a thin, fila dough shell, and it was quite tasty!

April 10, 2006
Kamili (our youngest adult female monkey) had a baby this morning! While we didn’t see her give birth, the baby was clearly still wet and had been born only a few hours before at the most. This is the first monkey in our group to give birth (the other monkey births have been with Leslie’s group). I had thought she was pregnant and kept talking to Scott about her “little belly”, but had not expected her to have the baby so soon! We were very excited, yet concerned at the same time as the baby did not appear to be suckling or moving much. We are afraid this baby won’t survive.

April 9, 2006
It’s been depressing to go back to the daily grind, but all good things must come to an end :). We did, however, collect a lot of data. Not much happened today aside from a record poop collection from us of 6 today!

April 8, 2006
We started out by going straight back to the hill where we saw the lions, but they had already left for the day. After a slow start, we came back to Tarhi for breakfast … full English breakfast! We settled our bill and left for a really nice afternoon of wildlife, including some ostriches, more elephants, giraffes, and a pride of hunting lions. We capped it all off by stopping in Voi for lunch at a local Kenyan restaurant, where we had chapatti mayai (like a breakfast burrito) then headed to the Voi Safari Lodge before heading back through Tsavo for a last look at the animals. Right before leaving the park, we watched a pair of secretary birds hunt and trap a rabbit; they consumed their kill right in front of us!

April 7, 2006
The morning started art 5:15 when our alarm went off and we rolled out of bed to start our safari. Scott’s stomach was still rebelling, so he did not have any breakfast. We grabbed our bags and hiking boots and jumped in the van for a bumpy ride across the back roads which wind past the Arabuko Sokoke forest and the Sabaki river before leading to Tsavo East. We have definitely been spoiled by the paved Mombasa-Malindi road. The drive took us about 3 hours, and we started to see what we came to see as soon as we entered the park grounds. There were herds of elephants and zebra just grazing in the grassland (as well as a family of baboons in one of the trees). After a good morning of seeing wildlife, we arrived at the Tarhi Camp, where after much haggling of the price with the camp and much convincing of Sarah to stay at Tarhi, we arrived at 5500 KSh for each person for the night. We stopped for lunch at the camp and watched the open plain fill with a drenching rain shower. We hung out for a little bit talking and enjoying our meal before the rain stopped and we could continue on our safari. The rain brought out the animals, and the best part was seeing a pride of 12 lions resting on the hill right before sunset! We returned to Tarhi for dinner and eventually got to sleep.

April 6, 2006
This morning it thankfully rained until 9am again and we sat at Mwamba reading environmental children’s books (“Mala the Mongoose” and “The King and the Mango Grave”). Finally, the rain lessened and we grabbed bodas and a matatu. Leslie had been worried that Patrick was waiting for her, but we found a note from him explaining that he would not be in today. Today was our first really day of behavioral follows and our first real serious poop collecting day. We didn’t do too bad! We collected 4 poops and did 6 follows. We left at 6pm to make up for starting late.

We packed our things tonight and went to sleep early so we could wake up and go on our 2-day safari to Tsavo East with Sarah, Katie, Moses, and Raymond!

April 5, 2006
Today started at 2am when Scott woke up feeling a bit strange then had to run to the bathroom to vomit profusely. He woke again at 5:15am to do so again. Me being such a light sleeper these days, did not sleep through this. I felt really bad for him and couldn’t have gotten back to sleep if I had tried after 5:15. I got ready for work around 6am, did what a could to make Scott feel better, and headed to work after promising to return by lunch to check up on him (he had insisted I go into work).

At 10am, Scott woke up and threw up a 3rd time. He tried to sleep the rest of the morning. I found him around noon asleep with the laptop on beside him (that is Scott for you). He had a temperature of 100.8 degrees and we were afraid he might have Malaria so we called the doctor and waited until 2:45 to go to Watamu to see him. Since we didn’t have any transportation, and he was afraid he would be sick on a boda boda or matatu, we called a Tuk Tuk. Unfortunately, these are very slow and very bumping and we were lucky he made it.

The doctor in Watamu was uite nice and they were fast and very professional. We came at 3 and were going home by 4pm, even with a blood test. The whole bill was 1300ksh (<$20) for everything…including some medications…what a deal! A blood test indicated he did not have Malaria and instead probably was an intestinal infection brought on by eating bad food (we are less certain that this was the cause now; see April 11 and 12). Since the only thing Scott had eaten that was different from what Monica ate was the Mexican Pizza, we concluded that the chicken must have been bad (after having set out in the heat for too long). After getting home, having some Sprite and crackers, and taking some Cipro, Scott started feeling better.

There was a dinner to go to at Salim’s (a guy who works at the Butterfly Farm near Gede). We had tried to cancel since Scott was sick, but this is difficult to do here as they had specially bought and prepared the food and no one has refrigeration so we would have felt awful if the food had gone bad. We were afraid that it would be a repeat of the debacle with Patrick’s family. They had specially prepared “Pilau” a Kenyan dish with spiced rice and meat. We caught boda bodas and then a matatu and arrived at Gede right on time. Leslie met us there. We learned a lot about Salim and his family that night, and we learned about why Scott’s stomach cannot handle spicy foods on Cipro, but that’s for later. We ate pilau into the night, and were just feeling pleasantly sleepy when Scott realized something wasn’t quite right. He tried to get up, collapsed, and ended up throwing up all of his meal in front of Slim’s whole extended family; luckily, it was dark. What a great way to repay someone’s hospitality! We explained about the Cipro and its unpleasant effects, and everyone seemed to understand. The trip back home was uneventful, and we crashed as soon as we hit the pillow.

April 4, 2006
We arrived at Gede around the normal time this morning, but it was raining pretty steadily so we hung out at the office and talked. Patrick and Leslie explained how we were to begin taking the behavioral data, what forms to fill out, etc. I ( Monica) also shared her latest wacky-larium-induced dream with everyone. She dreamt that she was playing “Truth or Dare” with Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Angelina Jolie. The twist was that these two ladies were topless! Jennifer was telling a “truth” about how she had been pretty upset when he got together with Angelina, but that she was okay with it now. I was not at all disturbed by any of this, but was much more concerned about what my “truth” or “dare” would be. I wanted it to be something profound so I could impress them. In the second part of my dream, I was wandering around the ruins and I was having trouble locating some of them. I realized why I couldn’t find them when I found that they were buried under a pile of Tufts Admissions files! :) These dreams are truly amusing!

At 9am the rain let up and we found our monkeys at their usual spot. At lunch, we skipped the pizza we’d brough and went to the M&H café with Leslie because I was really hungry! We came back, ate the pizza as well, finished off the day, and went to bed unaware of what was to come (as a result of the Mexican Chicken pizza?).

April 3, 2006
We found the monkeys fairly easily today. At lunch, Scott left until 3pm to get his hair cut. He had been concerned that a local “kinyozi” would not cut his hair properly seeing as the only real hair cut they seem to know here is shaving your head. Thus, he went to the nearby resort hotel to get it cut. Unfortunately, she wasn’t great either so I will likely just give it a go next time. Before leaving the ruins to get his hair cut, he changed his shirt. The Gede guides are so used to us wearing the same clothes day after day that they didn’t recognize Scott and kept joking about him being a tourist. At the Turtle Bay Hotel, Scott was also given the third degree by their security. Apparently there he wasn’t touristy enough. Finally, after he took off his hat and showed them his “nywele ndefu” (long hair) they let him in. The hairdresser was Swiss and has lived in Watamu for 30 years. Scott enjoyed talking with her in German.

Scott also saw an exciting spider today. It was 6 inches long from leg tip to leg tip with a mottled yellow abdomen and red tips on black legs. If ever a spider looked like it should be poisonous, this was it. He got several good photos of it.

Around 4pm Scott and I went into Malindi to do some email and then meet Leslie for dinner at I Love Pizza. We found Leslie at the Internet Café and noticed when she left, but didn’t think anything of it until the person who works at the Internet Café told us she had forgotten to pay. We bailed her out, but not without bugging her about it. On our way to “I Love Pizza” we stopped at a bookstore. We found a bunch of cool Swahili books that primary and secondary school students use to learn Swahili and decided we would buy the whole set before we head back to the states. We bought Level 3 and a Kamusi (Swahili Dictionary) to get us started and then headed to dinner. Unfortunately, even with the picture of 3rd grade children on the cover and all of the pictures inside, I have to say, we are going to need to start with Level 1, I think :)

We had Chini Chini’s (alcoholic drinks with honey, fruit juice, and vodka) and some very yummy Hawaiian and Mexican Chicken Pizzas, which Leslie paid for since she owed us one for doing her a past favor. Just as it was getting dark and we were dreading the matatu and boda boda rides home, Moses pulled up in his safari van and asked us if we wanted a lift. He had taken some American guests to Sabaki and went horseback riding. Apparently you can go on a beach ride for 2 hrs for only approximately $10/person. We will definitely be doing this in the future!