The Trouble with Colonialists

June 5, 2006
Today we had lots of rain. Luckily, we were able to complete most of
the things we wanted to accomplish in the morning before the rain hit.
The rain allowed us to work another hour after 11, but the rest of the
day was a torrential downpour. We ended up leaving at 5:15 during a
brief pause in the rain, which promptly began to fall again just as we
reached about the halfway point between the ruins and the matatu
stand. We reached Gede, and we all stopped in to the Three Spears for
a drink and a lot of fun discussions before Patrick went home and the
rest of us caught a matatu back to Turtle Bay.

The rest of the night was interesting. Monica decided to have a talk
with Lispa. She had been "resting" a lot instead of coming to dinner.
It turns out that she is sick of Liz's remarks (especially her
condescension to the African staff), and that she really cannot stand
being near Liz. She also disclosed one particular Liz comment that we
now keep near and dear to us…the fact that we are "noisy Americans".
At the same time, Scott had decided to live up to this title and
confront Liz about her remarks the previous day. When asked if she
could see how it would be offensive and awkward to everyone involved
for one person to be singled out as the "only full-paying guest", she
abruptly left to attend to a guest without saying anything.

Later, she brought in Dave to our previous conversation. He offered
that he deeply dislikes people who confront problems and that "issues
resolve themselves." It was a strange comment from people who are
supposed to be managers. This was always used as a textbook example of
how not to manage people in my business coursework, and they seemed to
be seeing the textbook results: little respect for management, low
morale, high turnover, etc. The fascinating observation, though, is
how stark the difference is in the efficiency of the field station
(e.g., morale, maintenance of facilities, email access, etc.) from
when Beatrice was managing the station and now that Liz and Dave are.
Unfortunately, it will probably take several of the staff quitting
before any action is taken, though.

June 4, 2006
Today was another good day for running. This time we managed to run
all of the way to Turtle Bay without stopping (or feeling like we were
about to die). We did not know if we could do it, but we finished the
work week by finishing the work for both groups of monkeys! This is a
pretty amazing feat when considering that even with the regular full
staff of researchers on Putin's group, they had not done this for at
least 6 months. It was great teamwork! On the way home, Laura, Scott,
and Monica had another strange experience in Gede. A funny man in a
tight shirt that exposed his belly came up to us and said "Excuse me."
And then proceeded to talk. At first we thought he was speaking
Swahili, but when we adjusted we realized that no, indeed he was
speaking gibberish. We did what any self-respecting Bostonite or New
Yorker would do … we ignored him, but he was persistent. Meanwhile, a
group of secondary school students and several of the local
townspeople were watching with big smiles, as we tried to tactfully
get him to move on. Finally, he touched Monica's shoulder, and Scott
had to inform him that he had to respect people's personal space.
Luckily, after about 30 minutes (the longest wait for a matatu that
we've ever had at Gede) a matatu came and rescued us! We were happy to
get away, and that we provided so much amusement to everyone. We
stopped off at the internet place while Laura went back to Mwamba,
which turned out to be a complete waste of time, and their connection
was too slow to access anything. We still ended up getting back in
time to take a quick swim in the ocean before coming in to get ready
for dinner. Dinner was interesting. New guests (birders) had arrived
from Taita to attend another ringing course from Colin, and Liz
introduced Tom as "the only full-paying guest," to which Scott added
"And I suppose the rest of us are trash then." It was a typical Liz
way of expressing her contempt at having so many researchers around;
she seems to fail to grasp the concept of a field station.

June 3, 2006
Today we went running along the beach, and that went very well. We saw
a beautiful sunrise and arrived at Turtle Bay with plenty of time to
pick up breakfast. The only caveat was that (like usual) Monica's face
got bright red from exertion and stayed this way for at least an hour.
Between her pasty-white legs and her bright red face, she got even
more stares than usual! We caught a matatu there, and when we got off
and were walking through Gede, we noticed a heavy cargo truck pull up
behind us. We went to move out of the way and noticed that it was
Patrick and his father! They gave us a lift to the ruins :), which was
a very nice surprise. We ended up working straight through the day,
and we definitely reached our goals for work. There was no power in
Gede all day so our hopes for doing email were yet again shattered.
That night, Scott received a nice call from his parents.

June 2, 2006
We have restarted (after the failure of two days ago) our training
regimen to get ready for our hike to see the mountain gorillas in
Uganda and our climb of Kilimanjaro. We have started easily by walking
along the beach to work, and we stopped at Turtle Bay to grab some
tasty mandazi (triangular fried pastries) for breakfast.
Monkey-watching went well, and we were even successful in walking to
Gede and accessing our email from the post office. We perfectly used
up our internet card sending a few important things off then headed
back to the ruins in time to see Salim trying to salvage some
butterfly pupae. Apparently, Putin's group of monkeys had broken into
the butterfly center and stolen several pupae. While he was explaining
what was happening through the fence, we saw Kito, a very brave
juvenile male, come from behind and start eating more pupae off the
table Salim had been working on. We came around and tried to help
control the monkey problem, and when Kito came back Scott used some of
his monkey knowledge to threaten him away. After all of the
excitement, we picked up 4 jars of honey to bring back with us.

June 1, 2006
It was a much better day. We worked all morning (after a walk/run to
Turtle Bay along the beach earlier in the morning) and then left to go
horseback riding with the Mwamba staff. We scheduled it for Kenyan
Independence Day so everyone could attend, and it was a great time!
Carol and Stanley had arranged for our own private matatu to come and
pick everyone up from Mwamba and Gede, so at 2 everyone piled into the
matatu and started off. The first stop was Gede Mobil station where
Scott met the matatu with Patrick and Salim (Monica had left a bit
earlier to help get everything organized at Mwamba, since Liz and
Dave, the managers, were not particularly happy about the idea and
were unwilling to help). Colin was sitting in the manamba's
(conductor's) seat and even had on a maroon shirt, the signature
uniform of the manambas. We arrived at Seaview Resort and immediately
headed down to their newly (i.e., just finished less than 1 month ago)
finished stables to start people off on the horses. The looks on
everyone's faces when they rode a horse for the first time were
priceless. Lawrence was beaming the whole time, and Kidenge, Tsofa,
Thomas, and Stanley were all very excited to be riding. Kidenge had to
bail from his horse when it started going too fast, but all in all it
was a good time. Sarah, an accomplished rider, had quite the spirited
horse and went running up and down the beach for some time. It looked
great, but we are still unsure who was in control. It took a lot to
convince Michae to ride; however, after Leslie told him that his
little girls could see a photo of him riding a horse he finally agreed
:). Despite Dave leaving early without giving Colin the money to pay
for the outing and Liz trying her best to make people feel
uncomfortable, the event went very well. Afterwards, we had the matatu
drop us off at the internet café, so we could get a little emailing
done.

May 31, 2006
Today was a total failure … absolutely. I think it all can be traced
to us looking like tourists. We started with a run along the
Watamu-Temple Point road where we were heckled every so often by
passersby. Scott had not had much to eat and was very grumpy by the
time he arrived at Gede. Scott had a pretty bad morning following the
monkeys, and Monica received a nice scratch across her hand. She had
gone to get a monkey poop, pulled down a branch to help her, and when
she released it, it brought along a thorned vine, which caught on her
hand. When the day was finally over (we thought) we headed out and
were met by two miraa-chewing fools on the road from the ruins. They
kept asking us what we did and were mocking that we study monkeys. It
was such a strange experience, since we had never seen these guys
before, and had never met anyone like this before. We were thoroughly
annoyed by this point, but we stopped by the post office to get a
package from Kevin and Steve, who sent us socks!!! You might think
that we get excited way too easily, but socks are like gold here, and
poor Leslie has been trying to live on 2 pairs of socks ever since she
landed in Nairobi and someone stole her other pairs from her bag.

It was the one glimmer of hope in our otherwise dismal day. We walked
back to Turtle Bay and ran into Lawrence, who called us over to his
sister's-in-law salon, where we managed to mangle "we are bad
students" in Swahili, so it came out "wewe ni wanafunzi mbaya" or "you
are bad students". I think everyone at the salon got the idea :).
Lawrence invited us to his house, and we met his little son, Isaac,
and wife, Cristin, and he shared some mangoes and bananas with us
while we sat and watched the sunset and let our stress drip off. We
needed this so badly. We realized it was getting late, so we decided
to walk back along the beach, which there was precious little of since
it was high tide. In the middle of the walk, Scott gouged his foot
with a stick. By the time we reached Mwamba we were quite a sight.
Thomas took one look at our wounds (Monica's hand and Scott's foot)
and asked us what happened. All we could say was that the day was "si
nzuri" (not good).

May 30, 2006
Not much happened today …

May 29, 2006
Today was our day off, and the rain fell all morning. We woke up and
made banana pancakes, which we shared with everyone. We also met
Britt, a technology support person with the Miami University group,
who was very fun and interesting, and he informed us of all the new
developments in the States. We worked on updating the blog, and later
caught a ride with Moses to Malindi. We showed Laura around Malindi
(like where to get a fan and where not to change US dollars … like the
guys who hang out in the alley next to the Standard Chartered Bank).
We mostly just took care of errands like checking the bus schedules
and emailing, but later we ended up eating at "I Love Pizza" for
dinner and everyone sampled the fabulous "chini chini", a nice
cocktail made with vodka, honey, and cane sugar.