Trop Ag

Agricultura Tropical, as they might say in someplace they speak spanish.  Going into my semester in Kenya, I actually had no idea what the classes were.  Like I signed up for the semester without knowing what courses were being taught.  I was in it more for the study abroad experience.  When I told friends and family that I was studying abroad, they're first question:  "what will you be doing there?"  To which I would non-descriptively answer:  "Field work."  So then I decided to look at the titles of the courses, and of all of them, Tropical Agriculture seemed the most interesting.  After actually taking the course, I can tell you it was very interesting, although I think Paula's was still my favorite (in terms of content and goals).  But Trop Ag (as they cool people call it) was a close second.

WHY?

1)  Cheryl Palm (the Professor) and Steve Wood (the TA) were really cool people - both Columbia University affiliated.

2)  Much like Paula's course, it had a practical element.  

We were commissioned with analyzing the health of six farms outside the town of Embu in the agricultural region south of Mount Kenya.  We were supposed to go to Kisumu during this course, but since Raila Odinga is from that region - and he lost the presidential election - Princeton was afraid we'd get caught up in rioting (pretty sure no rioting happened in that course).  Cheryl works in Kisumu for the UN Millenium Villages Project.  Basically, the worst thing about poverty is food security.  So, the UN set up project villages in some of the most poverty-stricken regions of Africa, representing different agroclimate zones found world-wide.  They're seeing what works, what doesn't, and if cost-effective strategies can be employed on a national/global level to increase food security.

We split into three groups:  Nutrients, Soils/Carbon, Biodiversity.  I was in the (BEST GROUP) Nutrients group.  We called ourselves Nutz, nbd.  As Nutz, we spent our time on the farm asking the farmer(s) questions about what fertilizers they put on their farm and how much vegetation they harvested from their farm plots.  Essentially, we wanted to create a farm balance for the basic crop nutrients nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).  Here's an example of the type of map we needed to make for each farm.

Nutrient balance diagram for the last farm sampled in Embu, created by ME!  They had no livestock (because they were super old and livestock are hard to take care of) but 

While this looks like just a simple easy picture a kid could make in MS Paint (because it is, although this was made in Word, not MS Paint...), the calculations behind the colorful arrows are actually really annoying.  There was a lot of guess work and a lot of assumptions made because the farmers didn't always know the exact amount of things harvested and the weights were sometimes measured in things like wheelbarrows.  If you want the short speech:  most of the farms are nutrient deficient on most of their farm plots, especially plots like the woodlot (used to harvest timbre) and napier grass (harvested and fed to livestock like cows, sheep, and goats).  Unlike the Maasai who open graze their animals, the agriculturalists in Embu have zero-grazing livestock, meaning the livestock are penned up and fed in place.  Livestock are basically a sink of nutrients, which kind of sucks.  Anyone who took basic biology should remember that ~10% of energy is lost between trophic levels, so essentially raising animals is less efficient that raising crops and eating those directly.  So why are people not vegans?!?  Well, in some places, humans can't eat the vegetation produced by the soil (e.g. more arid climates like North Kenya's Turkana region where milk and blood from cattle are a major source of calories; the cows can eat the crappy vegetation and the humans can eat the animal byproducts).  Also, I guess meat tastes good (FUN FACT:  a few nights ago I had a dream that I ate a hot dog and I woke up feeling so horrible for myself; for those that don't know, I've been "vegetarian" since last August, with the exception of a few slip ups).

Meeting and talking with the farmers was really cool.  All but one of them spoke English, and they were all very willing to help us learn about their farms.  Another FUN FACT:  most farms in Africa are smallholder, meaning small acreage.  The largest farm we visited was 6 acres (and the smallest was 1 acre).  But these are the farms that produce the coffee / tea (major Kenyan exports) for the world.  To me that's amazing.  Growing up in Illinois, I've seen the huge farms with vast stretches of corn (called maize in Africa) and soybeans as far as the eye can see.  The Kenyan farms (with the exception of the pineapple farms, which are controlled by fruit companies like Dole) were so small and so diverse.  Every farm produced at least 3 different crops that they sold to markets (mostly maize, beans, and bananas; smaller cash crops being khat, aloe, tea, coffee, macadamia nuts, and more).  There were also the security foods they kept in their fields for if there family needed extra food during a drought.  This was food like sweet potato, cassava, and yams (FUN FACT ABOUT YAMS:  The yams we have in the US, unless bought at an authentic African grocery store, are probably not real yams.  They're probably a variant of sweet potato.  When Africans were enslaved in the US, they were fed this white flesh sweet potato that reminded them of the yams from the homeland, so they called it yams, and thus yams entered the American vernacular to describe a potato-like food that is not in fact yams.).  These security foods can store in the soil up to five years without spoiling so they're actually really nice for places that have food security problems.  Thus, farmers scatter them about their farms.

Village kids that helped us count plants (part of the assignment was counting plants, no joke) on Ezekiel's farm.

Boys picking guava on Ann's farm.

Me and the daughter of Ann (one of the farmers)

Getting served tea after data collection at Editer's farm.

Maize and bean field.  It actually doesn't hurt either crop to intercrop them and it's good for soil fertility (since beans are legumes that fix nitrogen).

So we were staying in Embu for a week (during which time I watched the entire first and second season of Game of Thrones and am now addicted).  The hotel - Izaak Walton - was hilarious.  It was marketed as the best place to stay in Embu (which, you know, shouldn't really say a lot in the first place, Embu's not really a hoppin' town).  It was worse than advertised, which Cheryl told us is how you should approach anything in Africa.  The pool was advertised as Olympic-sized, to which I reply, "what Olympics?  1896? (FALSE:  The 1896 Olympics were swum in the open sea)."  Probably the worst part was the crappy internet.  When we were in Nairobi, we stayed at the Maasai Lodge, that had internet comparable in speed to Mpala.  At the Izaak Walton in Embu, the internet barely crawled along.  This would be fine, you know, if we were actually on vacation there.  But we needed to do work!  Our project required we look up nutrient contents of various crops and livestock byproducts.  We also had to register for classes, and any recent Princetonian knows, even when you click the register button right as class registration opens, you can still get locked out of classes.  I was, in fact, locked out of one EEB class I wanted next semester; but I did get into a documentary filmmaking class, so that should be fun.  The one redeeming quality of the hotel was its food:  delicious omelettes every morning, delicious garlic bread for lunch, etc.  YUM.  YUM.  IN.  MY.  TUM.  TUM.

Sadly, Cheryl had to leave us early because of a family emergency.  When we returned to Mpala without her, just Steve now, we had about 5 days to write a one-page report on a specific topic - biodiversity, nutrients, or carbon/biomass - a five-page report on another and then contribute a section of a paper written by the whole class in our group.  So, I wrote my first one-page paper about carbon, my five page paper about biodiversity, and helped write the nutrient section of the final class paper.  RIGHT?!?!  THAT'S A WHOLE LOT OF WORK!!!  Again, these courses have taught me how to put peddle to the metal and just get the assignment done.  

We turned in our paper on Tuesday morning and then went in to Nanyuki to do some last minute souvenir shopping.  Then we came back and played with some kids in the village before going on our final sundowner.  More about my closing emotions on my semester abroad in a later post.  For now, this has been Erisa Apantaku with a special report on "Trop Ag."  Stay tuned in the immediate future for:  "The Final Post."

NNP and the Maasai

After completing Andy's course (but not really because we still had to write a 6-8 page paper due 2 weeks later), we headed to NAIROBI.  Nairobi is the capital of Kenya.  It's also the only city that contains a national park in its city limits (STEP UP YOUR GAME PORTLAND, OREGON.).  I was excited to leave Mpala because the beetles were RIDIC.  Like actually.  So I was excited to go to Nairobi where we'd be staying in a hotel - hopefully more bug free than a research centre.  And for the most part it was.  Devika and I were in "Guest House," which was like a condo.  It would've been a great hang out space for all twelve of us, but we were SO BUSY.  What were we doing you ask?  Oh, just savin' the world, one transect at a time.

But actually, here's what we were doing:

Paula Kahumbu - a former Princeton graduate student of Andy Dobson - was our professor for this part of the course.  If you check out her website, you'll see she's really into policy, activism, and conservation.  So our project was aimed at this:  reconciling community needs with wildlife needs wherever possible for a potential WIN WIN situation.  The southern edge of Nairobi National Park (NNP) is a common grazing area for migratory wildebeests (yes, the animals that killed Simba's father), as well as a dispersal zone for other grazers (like zebra, eland, buffalo, etc.).  The park is currently not fences, but cattle herders from the surrounding community are not allowed to graze inside the park by law.  During the wet season, everything's fine because there's grass everywhere for everyone.  It's during the dry season, when grass outside the park is overgrazed, that things get rough for the community.  Additionally, during rainfails - like in 2009 - people are truly devastated.  So our goal was to do vegetation, insect, and animal surveys inside and outside the park to compare biodiversity.  Basically, we were trying to see, should we let grazing happen inside the park sometimes?  Would that be bad for animals inside the park?  Because ultimately, the way things are right now, the community kind of hates that they get the short end of the stick (they're animals can't graze inside the park, but park animals can graze wherever they want) 

Another major source of conflict between the community and NNP is the lions.  NNP attracts tourists because they want to see lions.  But the lions sometimes cross outside of the park and snatch members livestock.  Traditionally, when a lion kills livestock, Maasai warriors go kill the lion.  So the WIN WIN would be:  lions don't kill livestock, lions don't get killed.  BUT HOW?!?!?  HOW STOP A LION FROM EATING A DELICIOUS COW?!?!?  Answer:  Richard Terere.  I had the pleasure of hanging out with this cool, smart, 13-year-old boy who invented lion lights from the turn signals of a motorbike.  Basically he realized lions didn't frighten from solitary lights, but moving/flashing lights would keep lions away.  Check out his TEDx talk here; YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT.  Anyway, he had a lot of cool things to say and it was interesting seeing the argument - human-wildlife conflict - from his side.  Paula heard about his invention when she was talking to the community about other conservation things and took him under her wing sort of.  Now he's going to the best school in Nairobi and wants to be a aerospace engineer (I made sure to plug the MAE major at Princeton!)  You hear about these stories all the time.  I truly believe everyone on this planet is capable of innovation.  If it weren't an inherent property of humanity, humans wouldn't have evolved to the state we're at now.  I just wish everyone had the opportunity, and someone to take notice of incredible ability and foster it.  That's the key.

But I digress.  So we were counting plants.  More counting plants.  But actually, I was in the mammal group and had the pleasure of counting poop instead.  Since the park is only open at certain times during the day, we couldn't go on early morning or late night game drives.  So instead we did poop transects where we identified and counted the poop we saw on a 30 meter transect.  We also set up camera traps, which are basically cameras that take pictures when they detect motion.  This way we hoped to catch certain things that only really become active at night.  And WE DID!

Paula is super important / connected in the world of Kenyan conservation and policy.  I mean, she has her own website for goodness sakes.  (SIDE NOTE:  She’s like always on her phone that’s how busy she is.  At first I thought it was rude.  I was like, “come on lady, you’re here to teach us, not email people!”  But then I realized she was just super busy because she is the busiest person in Kenya.  Our course was the week leading up to the presidential inauguration, and after our course ended, we learned that Paula had WRITTEN a substantial part of Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech.  It was an honor just to have a class taught by her.)  Anyway, since she’s important, she has a lot of important friends that came along with us into the field and helped us collect and analyze our data.  One was Dino Martens, who I had cited in a paper earlier in the semester.  He’s basically a super genius.  He knew all the plants and insects we encountered.  Another was Jeff Worden.  Basically, they were super helpful.

(SIDE NOTE:  Sorry, this blog post sucks.  I don’t know.  I’ve lost the magic…  If you’re bored of reading, skip ahead to the section entitled: BEGIN READING HERE.)

Anyway, after we did the sampling, we had to give a presentation to the community about our findings.  The presentation was split into two major sections:  impartial data presentation and debate.  I was in the debate side (those who know me may know I like to argue and love classroom debates!), arguing for keeping cattle out of NNP.  It wasn't really a real debate because we didn't go back and forth at all, it was more just an argumentative presentation.  My colleagues Amy and Suchana were also on the AGAINST side.  It was funny because our major argument against grazing was regulation, but that's something we didn't feel comfortable saying in our presentation:  "hey, we can't let you do this because, you know, you give a man a yard, he'll take a meter" (that's not the expression, but that's what I said at like 2 in the morning when we were working on our project).  Anyway, we based our argument off the fact biodiversity was severely reduced outside the park, the fact that cattle destroy the aesthetics of the park (and could scare away animals that are fearful of humans/cattle like rhinos), and disease transmission between wildlife and cattle.  Suchana came up with a pretty good solution to no cattle in the park, but still helping the cattle:  MOW THE GRASS.  The grass inside the park is actually not that palatable for grazers.  The argument for allowing cattle in the park was basically there's plenty of it and it will be better grass if we let them in.  But again, regulation is a beyotch.  So why not mow the grass - so fresher, tastier grass can grow back - and give it to community members with cattle.  That way, it's way easier for the park to maintain biodiversity.  It sounds kind of silly, but it's worth a shot, especially if climate change keeps frakking up the weather such that droughts are more frequent and severe.

It was funny because we were worried we would “lose” the argument because most of the evidence seems to say that with controlled grazing inside the park things would still be okay (and by ‘things,’ I mean the ecosystem).  The night before the presentation, we were up until 2 AM preparing the presentation.  It was my fault, because I decided to start pouring through extra material that night trying to support our argument.  I got about 4 hours of sleep before I had to wake up to practice the presentation with Amy and Suchana.  I was SO TIRED.  I was worried that in my exhausted state I would fail the presentation.  On the way to the National Park – where we were giving the presentation in a conference room – I was busily compiling the different presentation slides from everyone’s separate presentations (data, for, and against) IN THE CAR.  I thought I was going to vomit looking at the screen.  I was scatterbrained, I wasn’t thinking straight.  I started to come ‘round to reasonable thinking once we got into the conference room and set up the presentation.  When we first got there thirty minutes before the presentation began, no one was there.  Paula had invited practically EVERYONE she knew to the presentation.  Being a super important person in Kenya, this had the potential to be many people.  When she taught the course last year, the focus was on a road that was being developed and that would cut into the park.  Obviously this brought a lot of attention and there were over 100 community members that showed up to the students’ presentations.  My hopes (of not having to give a presentation in front of a bajillion community members) were dashed when people started showing up.  Most of them were involved with KWS (Kenyan Wildlife Service), or were conservationists/ecologists or just general students.  The only members of the “community” (i.e. the people that want to graze in the park) were Richard Terere and Nickson Parmisa.  So essentially we “won” by default because most of the audience already agreed with us that you can’t let cattle in the park.  My hope is that KWS starts exploring the opportunities to lessen the devastation of livestock during drought years. 

After we gave our presentation, we went to Dino’s neighborhood, which is random artist collective on the other side of a gorge that you cross by wire bridge.  At the collective, everything is recycled glass art.  The buildings are built into the curve of rocks found naturally there.  Basically, it’s a commitment to sustainability and living with nature instead of forcibly carving civilization out of every inch of soil on the planet.  Sadly, there were many mosquitoes there and I got bit up and down my whole body.  Happily, we saw / learned how to make glass beads and then purchased some glass beads.  Elora (my sister), get excited; I bought you beads (BEES?!?!).  It was cool.  I thought my roommate Clare would LOVE IT since she’s a hippy, and awesome. 

So you’d think, after collecting data for four days, spending 24 hours to prepare a presentation, giving said presentation (flawlessly might I add), we’d get the afternoon in the bead store and then chill out.

FALSE.  FRAKKING FALSE.  Going into the course, we knew we’d have to write a paper collaboratively, all 12 of us, due the day after our presentation.  What we were told would be a short paper (1-2 paragraphs per person), suddenly became long (1-2 pages per person).  Add to this the fact that we still hadn’t finished our papers for Andy’s class (that’s right, another 6-8 page paper on the way), we spent the night working.  Essentially two super late nighters in a row.  The next day, I was completely spent.  If these courses have taught me anything, it’s how to take practically no data, put it through the bullsh*t machine that is my brain, and spit out acceptable writing.  I suppose this is an important skill to have…

(BEGIN READING HERE.)

The most interesting thing about this course was the human element.  Before it, we’d only done hard science and not talked at all about policy.  As part of the mammal group, a lot of my job involved talking with the Maasai herdsmen – notably Nickson Parmisa, a chief in the local government, about their feelings on cattle grazing in the park and wildlife.  All of them loved having the wildlife around, but saw the inequity of the grazing situation.  Another thing that doesn’t help is that the Kenyan people don’t “own” the wildlife; legally, the government (KWS) does.  So if they don’t benefit from it, but only suffer from it, how can you expect the Kenyan people to be chill with this inquity?  Speaking to Nickson, he went through a long list of droughts he had lived through and the different tactics he had to take to feed his cows – in some cases walking with them for 3 days straight to a place of greener pasture.


Nickson, a chief in the local government, also told me a lot about the Maasai.  Although the culture has changed to adapt to an evolving world, they still maintain a lot of traditional ceremonies.  One that stuck out to me was a sort of transition from youngish adult to more respectable adult (I think?  I don’t really know what marked the transition, but I think it was turning 30 or something).  (Okay, I’m severely forgetting the intricacies of the ceremony he told us, but here’s my best shot:)  They had a big feast and the men all ate meat together.  Then they left and the women came.  If any woman touched the pig carcasses, she had cheated on her husband before.  (I think that’s it.) 

He also told me about the diseases that affected the cattle, such as MCF (malignant catarrhal fever) and ECF (east coast fever).  I asked him about Q fever (see my previous blog post for more info on Q fever).  He said he’s never heard of it.  I wondered how prevalent Q fever was in the populations (animal and human) in this region.  If Princeton was worried about it, it must be a sort of big deal (maybe?).  I think that would make a cool project.  My thesis project is on the prevalence of Leptospirosis in sea lions:  what dictates what animals get sick and die?  Has anyone looked into antibody titres of zoonotic diseases in herdsmen outside NNP?  Maybe that should happen?  I don’t know.

A cool thing about the culture I learned the hard way:  older / more respected people greet other members of the community by touching their head.  So, an adult would great a child by toughing his/her head.  I didn’t realize this and began shaking hands with all these kids and they gave me the strangest look.  Eventually, one mother started laughing and said, sticking out her hand to mock a hand-shake, “they don’t know this way.  They only know this way,” said as she learned her head forward.  I felt like such an idiot!  I also felt bad because when I had shook the hands of the kids it felt sort of like I was subverting their cultural norms and I didn’t want to be offensive.  But the fact the Mom just laughed at me was probably a good sign that nothing was too serious.

I’ll leave you with a story from another Maasai – this time a KWS officer named Jackson Kuyoni.  He was really interested in birds, so I asked what spurred this passion.  Jackson told me that before getting circumsized, he had to kill severely birds that would then be made into a colorful headdress to be worn on the day of the ceremony.  But he loved the birds because of their color, and after killing three he told his family he wasn’t going to kill anymore.  This caused some strife between himself and his father and grandmother, who both wanted him to carry on the tradition.  But Jackson wouldn’t budge.  Eventually, his family let him go bird-headdress-less, so at the ceremony he was the only boy without one.  And he started a trend!  He’s the oldest in his family and his younger brothers didn’t have to attain birds either.  Jackson’s happy about this since some of the birds they have to sacrifice are threatened or endangered.

The Dobber

It’s been a while since I posted, so… here’s another post, starting where I left off last.  After we climbed Mt. Kenya, we spent two weeks in a course taught by Professor Andy Dobson.  All I knew about Dobson before the course began was that he was a disease ecologist, he was British (Scottish actually), and he never replied to emails – he’s the thesis advisor of two students here so they theoretically needed to be in contact during March so they could plan their thesis, but, whatever.  While they talked about how he didn’t respond to their emails, they would call him Dobbers because that’s his netID.  

Anyway, he’s actually an awesome, chill guy, and we found out really quickly.  Upon his arrival – a day later than when we expected him to arrive – he gave us our assignment for the course:  we were going to map the distribution of plants, animals, and insects on Mpala Ranch.  Maybe this sounds fun to you!  If so, you are probably not a field ecologist.  If this sounds ridiculous to you, you are probably a field ecologist, or a practical human being, who realizes that two weeks is not enough time to do a thorough sampling.  Mpala Ranch has four types of soil – red clay, black cotton, riparian, transition (between the red clay and black cotton) – so the hope was to see the different biological communities atop these soils.  Like I wrote, it was ambitious and totally impractical, but it was a valuable exercise.  I had never really done anything like ecological surveying before and I learned a lot:  mostly that this type of surveying is ridiculously tedious and annoying.  We split into four specialized groups to sample the ranch:  mammals, birds, insects, and plants.  I was in the mammal group with Nitasha and my roommate Devika.  We called ourselves Mammies and formed what our other classmates might’ve called “a clique.”  I mean, mammals are definitely the coolest things around, and to survey the mammals we woke up every morning at 5:30 AM, went on a drive until 9 AM when we would eat breakfast.  We’d do another drive after dinner (8 PM – 10 PM) to see if animal distribution was effected by time and also to see the animals that only come out at night.  Over the course of one week of sampling, we drove over 200 kilometers.  It was exhausting, but really fun.  On our drives, the bird group would join us so I learned a lot about the different birds of East Africa.  The drives were fun; the vegetation sampling was not.  After our breakfast, we had to go out into the field with the plant and insect groups and do their bidding when all we wanted to do was sleep.  By the time we got back from the field (lunch time) we just had enough energy to eat and then lay down.  Because we were worried we’d never actual analyze the mountain of data we were collecting, we were crabby and resentful all the time.  Eventually, we were able to convince Dobson to let us spend one afternoon at the centre analyzing our data, and it was much needed.  Here’s a list of all the animals I saw on our drives:

1) Dikdik (yes, it’s actually called that…)

2) Scrub Hare

3) Impala

4) Reticulated Giraffe

5) Plains Zebra

6) Grevy's Zebra

7) Thomson's Gazelle

8) Rock Hyrax

9) Vervet Monkey

10) Galago (aka Bushbaby)

11) Spotted Hyena

12) White-tailed Mongoose

13) Black-backed Jackal

14) Grant's Gazelle

15) Elephant

16) Olive Baboon

17) Striped Ground Squirrel

18) Cattle (Mpala is a research centre and commercial ranch, so cattle abound)

19) Slender Mongoose

20) Hippopotamus

21) Defassa Waterbuck

22) Eland

23) Buffalo

24) Steinbok

25) Bushbuck

26) Domestic Dog (we’ve seen wild dogs [actually severely endangered] earlier in the semester just not during our sampling; only domestic dogs which are kinda boring [no offense!])

27) Fringe-tailed Gerbil

28) Leaf-nosed Bat

29) Dwarf Mongoose

30) Honey Badger

31) Lion (heard, not seen; although I saw lions earlier at Ol Pejeta and again at NNP [BLOG POST TO COME SHORTLY!])

32) Warthog

33) Jackson's Hartebeest

34) Oryx

35) Single-striped Grass Mouse

36) Honey badger (speculative…)

Now here are some random stories from our time in Andy’s class:

1) Rock Band.  As Mammies, we would always complain while doing the vegetation plots.  On our first day doing vegetation, we found the work so boring, in between counting trees, shrubs, and blades of grass, we picked up rocks and hammered out beats.  One particularly popular song (only amongst the three of us, everyone else hated our singing) was called “Countin’ Plants.”  The lyrics (written by me) are as follows:

Countin’

Plants

Countin’

Plants

Countin’

Plants

At Mpalaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Ranch

At one point I started banging out a beat that was like this super awesome LCD Soundsystem song, so enjoy it and be thankful you weren’t counting plants and listening to my shrill voice.

2) Q Fever.  Before coming to Kenya, we had to have a pre-departure meeting with a University physician about Q Fever.  Basically, Q Fever is kinda like Chagas disease in that you get it, you think you just have the flu, and, like, two decades later your heart craps out and you die.  If you catch it early, you treat with antibiotics and it’s no big deal.  But they wanted to check our heart function before even going because it probably is bad to get it if you already have valve problems.  So… we were told not to touch livestock because Q Fever is carried on ticks that are on livestock.  But… during one particularly lackadaisical day of counting plants, we just needed a pick me up and it was convenient that at this exact moment a herd of goats/sheep (I really can’t tell the difference) came through.  We wouldn’t jump at just any goatsheeps, but the Maasai herders were curious and came over to look at us, so we looked at them and saw one of them had a baby animal hanging from a sheet tied to his breast.  IT WAS SO CUTE!  So we asked him if we could pet lamby (that’s what we called it even though it was a baby goat [i.e. kid]) and we did when he said yes.  We played with the lamby (that was born JUST THE DAY BEFORE!) even though it couldn’t walk, by petting it and trying to give it pieces of straw to eat.  Eventually we went back to our plot and their herdsmen went back to their sheepgoats.  Dobson came over to us after a while and we told him about our exploits with lamby, to which he said only, “Girls… Q Fever.”  OH SHOOT!  TOTALLY FORGOT!  THE LAMB WAS JUST SO CUTE!  Okay, so we probably had caught Q Fever.  But actually no because we would’ve seen a tick on us and also the lamb was freshly born so I don’t know how it could get Q Fever that quickly.  Anyway, later that night I checked out the Q Fever Wikipedia page and was pleasantly surprised when I read the following (straight from the page):  “Treatment of acute Q fever with antibiotics is very effective. ^{[CITATION NEEDED]}”  I’M SORRY, WHAT?  You can’t just drop this vote of confidence on me Wikipedia, then rip it away with a “CITATION NEEDED.”  Whatever.  But actually, we don’t have Q Fever.  But the incident did breed hilarious phrasings such as:  “If this isn’t Q Fever, I don’t know what is.”

Nitasha and Devika with lamby.

3) Toad in the Road.  On one of our night drives, we saw a toad in the road.  I don’t know what came over me, but I decided to pick up the toad (we named it froggy to stick with the incorrect naming convention established with lamby).  Previously, I wasn’t the type of person to pick up frogtoads.  For example, my cousins would always pick up toadfrogs and I would just pet the amphibians’ backs with one finger if I weren’t running away from the frogtoad.  I don’t know why I was afraid (firstly, I wasn’t afraid, I just don’t like things crawling on me…) of these creatures in the past, but maybe it was the attempt to look like a tough girl in front of Dobson, but I hopped out and picked up froggy and brought it into our car.  Froggy proceeded to FREAK THE HECK OUT and jump around the seat before I flung it outside again (after we had identified it).  Anyway, later in the week, I picked up another toadfrog, so, you know… this is a thing I can do now.

4) Leopard in Da Streets.  Of the big cats here (Cheetah, Lion, Leopard), I’ve seen the first two.  I (along with my classmates) have yet to see a leopard.  The one morning after we were done sampling the mammals (and thus done waking up early for early morning game drives), Dobson and our TA Jake went out just for fun and SAW A LEOPARD.  I curse the gods.

More Ado About Dobson:  He’s actually really cool.  Some afternoons we had cocktail lectures and he talked about really interesting things!  One lecture was on general ecology of the Serengeti.  Interestingly, after rinderpest was eradicated (one of the only two viruses to be wiped off the planet, the other being smallpox), animal communities altered because wildebeest populations we no longer depressed due to disease.  This altered predator populations, plant communities, and ultimately soils.  I had never before considered a disease to have the ability to alter soil make-up.  Just goes to show you… it’s all connected…

Another one of his lectures was about rabies.  Definitely not the type of lecture you want to have in Kenya without having received the rabies vaccine.  Basically, you can get rabies from many sources:  domestic dogs, wild animals (hyenas), bats (just inhaling their saliva can do it), etc.  SUPER SCARRY CONSIDERING BATS LIVE IN THE FREAKIN’ BATHROOMS!  Also, when the director of Mpala mentioned that once they had a rabid hyena chillin’ in the bathroom.  Basically, I didn’t want to use the bathroom for a week after hearing this lecture.  The sad thing is the week we arrived at Mpala, a research assistant had died of rabies.  This sh*t is happening all over people, and I feel like in the U.S., we never really consider it as an issue anymore because a vaccine exists and treatment is readily available for those bitten.  Ain’t the same here.  Dobson works with a group in Tanzania trying to vaccinate pet dogs (if you could call them pets; they live in the house but have to fend for themselves for food) and it’s pretty successful, but there’s still so much that needs to be done.  I told him someone should do their senior thesis work on rabid dogs and call it “The Real Reservoir Dogs.”  He chuckled.  I chuckled.  But actually, this stuff is pretty sad.  Dobson told the story of one man who was bitten by his daughter who was bitted by a pet dog.  The man didn’t have the money to get treated.  There’s only been one successful treatment (The Milwaukee Protocol) of rabies once symptoms started settling in.  Doctors pumped her full of ketamine to slow her neural function and limit the spread of the virus to her brain.  With the virus slowed, her body’s immune system (with the help of antivirals) was able to fight off the attack on its own.  However, post-first-symptoms survival is extremely rare.  When someone starts showing symptoms, the treatment is, as Dobson said, “say goodbye and chain them to a bed.” 

We had another lecture about Elephants and the Ivory Trade.  Basically, China sucks.  But not really because every country exploits a different natural resource and it just so happens one of China’s is ivory and Americans want elephants to hang around so their children can see them in zoos but know they exist in the wild as well.  But China likes ivory for traditional purposes, and since the Chinese middle class is growing, so goes the ivory demand.  Many countries operate a legal ivory trade with quotas, but it’s total bullsh*t because poachers will always find a way to cheat the system if there’s a system in the first place.  In West Africa, elephants are basically all gone.  In East Africa, they’re declining.  In Southern Africa, where they use the “legal ivory trade” to pay for their conservation efforts.  But the sad part is, poaching totally screws up elephant social structure.  I don’t really remember why, but it totally does.  If you’re curious, send me an email and I’ll look back at my lecture notes.

Don't tell me you don't like elephants...

Our last lecture was on roads.  Sounds boring, but it was specifically on the road the Tanzanian government wants to build that would cut straight through the Serengeti National Park (SNP) and straight the wildebeest migration corridor.  Hundreds of thousands of wildebeest migrate from south Kenya to south Serengeti every year and having a road there probably wouldn’t be good.  I’ve driven down NJ/NY highways and seen so many deer dead on the side of the road.  I guess it’s kind of bad that I’m desensitized to deer, but if it were cheetah or wildebeest that I saw dead on the side of the road, I’d be appalled.  The funny thing is, it’s also totally more economical to go around the SNP, but the government promised one thing and if they go back on its promised road it will make them look weak.  A government going back on it’s word looking weak… guess Congress is pretty damn weak.

THE END.  More to come on Paula Kahumbu’s class and my experience in Nairobi National Park!

P.S.  I’m addicted to Game of Thrones.  That is all.

The Wet Season

Sophomore fall I took a class called African Literature and Film.  One week we watched a film called Daratt, which roughly translates to Dry Season.  It was about a boy who’s father had been killed in the civil war in Chad.  When it is announced over the radio that war criminals will be given full amnesty, his grandfather tasks him with killing the man who murdered his father.  It’s a great film that won a few cinema awards. 

Anyway, I mention it because if I were to make a film called The Wet Season, the main character would be beetles, with supporting actors/actresses being termites and mosquitoes.  There would be no plot and the entire movie would depict a bajillion beetles flying at the camera lens for 90 minutes.  Did you know termites fly?  I didn’t know that until, one night, I was horrified by the increase in moths we were encountering after the first rains.  Someone proceeded to tell me those where termites.  Immediately my horror grew.  Termites were the things that were supposed to rot your wooden deck.  They were not supposed to fly into your hair and mouth as you tried to eat dinner.  The beetles are a joke.  And by that, I don’t mean they’re an insignificant non-threat and thus funny.  No, I mean it’s a frakking joke how many frakking beetles are around and it’s frakking ridiculous that they cannot avoid you when they’re flying around doing beetle things.  It’s honestly a nightmare.  If it weren’t for my bug net, I’m convinced I’d have at least a bajillion beetles crawling on me throughout the night.

The strange thing is, the mosquitoes are not the worst part.  I was sure the mosquitoes would destroy me, eat me alive, suck all the blood out of my body.  But they aren’t.  In the U.S., we hear all this stuff about endemic malaria, thus an abundance of mosquitoes, and we think the place must be full of the bugs, especially during the wet season.  The summer before my senior year of high school, I went on a backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountain range.  It was, what the leaders of the trip would like to call, Type II fun (not to be confused with Type II diabetes, which is most certainly not fun; also not to be confused with Type II error, which is just boring).  Type II fun is when, looking back on an experience after a certain span of time, you remember it as fun.  Type I fun is when something is actually fun in the moment.  The Wind River Mountain trip was horrible at the time because it was my first outdoor experience and it was defined by mosquitoes.  Usually mosquitoes are few and far between during the day, then they come out in droves at dawn and dusk.  The Wind River mosquitoes had no sense of time, for they were ever-present all hours of the day.  I put on 99% DEET, but the mosquitoes didn’t care.  I was confined to hiking in my raincoat and long pants to prevent against bites.  I was lucky in that before we hit the trail, I headed the warnings of a man in a game shop and bought a bug net.  My face was protected most of the time, but when we ate meals, it was always standing up and always on the move to prevent against mosquitoes landing and sucking (well, mosquitoes always suck, but…).

At least beetles don’t bite.  But they’re bigger.  And grosser in my mind because they’re not something I’ve encountered a lot of in America.  Perhaps Cicada Summers counts as the closest thing, but we have those in Chicago and I don’t remember them being that bad…

All I can say is, if you ever come to Kenya (which you should because it is AWESOME!) DO NOT COME DURING THE WET SEASON.  It’s amazing to see the transition from wet season to dry season, but if you’re coming for a few weeks, and you can choose which season, do dry.

21 Things I Got from BuzzFeed

It's the Sunday before the end of Spring Break for my friends back at Princeton, so it's seems appropriate that I give them a little help with their procrastination.  Also, I can't use Facebook until 9 PM (it's currently 11 AM here), so I'm going to post some hilarious links from Buzzfeed HERE:

1.  This is why Tilda Swinton is a frakkin' BOSS!  One time Academy Award winner (Michael Clayton), but she seriously could care less.  She probably uses the Oscar to hold her toilet paper.

2.  I need to play The Sims.  Preferably The Sims 2, but I'd be down with The Sims 3...  That's how desperate this is.

3.  This is horribly sad.  I had no idea that Australia had a practice of forcing women into giving their babies up up for adoption in the 60s, but at least their apologizing now.  I think apologies are meaningful, even if they don't undo what's already been done.

4.  Is it bad to use a quote from a tyrant (Mao Zedong) if the quote itself is actually pretty good?  I'm curious what others think.  On one hand, I would say, "no," but by quoting the tyrant  are you endorsing the tyrant?

5.  I've been saying this forever:  RUGRATS TAUGHT ME EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT LIFE.  Seriously.  Without television in general, I'd be way less smart than I am today.  Suck it people who read books...

6.  I'm going to vomit.  Why do I live in such a world where this kind of sh*t exists?  Actual quote from one of the men in charge of The Feminist Victims Charity: "While walking to my place, I realized how drunk she was. In America, having sex with her would have been rape, since she legally couldn't give her consent. It didn't help matters that I was relatively sober, but I can't say I cared or even hesitated. I won't rationalize my actions, but having sex is what I do."  VOMIT!  I'm vomiting in my mouth RIGHT NOW.  Feminism is really just equality with an emphasis on women.  When it goes past creating equal opportunity, treatment, and safety for women just as much as their is for men, then it's gone too far and there may be victims of it.  I don't know if that's happened yet.  It certainly hasn't happened on a LARGE, INSTITUTIONALIZE SCALE SUCH AS SEXISM!...

7.  I, as well as all of America, eat unhealthy and am going to die.

8.  Summer Heights High was an amazing Austrialian TV show.  Why did it get cancelled?

9.  OMG I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEW DAFT PUNK ALBUM AND ALIVE 2017!

10.  Steinem for the win!  Paraphrase:  Feminism is full social, economic, and political equality of males and females.  Also, she likes the show Girls.

11.  Sofia Coppola (one of the 4 women to ever be nominated for Best Director) and I think alike.  We both had Sleigh Bells music in our minds when shooting scenes of our respective movies (i.e. The Bling Ring and Served Cold, respectively).  Why is Sleigh Bells music in every trailer?  Because Sleigh Bells music is frakkin' awesome!  It gets you pumped up and excited to watch whatever movie is being advertised!

12.  Spice World really was a wonderful movie (in the oh my god this is ridiculously stupid kinda way).  And so good for the women's movement.  But actually.  The Spice Girls showed that there wasn't one type of girl, but several, and they could all be friends!  We need another Spice Girls.  Way more than we need another stupid boy band (re:  One Direction).

13.  I respect this woman.  Poonanji Marshall.  IDK if she's real, but if she is, she's awesome.

14.  30 reasons I need to live in Portland, Oregon.

15.  SO HUNGRY FOR THIS FOOD!  That's one thing about Kenya, the food is good, but sometimes I just miss a good ole fashion box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.  When we get homesick here, it's usually always about food...

16.  We put birds on things (not buzzfeed, but who cares).

17.  I just finished reading (or I suppose technically "listening to" on audiobook) Tina Fey's hilarious Bossypants and all I can say is every single human (at minimum every single female) should read (or audiobook listen to) this book.  I was constantly laughing out loud.  I wish it had never ended because it was so funny.  I wish every week I could listen to Tina Fey talk about hilarious things that happened in her life.  This is why I'm sad 30 Rock is over, but at least the episodes (and jokes) will be immortalized for all time - and laughed over for much longer.

18.  On a similar note, Tina Fey is one of the most hilarious people of our generation.  Just look at the fact that Mean Girls is still relevant and related to, like, every big hit in pop culture (re:  Les Mean Girls and Mean Girls of Panem).

19.  UNDERSTATEMENT.  Everything is great in Kenya.  Don't worry about me.

20.  Mother's day is coming up.  Do something nice, will ya?

21.  And I leave you with some positive words from THE Mr. Rogers.  

Spring Break

While most college co-eds spend their Spring Break week getting schwasty on a beach in Florida, or Puerto Rico, or California, I spent my four day Spring Break hiking Mt. Kenya National Park and summiting the second highest mountain on the African continent while sustaining sunburns to most of my body while simultaneous being frozen like a popsicle in the mornings and evenings.  [FUN FACT:  Mt. Kenya is shorter than Mt. Kilimanjaro, but Kilimanjaro is a much easier mountain to climb (nicknamed "The Old Man's Mountain"), so.. you know... Kenya is more bad-ass.]

I shall now chronicle the whole frigid ordeal:

Saturday
We left Mpala and drove one hour to Nanyuki where we stopped at our favorite hang out, the Nakumatt!  There, we said goodbye to Kelly and Frances, our Ecohydrology professor and TA respectively, and met Cool John - the man who would be leading us up Mt. Kenya.  Before leaving the Nakumatt, I bought an ice cream cone eager for something sweet.  In hindsight, a warm chocolate chip cookie would've been better because the next three days were about to be the COLDEST OF MY LIFE.  But, oh well.  We drove to the National Park entrance and met the porters who would be joining us on.  After a quick lunch of PB&J, we began our hike.  That first day, we hiked almost entirely on a service road that goes up to the Meterological Station.  It was a mild uphill grade, but overall was not that bad.  By four we were at our first "campsite."  I put "campsite" in quotes, because I should explain that this was a luxury place to stay compared to the tents I had imagined.  These were buildings!  With running (freezing cold) water and flush toilets!  We dropped our bags on bunk beds, changed into warm clothes, then proceeded to drink tea and play Presidents.  While we played cards, our porters cooked dinner for us.  See what I mean about luxury camping!  There were British Army guys (BAGs as they're called here) sharing the huts with us and they had to cook their own food on WhisperLite stoves.  As we were about to go to sleep, one of the BAGs came over and told us some of the beds we had chosen had bed bugs (luckily not mine!).  Those of us that were on infected beds switched and luckily no one got bed bugs!  But every night, I was convinced I would get bugs.  Or I would freeze to death.  Legitimately, that was the coldest I've ever been.  My room at home is unusual in that it is the hottest room in the summer and the coldest in the winter, so I'm kind of used to being cold at night.  But I also have an electric blanket at home, so that's got to help.  Here, all I had was a warm water bottle and a semi-broken sleeping bag.

The bed-bug bunk-beds.

Sunday
We woke up early on Sunday for our second longest day of hiking.  Today, we were traveling to the camp at the base of the mountain.  This was a more challenging hike than the day before (we were on a trail now instead of a road) and we had to go up and down through several valleys.  Beautiful views of Nanyuki and the flower farms further north were sprinkled along the way.  Further to the south, Mt. Kenya loomed in the fog.

View of Mt. Kenya from a valley in the mist.

On the trail, we played typical OA games such as Boticelli and Contact.  Also, we drank water straight from the streams (and no one got diarrhea)!  It was fun.  When we got to the base camp (again around 4 PM), we were all so tired and sore, most of us again settle into the dining table and played Presidents while drinking tea.  I've become notorious for getting way too into this card game.  The way it works (if you were too lazy to click and read my earlier Wikipedia link) is you try to get rid of all your cards, and if you're first to do it, you become "President."  If you're last to do it, you become "scum."  Scum has to give their best two cards to the President, thereby generally perpetuating their status as scum.  Essentially, it's the socioeconomic caste system in America.  Sunday night, we ate a quick and earlier dinner around 6 so we could be in bed by 7:30 PM to prepare for our 2 AM wake-up call Monday morning.  That's right... I said 2 AM.  I haven't gone to bed at 7:30 since I was, probably, five years old.  Usually, in college, we go to sleep at 2 AM.

Monday AM

Cool John likes to climb Mt. Kenya in the morning so we can see the sunrise from the peak.  This is both amazing and terrifying.  It's amazing because you see images such as this as you're climbing up that inspire you to keep your legs pumping and GET THERE!

Thin red line alerting us to the imminent sunrise as we hiked up Mt. Kenya.

It's terrifying because, for the first two hours of our three hour hike up, I thought I was going to faint, fall down the mountain, and die.  On that climb, I had three things going against me that I don't usually when I'm hiking.  

1)  ALTITUDE!  Base camp on the second day was over 13,800 feet above sea level.  That's the highest I've ever climbed in my life (re:  Wind River Peak, WY), and the last time I did that I felt horrible, like I was dying on the way up.  So, yeah, we were hella high, meaning less oxygen, meaning less oxidative phosphorylation and the like.  One of the guys on the trip, Rob, plays lacrosse so he was a major source of motivation up this mountain.  He would shout, "GLYCOLYSIS!" and "OXIDATIVE PHOSPHORYLATION!" during the trek, but I'm telling you, all I was doing was glycolysis.

2)  FATIGUE!  Waking up at 2 AM to hike uphill for 3 hours is, like, ridiculous.  I said this earlier, but I think it's important to re-iterate, every 5 minutes I mini-fainted a little in my head.  At one point, my legs weren't even tired and I wasn't having trouble breathing, but I thought I was going to go narco and fall asleep.

3)  SICKLE CELL TRAIT!  I mean, having less than the full number of functional red blood cells isn't a big deal right?  Especially when you're at altitude and also have sports induced asthma and are a woman (less iron).  Whatever.  I'm a FRAKKIN' CHAMP.  I CLIMBED THAT MOUNTAIN WITH MY SICKLE RBCs, MY INHALER, AND MY UTERUS.

Fun fact:  We actually climbed the third highest peak on Mt. Kenya, Lenana, so it wasn't the second highest point in Africa...  But still, over 16,000 feet.  That's high.

About thirty minutes from the top, we took a break because we were AHEAD OF SCHEDULE and Cool John didn't want us to dawdle at the top before the sun rise where it would be colder and windier.  We all laid down on top of each other at the base of this cave lake overhang to stay warm.  It was cute.  After about ten minutes laying down, it was time to get going again, so we rallied and trekked up the mountain LIKE BOSSES!  At the top, our porters gave us each a cup of tea, which was super necessary because it was so cold!  Even though it was really cold, Caroline and I took off our layers to show off our Outdoor Action shirts and take a picture (not shown below).

Me, at the top with the sun rising behind me and a cup of warm tea.

The sun illuminating the peaks and sea of clouds surrounding the mountain.

After about ten minutes at the top, we began our decent, which was super scary!  There was snow on the ground, and now we could SEE where we'd end up if we slipped - tumbling down a rocky slope into a tarn.  It was slow going, taking us a little under the three hours it took us to get up.  When we got back down, we had breakfast ready for us and ate before embarking on our second hike of the day, heading to the first campsite.

Sunday PM (slash really just 10 AM onward)
This hike was easier than coming out because we were going flat or down hill mostly except for two uphills.  We again played OA trail games along the way.  It was fun and I found myself less tired than I expected to be given that I got 5 hours of sleep and just climbed a mountain.  I think the excitement from being on the top of the mountain was still powering me through.  I wouldn't crash until that night, when around 7 PM, everyone got tired and went to bed after dinner.  This time, we were sharing the campsite with a group of middle schoolers who were loud late into the night, so I laid in bed talking to my bed mate Suchana for an hour before being able to go to sleep.  It was less important to get a good nights sleep that night though, because we had a light day Monday and didn't have to hike a mountain.  But as always, when you need something, you don't get it.  And when you don't need it, it comes to you.  I slept my best that night...

Monday
Monday we hiked out for about three hours in the morning.  We thanked Cool John and the awesome porters who made our trip so much fun, and headed back to Nanyuki.  At Nanyuki, we went to (wait for it...) Nakumatt and bought some snacks and immenities.  It was on the ride back to Nanyuki that I realized I had gotten sunburned.  I've only been sunburned several times.  Once was randomly one summer.  I swam competitively twice a day outside every summer for twelve years of my life and never got sunburned except for once in that final year.  If this isn't proof of ozone depletion, I don't know what is...  The second time was hiking in the Wind River range at altitude.  I should've realized I was going to get sunburned (and I know my friend Maisie will rag on me HARD for not wearing any sunscreen) but my bottle of sunscreen isn't very travel friendly (it's a pump bottle) so I left it at Mpala.  So at the Nakumatt I bought a travel squeeze bottle for the future.  We then went to this awesome place called Dorman's and gorged our faces with good food.  I don't dislike the food at Mpala (I actually really like it and want to get some recipes for when I cook for myself at home), but day in and day out it gets a little boring.  At Dorman's I got a vegetable panini with fries, a Coke, and a milkshake.  It was DELICIOUS!  I can't wait for when we go to Nairobi in a week for more non-Mpala, restaurant quality, food.  While we were at Dorman's, it began to rain, the first rainy season rain any of us had experienced.  To be honest, it was way less intense than those Chicago summer storms.  But it was cool.  I think one of the coolest things about studying abroad (or spending more than a couple weeks somewhere) instead of vacationing for a week or two is that you see a larger chunk of the place your visiting.  If I had just been here during the wet season, I would totally miss the grass turning green and the breeding season of many animals and the burst of mosquitoes (but, why would I want to be around for that?).  I can't wait to see the changes that occur here from dry to wet season.

The End
Today we learned that Dobson - our next professor - wouldn't be coming to Mpala until TOMORROW!  This means that, although we were supposed to start class today, it looks like we've got a free day!

P.S.  If we're friends (meaning if you're not some rando I don't know that's just randomly reading peoples blogs) send me an email and tell me how you're doing!

P.P.S.  My computer totally started freaking out yesterday and wouldn't let me do anything without freezing and dying (sounds like me on Mt. Kenya).  If it weren't for my super awesome roommate Devika, I wouldn't be able to post this or continue to talk to y'all on the interwebs (or finish watching season 3 of Downton Abbey).