Moyo Hill Camp – Day 29 – 3/5/11
I was up and in the kitchen by 6:15am and got put to work buttering bread. The rest of my cook crew stumbled in and we had breakfast ready ten minutes early. Swahili was our first class of the day with our quiz. This turned out to be alright after all because people complained so much he decided to let us use any notes we had. Since I write down everything I can I felt pretty good about how this turned out. We got a half an hour break before resuming regular Swahili class where we listened to audio tracks of Swahili to improve our pronunciation. After lunch we watched a movie (Milking the Rhino) about tourism, wildlife conservation and the local communities which was interesting and repeated many of the things we had heard in lecture applied to the real world. Our final activity of the day was to jump in the cruisers and go do a field exercise. Our WE professor had cancelled this excursion previously in the semester due to rain so we made it up today. We drove to Mto wa Mbu picked up a local guide and headed to the protected corridor in Lake Manyara. It was a fun drive. I got shotgun in the cruiser driven by our WE professor, neither of us could figure out how the seatbelts worked so I spent the first fifteen minutes of the drive with both our belts trying to make them stay in the other half of the buckle (the key was to put the outside of the retractable buckle piece facing toward the passenger in the opposite belt’s intended secure other half-sorry its hard to explain). I got it in the end but its difficult to balance a backpack on your lap, play with seatbelts, and avoid the gear shift all at the same time. The field exercise was to walk a transect in the open grassland noting the types of grass, grass height, and level ground cover every two meters. We looked ridiculous all in a row taking two steps, the stabbing the ground with a stick before crouching to stare at the exact spot we just stabbed. There were four Maasai cattle herds in the area that their young herdsmen watched us with perplexed expressions on their faces. This exercise went from 2pm until about 4:30pm so we were all very sweaty and dusty at the end. On our way out we drove closer to the very distant lake through a large herd of wildebeest before off-roading back to the main road. The rest of my evening shall be spent furiously finishing my poster for WM tomorrow and trying to think up something original to say in my presentation in morning.
Moyo Hill Camp – Day 30 – 3/6/11
After only four short hours of sleep I got up and ate a hurried breakfast before running to print out my finished poster for class. Presentations began at 8am and there are 29 of us all presenting the same data and results. Our professor was choosing people at random so the whole class waited tensely for their name to be called. As it turned out I was the eight to last person to go. This meant I had lots of time to get nervous, forget what I wanted to say, and sweating and shaking slightly….a great way to stand up and present. I lived through it and delivered my results just like everyone else but I was vividly reminded why I dislike public speaking so much. The best part of today was that after presentations were finished, we were free for the whole day. Most people piled into the cruisers and went back to Mto was Mbu to walk around, buy paintings, and go on a bike tour. I would have done the bike tour but I was exhausted from not sleeping the night before, it cost a lot, and I was nearly out of clean clothes. So I stayed behind, did my laundry and hung out with the three other girls who stayed and were not napping. After a very quiet lunch (there was only seven of us and the staff), I took my book and found a really comfy tree to sit under. The large group of students returned from Mto wa Mbu to drop stuff off and pick up whoever wanted to go into Karatu and go to the tourist lodge for US food and beer. Again I declined and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening basking under my tree, watching the birds, and reading my book in near silence.
Once everyone returned from Karatu we had dinner and a group of us watched 300 (movie about ancient Sparta). I’m now off to bed
Moyo Hill Camp – Day 31 – 3/7/11
The morning started by me waking up to the sound of the breakfast bell which meant I was late. Its pretty difficult to leap of out bed with a tightly tucked in mosquito net all around your bed and when you are on the top bunk but I managed it. I was also profoundly grateful something had made me put out my clothes last night. I made it to breakfast with ten minutes to spare before class started. I ate the non-portable half of my breakfast then grabbed a bowl and fled to class with the portable remains of breakfast. I was not late and we had a very interesting last EP lecture (of course it would be the last lecture I would find the most interesting). Our next class was a combined WE/WM class. We were split into groups of four and given a topic to discuss and later present on. My group was assigned Land Use Changes. We created a simple powerpoint outlining the three main issues and possible solutions on this topic and returned to the class with everyone else. These presentations took the rest of the morning and the beginning of the afternoon. We got a nice break until 3:30pm when we all headed to the HUGE monthly market in Karatu. I did not take money to buy anything and had fun wandering through the stalls with a few others. The only shadow was when one of the students I was walking with had someone try and steal his money right out of his pocket. The guy stood behind Luke (we as usual were surrounded by salesmen) and reached right into his pocket. Luke noticed and grabbed the guys hand and pulled it out of the robber’s pouch to find his money still clamped in the robber’s fist. It was disappointing but not surprising in so large a gathering of people where we are such targets. People got fabric, baskets, carvings, Tanzania jerseys, and 80’s clothing for the dance students want to organize before we head to Kenya. Tomorrow we have the third and final part of the traveling lecture series so I better go to sleep
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