Time for one last blooogggg!!!
We had our community presentation a couple days ago, where everyone presented their topics to both big-wigs and illiterate locals alike. I would like to say that everything went as lovely and smooth as the mock presentation, but that would be a complete lie. My group began to throw their powerpoint together in the early morning, making only the rough skeleton for editing by Prof. Wallis. We waited and waited and waited for her to return from Arusha, which is 2 hours away, and the meeting was ultimately pushed back from 1 until 4:30. At 4:30 we had only a rough visual outline and at 5:00 we learned that our entire presentation was to be translated. We were worried about the practice that is involved with speaking to a person in the correct amount so that translation is complete, clear, and effective. That would have been relatively easy to deal with, what we were presented with was completely ridiculous. The translator was not a translator at all, but an intern under our Wildlife Management professor who was semi-fluent in English. He was simply not qualified to do the work of translation, which is an art in all senses of the word. We ended up staying up until 2:00 am the night before our big unveiling to the community, adding images to slides, chopping down words to simplify our topics, reducing our presentation time, creating a script for the translator to translate on paper and hand out since we had abandoned live translation, and attempting to practice our speaking skills. It was a disaster. It was not in any way difficult to speak in front of people, the true struggle was trying to explain my complicated project completely and concisely in 4 slides. I knew that the information provided sounded ridiculous, and the thought of cutting up all my hard work made me stutter. But wait, to make it worse; the highlight of my presentation was a recording of very startling baboon vocalizations. Now I’m not a rookie, I checked my equipment the Moring of the presentation. However, when I presented the sound didn’t work and I nearly burst into tears up on the stage. I stumbled through it blindly, completely mortified and very very very glad but disappointed when it was over.
For the next hour after all presentations were over, several local people spoke in Swahili (which I obviously wasn’t able to understand). At one point they started singing ‘jambo bwana’ to us, which is essentially the happy birthday-ish pop song for welcoming people anywhere (which we had heard many many many times since our arrival here). It was very unexpected and funny and we laughed off a bit of the tension we had experienced. I found out today that the speakers were commenting on our presentations, saying that they were unbelievably thankful for our presence here and the respect we had shown the locals by informing them of our scientific activities. They were shocked that we had taken the time to include them, but for this program it is obvious; in order to preserve the health of an ecosystem you must involve the local people or your project will fail.
Once we were done with presentations we felt a little bit useless. It was the first time in 3 months we had no academic work and it meant that there was an obvious activity to tackle: packing. It went more smoothly than I had expected, with plenty of room in my bag. The program did us a favor by driving our bags to the Nairobi site so we avoid the overweight luggage fees (at least once in these travels). I had been missing my VERY expensive VERY new binoculars for 3 weeks. I was absolutely sick with guilt and really confused on how they had been misplaced. We were living out of a suitcase for over a month, and it is absolutely the worst way to attempt to keep things organized. As I packed and set my stuff in front of the huge truck I attempted to come to terms with losing something so ridiculous (and it didn’t really work), Then our very squirrely Puerto Rican friend, Coral walks up to me guiltily and places my binoculars next to me on the table with “they were under my bed and I don’t know how they got there” before walking away. That was a very good day.
Grades came out!
Wildlife Ecology – B
Environmental Policy – B+
Wildlife Management – B
Directed Research – A-
I feel really good about them because I am a biology major, not necessarily an environmental studies major. Just like the average bear, I really didn’t think there was a difference. Silly me, there is. I was at an extreme disadvantage at not having the background in these subjects. Also, the professors are extremely qualified and the program wants to have academic weight so they tend to make many assignments ridiculous and very difficult. Those B’s took a lot of sweat and tears and this when SFS said it was an academic program… it was NOT kidding.
Our last activities have been very entertaining. We have spent the last couple of days splurging, buying trinkets before we ship out. We watched a scary movie together, which is incredibly frightening when you’re technically sitting outside. And we had an Ugali eating contest between one of the boys and our little south Korean girl student. Jiyong kicked Ryan’s ass and I haven’t laughed that hard in a really long time.
We found out just now at 8:00pm the night before we leave that our group reservation for the flight has been cancelled. Our student affairs coordinator literally said “I’m going to go to and talk to the manager…. And I don’t really know what I’m going to stay”. We plan on driving to Nairobi in the worst case scenario. It’s really an appropriate occurrence which sums up this trip well. Everything in Africa has required flexibility and patience. When they say there is “no hurry in Africa”. they are not kidding.
Mostly I can’t believe we leave tomorrow morning. Not only does it mean that I have to say goodbye to some (but not all) very close friends, but it will also be my first time completely independently braving the world all by my big-girl self!
I had a revelation and realized that only hearing one voice about this experience is a little selfish. Here are two friends of mine here who have their own blogs (and the ones that I consider to be the best of the best).
Jen’s Blog has fantastic pictures which you should definitely take a look at:
Cara aka Carabash is my incredibly talented English major roommate. She is getting PAID to write this blog. She is PUBLISHED. (and I’m jealous).
HAHAHA. Tonight I forgot my towel while in the shower. I was contemplating using my T-shirt as a towel when Kaila walked in. I kindly requested that she bring me my towel and since she’s the nicest girl in the entire universe she agreed. Except she had to ask Cara where it was. Instead of throwing the towel into my shower they threw a burlap sack. After I got the joke and told them I wasn’t using it they threw in my laundry scrub brush, my tupperware, and Cara’s walking staff – all while laughing hysterically. Before finally throwing in my towel so I could continue my night with some normalcy. After I ran into another dung beetle. They are huge, at least 4 inches long. They are also not particularly exciting since I have seen a million of them. I rescued this one from our laundry bucket. Little did I know that they could fly and when that huge bug took off I nearly died of a heart attack. I’m really going to miss Africa. A lot.
