Today is the day I must bid SFS adieu. I still have ten more days to say goodbye to East Africa, though, which is fortunate — I don’t know if I could say goodbye to both the people and the countries I’ve come to love at the same time. I’ll be sad to go, but I can’t wait to see my mountains again.
(That is, after a month in England and Italy!)
Country roads, take me home …
(Source: whereareyourfriends, via youmayseeawhale)
I leave Kenya in only three days! We officially finished our academic work yesterday, when we presented our research findings to a gathering of approximately 100 Maasai community members (does this mean I’m a senior now??). I’ve been decompressing since then, and am finally allowing myself to contemplate things like cookie dough — those things which were a complete impossibility before, but which I might be able to obtain in the near-ish future.
Chocolate. Chip. Cookie. Dough.
(Source: insomniaticthoughts, via smilebigsmilepretty)
I think I’ve finally overdosed on caffeine. My stomach is twitching.
After 8 days of data collection
4 days of data analysis
4 days of write-up
and approximately as many hours of sleep
I am a tired otter.
Awww… Get off!
by BewildaBeast
This is the third day of Directed Research write-up. Whole draft is due to tomorrow. Still have materials & methods, discussion, and abstract to go. This giraffe is modeling my perpetual “hrrrrrmppphhhh” expression.
In Coming!
by larson
See the baby albino? —Kimana Wildlife Sanctuary
Clockin’ in at 15 hours of uninterrupted data analysis today WOOT
We’re now on day 6 of field work! This entails waking up at 6 every morning (or 5:30, in the event of cook crew) and spending about 8 hours in the field collecting data before trundling back to camp. As I think I’ve mentioned before, my group is looking at the effects of increasing agricultural land-use within the catchment area on soil erosion, water quality, and human health. One of the reasons I love this project is because we’re collecting so many kinds of data. I’m too tired right now to put them into a cohesive paragraph form, so here’s a list:
Channel mapping w/ GPS UTM
Vegetation transects every 200 meters for herbaceous veg. cover and soil erosion (described in previous post)
Turbidity, flow rate (using the orange method! If you’re Siobhan Fennessy, you know what this means ☺) and pH (with super-ghetto methods involving red cabbage and turmeric … uh it’s totally legit)
Macroinvertebrates (using a home-made kick net fashioned from two broom handles and a broken mosquito net)
Mapping farms, homesteads, toilets, and water pumps w/in 200 meters of the river
Mapping percent riverine canopy cover along the channel
So that’s a lot! Oh, and we’re also interviewing local residents (mostly Maasai agro-pastoralists) about their livelihoods, water use/management, conflicts over water, and perceptions of changes in the riverine ecosystem through time with a 4.5 page survey.
A few anecdotes:
One of my interviewees yesterday turned out to be the wife of a pastor. We had encountered her in the middle of the expansive, dry, dusty rangeland scattered with big hunks of basalt as we were on our way to the next boma, and she basically told us that we were going to interview her, because she had lots of opinions. When we’d finished, she said (in Kimaasai) that the Lord brings people together for a reason, so we should pray before we parted. And so it was that I found myself holding the hand of her small son on my right and our local guide, Danson, on my left, head bowed, praying in Kimaasai under the scorching sun in the middle of a basalt field with a herd of goats wandering by. What is my life.
Would you like to know how tiring DR is? I slept through a 4.6 magnitude earthquake this morning.
Though my sleeping brain didn’t consider the literal shaking of our entire banda reason enough to wake up, I awoke instantly when my banda-mates started talking. Since I obviously hadn’t registered the earthquake, I thought they were just having a conversation at five in the morning (‘cause that makes a lot of sense). The only words I managed to produce were: “Guys. Sleep time. This is sleep time.” And then I conked out again approximately 0.00924 seconds later.
Ok, here’s one last story. For the last two weeks, we have had a resident juvenile Verreux’s eagle owl living at camp. He’s kind of scruffy in that juvenile-bird sort of way, but already has a wingspan of about four feet. He hangs out gawkily in trees all day, screeches at regular intervals all night, and is beloved by all. My friend Anna named him Escalus (a dignified sort name – it stuck). I was up late two nights ago working on our research proposal on the large, open porch of the chumba. It was just midnight, and I was the only one awake. Escalus swooped down out of the night and snatched up a black beetle about as large as his face that was on the ground right next to porch. The swoosh of his wings and the crunching of the beetle as he negotiated the exoskeleton were magnified in the empty chumba. When he’d gulped the beetle down, he stood there on white, downy legs, considering me with black shining eyes in a creamy white face. Then he waddled (Escalus is a pretty awkward teenager) a few short steps before flying up onto the porch itself, lured in by another unsuspecting beetle, not four feet away from where I sat. Then he gave me a long look before launching himself off the porch to fly back to his usual nocturnal perch in one of the yellow acacias. He gave his hoarse cry again, which I took to mean: you’re welcome for the front-row beetle takedown seating. Now go to bed – this night isn’t gonna get any cooler.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Africa!
Glow in the Dark Soldiers and a Civil War Mystery
At the Battle of Shiloh, some wounded soldiers waited days in the chilly rain for medical help. When soldiers usually waited that long, they were prone to deadly infections that doctors at the time couldn’t do anything about, much less understand the cause.
Some of them noticed that their wounds were glowing at night. Were they hallucinating?And those with glowing wounds had better survival rates. 140 years later someone figured out why.
Soil-dwelling worms like the one above are filled with bacteria that they use to eat and protect food they find in the soil. The luminescent bacteria inside the nematodes fight off other bacteria, and the worm and bacteria both get a tasty meal all to themselves.
The soil of the Shiloh battlefield was full of these worms and bacteria, and when they got into the soldier’s wounds they created a glowing, antiseptic worm bandage.
(via Mental Floss image via Nikon’s Small World)
Pop Quiz!
The acronym ‘DR’ stands for which of the following?
(a) Daily Rigor
(b) Dang, (this heat is) Ridiculous
(c) Did (we) Remember (the neosporin? the acacias got me again)
(d) Directed Research
(e) All of the above
You guessed it! DR is actually for Directed Research. My project, in the briefest of brief, is: how do changes in patterns of land-use in the Noolturesh watershed relate to soil erosion, vegetation patterns, water quality, and human health? Here was my day today:
5:30: cook crew
6:30-7: breakfast, pack up ALL THE THINGS
7:05-8: travel to Kuku Group Ranch, East from KBC towards Tsavo Nat. Park
8:00-16:00: Collect data on vegetation and soil erosion. (What this actually entails: navigating solid walls of low acacia (read: THORNY-OUCHY-NO-GOOD) and precipitous, eroding drop-offs into the river in order to set up 30 x 30m test plots to (1) sample herbaceous and woody vegetation, and (2) plot rill and gully erosion sites with the GPS. I guess the day could actually be summarized as follows: Laura: 1 Plants: 0, By which I mean, I got out alive and with all my body parts intact! For those of you who have not met Acacia mellifera in battle, take my word for it that this is an impressive feat.)
16:00-17:00 Travel back to camp in a dehydrated daze
17:00-18:00 The amount of dirt tagging along on your body strikes you with a sudden urgency. MUST CLEAN SELF MUST CLEAN SELF!
18:00-19:00 Debrief first day of fieldwork with our awesome professor and faculty advisor, Kiringe
19:00-20:00 dinner
20:00-20:45 more cook crew (dishwashing this time)
20:45-??? STUFF (as in, finish data entry, and then think, ‘I should do my article-reading type of research now because I’m only going to get more tired as this month continues, but Imma go on tumblr instead wooooooooooooooo!’)
SLEEEEEEEP NOW
(I’m having buckets of fun! :)
<3 to all)
