Kenya-month 3

This last month has gone by unbelievably fast. I have been so busy I haven’t been able to sit down and write an update until now.

I have finally finished learning all four groups, finishing with the largest earlier this month. This last group lives in the forest around the forest station and spends a great deal of their time ransacking the village. They have absolutely no fear of humans and associate them with food. People actually complain to us when the monkeys steal their food. They don’t seem to understand that by throwing their leftovers in the bushes for the monkeys to fight over they are inviting them to steal from them. It was no surprise to me when one of the juvenile males came after me for food I had in my hand. He jumped right up and grabbed my hands, trying to steal a bag from me. It really scared me. A couple days later he came after Alicia for an empty plastic shopping bag. Bad Scully. I just hope he was only coming after us because we are familiar to him, if he attacks someone in the village like that it will all be over for him.

I accidentally presented for grooming to another juvenile male in the same group. Bagi, Gandalf, and Quack found a giant beetle in dining hall at the tourist cabins. The dining hall is a big round open structure and the monkeys are always hanging out there. I peeked my head over the wall to watch and see what they were doing with the beetle and I guess with the way I positioned myself, Bagi thought I wanted to be groomed. And he did, but only for about two seconds and he quickly got bored with my shirt.

At the beginning of the month we were in the vicinity when a colobus infanticide occurred. I was able to retrieve the body immediately after and we brought it back to the house in a plastic shopping bag to do a necropsy. I later learned that everyone thought I had a giant snake in the bag when I walked through the village towards my house. They all probably think I am insane. We had to do the examination outside on the table we reserve for dead things. We moved the dog skeleton and various other skulls and bones to the ground and set up. When I came out of the house with a face-mask and gloves the neighbor boy just laughed. But I think I thoroughly frightened all the neighbors when started cutting. I hope they have more respect for me now knowing that I am armed with scalpels.

One of the study groups (the one constantly being harassed by poachers) seems to be splitting. Three of the females disappeared for almost two weeks. My first thought was that they had been poached, but one of the assistants heard from someone that there were monkeys hanging out at a nearby stream. His informant told him that there were people wanting to hunt them. I, not knowing where this stream was, decided to go and check it out for myself. Well, somehow I completely missed it and ended up far away in an extensive grassland. I heard some strange noises, went to check it out, and was faced with the biggest hairiest creature I have ever seen. It took a while to register that it was just a baboon but for a few seconds I began to wonder if I had just met the Kenyan version of Bigfoot. I knew there were baboons in the surrounding forest but have never heard nor seen them while out with the study groups. The two species don’t seem to coexist together, in this area anyway. The blue monkeys actually alarm and run from baboons.

Since my attempt at locating the females was unsuccessful, I sent some of the assistants out to do it. Within a couple hours they had found the three females plus two of their offspring and Sawa (a male but not the resident) at the stream. It is unheard of for female blue monkeys to disperse. After a week of visiting them at the stream and finding it impossible to follow them unless they cooperated and stayed visible high on the bank, they came back to the group...for a whole half a day.

Once again, those same females have left the group and Sawa seems to have persuaded more females to follow him to parts of the forest we have never been. Crazy things are happening with this group, the last time I was out with them they were in four separate parties and a group of unhabituated juveniles was associating with one of the subgroups. But there is never a dull day when you are out with them!

I ran into some jackals while out with G-north group last week. I guess they have never been seen in that area of the forest before so it is pretty exciting. This is the group that hangs out on the edge of the forest where it meets the tea field. There are always dogs coming from the village across the tea to harass the monkeys so when the blues, colobus, and redtails all started alarming I wasn’t expecting anything but. I was pleasantly surprised to see a jackal run out and pause in the corridor between the tea and forest, I think he was about as surprised to see me and quickly disappeared under the tea.

Alicia got her hair braided a couple weeks ago. One of our friends got her neighbor who was in town visiting her parents to come and do it. They convinced me that I should get my hair braided as well and we set up a time for her to come back on my next off day. She never came and I got word that she had gone home, back to her husband. Later we learned that she had in fact gone home but told her husband she was leaving him because she didn’t need him anymore and could make her own money here, braiding our hair forever, and came back. Alicia only paid her about $7 to braid her hair and I would have paid the same, there are only two of us here and we don’t really need our hair braided very often. In the end she went back to her husband and I never got my hair braided, I really didn’t even want it done in the first place.

The problems we cause and don’t even realize it.

Alicia went on vacation this week so I am alone in the house and getting a feel for what things will be like after she leaves in November. It is very very quiet, but I have a large library of DVD’s left by the last field manager to keep me company.

I talked to the postmaster about our lack of mail from the US (and other parts of the world) and he was actually pretty concerned. What is the point of paying for a P.O. box if we don’t get mail? He had me write a letter on the spot and said he would do what he could. 

Kenya-month 2

I took over the manager position about a week and a half ago. Everything is going reasonably well except for the occasional assistant who shows up an hour late. I am just scrambling to learn my remaining two groups with the hopes that things will soon settle into a routine. I have almost finished one of them but they seem to be dividing into two parties at the moment and it has become almost impossible to find them.

While I was out with one of the groups in the rain recently I came upon two poachers hunting monkeys. They must think that when it rains we are not out there. I was really glad that day I was. I had actually only found the group about 20 min before. On the road I saw a man with a sharpened stick aiming for the top of a tree. He didn’t hear me approach because of the rain but when he saw me two men and two dogs took off running. I was filled with such anger when I saw them, I wanted so bad to chase after them, but that wouldn’t have done any good. I did report it to the forester who assured me they will be patrolling that area more often and gave me his cell phone number to call incase I run into more poachers or dogs. I find it very hard to believe him.

To hunt the monkeys they trap one in the top of a tree and start throwing pointed sticks at it until it tries to move away, when it does so it comes down low and then the dogs go after it. The monkey would be ok if is just stayed up high in the tree but they get so worked up that they try to flee. In the last year about 10 monkeys in this group have gone missing. Some of the assistants have encountered poachers, Erick even told me he grappled with one, but they are still managing to take monkeys. I am sure one of the main reasons is that these monkeys are habituated and easily approachable by humans. They do seem to differentiate between monkey watchers and non-monkey watchers though, as well as different sex and age classes. They are usually not alarmed by women collecting firewood but hide from children and grown men.

While out with this same group I discovered some caves. All of the other assistants had noticed them before but no one has been curious (or crazy?) enough to actually go in them. From above you can’t see how deep they are but once you get down and take a look they aren’t too deep. The first one I ventured into was about a meter deep and had bricks all the way up the back. My first thought was buried treasure, maybe pirates of Kakamega? But it seems that it may have been a chimney of sorts. Above the bricks there is a perfect square hole. When I mentioned that there were bricks in the cave all of the assistants perked up, I still can’t believe that I was the first one to look down there. I convinced one of the assistants to check out another cave with me. This one was deeper, maybe 4 or 5 meters, and had bricks at the back of it too. But it looked like the bricks had been covered up at one point. It is all still a mystery to me, but now I have somewhere to take cover from the rain.

One of the grad students and I made a trip to Kisumu last week to visit Hippo Point and shop at the biggest grocery store around. Marina had a flight out of the Kisumu airport in the morning so she hired a taxi and we rode along. After we dropped her off the taxi driver took us out to Hippo Point, which sticks out into Lake Victoria. He had absolutely no idea where he was going and we ended up picking up a lady heading that way who directed us. We found some guys with boats on the shore for tours to see the hippos and other wildlife. They tried to charge us an outrageous amount and we eventually talked them down to something reasonable (after I walked away a couple times).

I was quite impressed by our guide, Titus. He showed us the hippos as promised, many species of birds, including numerous kingfishers, as well as a Nile monitor lizard. There were supposed to be 16 hippos in the group, although I have no idea how many I actually saw floating there in the water. The group is very habituated and we were able to get pretty close in the boat. They basically just sat there, but were very impressive nonetheless.

After that we attempted to find the craft market but it had moved since Lonely Planet published the guide to Kenya. We kept walking around a parking lot looking at our map. Finally someone informed us that the market had moved to make space for the university parking lot a couple years ago! The market is now located in an area with much less traffic and many of the vendors told us that they get a lot less business than they did before. This market was much different than the food market, where you are lucky if you can talk someone down 5 shillings. Here they say, this is what I would ask for it, what would you ask for it? A lot of the vendors sold things that were completely made out of recycled materials but the majority was soapstone carvings.

After that we went to MegaCity Nakumatt for luxuries like broccoli, cream cheese, and limes. And then made the long trip back to the forest station in a matatu followed by an hour on a boda.

At the forest station all of the poles and wires have been but up but the electricity hasn’t been installed yet. The majority of the cut trees have all been sold and the smaller ones burned for cooking. And the monkeys are now using the wires to travel across the village. I am not looking forward to the day power is finally brought here. 

Oh and I named my first monkey: Pickle. I spent three days with one of the groups and everyone told me the male was one named Sawa. Sawa means ok in Swahili. Well, everything wasn’t so sawa. I still have yet to meet Sawa. And now Pickle is hanging around with his ladies. 

Kenya-month 1

It has been awhile since my last update and I haven’t been really good at responding to emails (sorry!). I have been busy training and getting ready to start managing the field site, which I will officially do at the end of this month. I finished learning my first two groups (so I am about half way done) and hopefully will start to collect actual data soon.

I have been spending a lot of time with the G North group on the edge of the forest where it meets the tea fields. The alpha male of the group, PH, runs across the tea to the village and steals two or more ears of maize everyday. The people in the village get very angry and understandably so, but they do nothing more than yell at us about it, calling them our monkeys, telling us we should do something about it, and threatening to kill them. What they don’t understand is that killing one monkey who steals maize isn’t going to solve the problem, it will for a little while but it won’t be long before another one starts stealing crops again. In other parts of the forest there are huts next to the maize fields where someone sits and guards their crops, but that doesn’t seem to be something this village is willing to invest time doing.

A couple weeks ago we were out with GN and heard screams from across the tea and not wanting to miss the action or catching PH red handed, we turned to see an entire family come racing out and start looking for something. One of the boys reached down and pulled up a dead chicken. Watching the edge of the tea we saw a giant mongoose come running out. That was a relief; PH killing chickens would not go over so well.

A colobus monkey was killed in that same village the other day. Someone saw it happen and told someone, who told one of the assistants, who told us they claimed the monkey was raiding their crops. Colobus are not known to be crop raiders and there is a eucalyptus tree in the village that they like to feed on, which doesn’t hurt anyone. I don’t think the people differentiate between the species (except for taste and supposedly colobus don’t taste very good) and saw it in the village and thought it was a threat, probably because every time they see PH he is shoving one ear of maize under his arm and one in his mouth.

It is illegal but nothing can be done with out actual proof. It makes me angry but the other day I did actually scare off some young boys with dogs who were trying to hunt monkeys just by being me. There was a group of about 7 boys probably around 15-20 years old with three dogs and as soon as they saw me they took off running, I guess I am scary (see kids crying below for more evidence).

A couple of the other people on the project and I went on an adventure to another part of the Kakamega forest a couple weeks ago. We went in search of DeBrazza’s monkeys, which we never did see. Our guide showed up late and drunk and told us we were too late to see them. Oh well, but we did see quite a few olive baboons, an African paradise flycatcher, and some crowned cranes and he took us on a bushwhacking adventure thorough the forest. It was hard to tell if he knew where he was going or if he just kept losing the trails. We ended our hike at a waterfall on a river that runs between the forest and a nearby village. Within ten minutes news of our presence must have spread throughout the entire village because every child in the area showed up on the other side of the river to see the mzungu.

Mzungu translates as European but I gather it is simply used as non-African. Walking down the road or riding on a boda boda (bicycle taxi) people always yell, “hello mzungu, how are you?” I think ‘how are you’ is the first phrase that everyone learns and even when you answer and ask back all they say is thank you. The other day I had a young boy chase my boda down, when I looked over he said, “hello mzungu, I love you.” People get really excited, it is so strange. I think am developing a complex and will probably be depressed when I leave Kenya and no one jumps up and down and wants to know how I am when I pass by. There are some children that are scared of me though; I made a boy run off screaming and crying the other day in the forest station. Many parents tell their kids that if they are bad a mzungu will come and eat them. There is this family with a few little girls along the road we walk on to get to the monkeys; we call them the jambo girls because every time you pass by they yell jambo at least 3 times. Last year they used to run screaming whenever they saw a white person so this is a great improvement.

The other thing that I find amusing is that everyone is obsessed with Obama. There are at least two songs on the radio about him, the chorus simply goes, Barak Obama, Barak Obama. I have seen campaign posters plastered on cars as well. I was having a conversation with one of the Kenyan assistants about my skin tone and how I can’t stand in the sun for too long, we hadn’t even talked about Obama all day, but he thought for a while and came up with this out of nowhere: Obama is an African mzungu and he can survive anywhere.

Many of you already know this but I am actually writing this email from Wisconsin. My grandfather passed away recently and I made the decision to come home for the service and spend time with my family. I will only be here for about a week and then will make the long journey back to Kakamega. My journey back to the States was very long and once again it took me much longer than planned to make the trip between Kakmega and Nairobi.

I ended up having to change vehicles 7 times! I left at 6 am and missed my first matatu. Luckily there is another one that comes in the am and goes into Kakamega town so I jumped on that one and got off about halfway in a town called Shinyalu. The same man is always taking our money for the ride and I told him I missed the earlier matatu so he got off with me and found me a boda boda and even bargained with the guy for me! While I was on the boda boda we actually passed the matatu that I missed earlier and it was broken down/stuck in the mud on the side of the road, so in the end I beat it anyway. As soon as we got to the highway a matatu heading for Kisumu pulled up and I jumped on. About halfway there everyone else got off and I was the only one left, so the driver ended up paying another vehicle to take me. I got kicked out of my comfortable seat in the front and shoved in the back of a matatu that had ‘drive it like you stole it’ written on the back and a picture of Jennifer Lopez stuck to the wall with Cinderella written next to it. A little before 10 am I got into Kisumu and was approached by at least ten different people all wanting to know where I was going and why I didn’t want to take their matatu. Finally someone helped me find the company that I was looking for and I booked a ticket to Nairobi. The vehicle was bigger and more comfortable than the typical matatu and was supposed to go directly to Nairobi in about 6 hours. A couple hours into the trip we got a flat tire. It only took about 30 min to change and then we were on our way again, but once we got to Nakuru we drove downtown to the booking office because the driver wanted to change vehicles. On the way there he ended up getting our vehicle stuck up against a large truck but people showed up out of nowhere and helped, so it was only a minor setback but pretty embarrassing. When we pulled up to the office the driver got out, left the vehicle running, didn’t tell us anything and just disappeared. About an hour later another much smaller vehicle finally showed up (we couldn’t actually all fit in it and one guy got left behind, I felt so bad because he was the one that did most of the work changing the tire!) and took us to Nairobi. We finally arrived at about 6:15 pm and I had to be at the airport by 7:30. The guy that was sitting next to me ended up taking me to find a taxi and even bargained with the guy for me. In the end I made it there exhausted, and starving with enough time to drink my first Tusker. 

Kenya-week one

I have sort of settled in to my new home. I have only been here for a couple of days so I am still trying to figure everything out, not to mention learn 150 monkeys!

I mentioned in an earlier email that I had to do some official business in Nairobi on my first day. I got up in the morning and went to see a man at the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology to get clearance to do research in Kenya. When I got to the offices I found out that he wasn't there and someone sent me to his very intimidating boss who made it clear that he was the one who made the final decision on whether I got research clearance or NOT (emphasis on the not) and then he took all of my paperwork and told me to go enjoy Nairobi and come back at noon. I left there feeling nauseous, (probably partly from the anti-malarials) went back to my hotel, crawled back into bed and tried not to think about what would happen if he decided not to give me clearance. But when I went back the boss was gone and the man I was supposed to meet with was back and he gave me what I needed no questions asked (after I paid a fee, of course). After that I had to meet with a man who was going to help expedite the process of getting my student visa. I paid him another larger fee, handed off my passport, and now am waiting to get it back with my new visa, which will make me a resident of Kenya for the year (and I just found out that means I get resident rates on certain things).

Friday morning we left for Kakamega. We had a really long journey and our bus got into a minor accident along the way, so instead of being a 8 hour ride it was close to 10. Our bus ran into a small car on the road and after the impact it felt like we were going to tip right over! Very scary but no one was injured (except the car) and we all got off the bus and stood around for a while waiting for the cops. We finally got into town around 7:30 did some speed grocery shopping and then headed off for the forest.

Our house is pretty small - Alicia, the undergrad assistant, and I are sharing a room and Marina sleeps in the kitchen/living area. There is a similar house next door and there are three grad students living there right now. One of them is leaving in 3 weeks and the other 2 are staying until August.

I went out to meet G North group (one of four groups) for the first time on Saturday and have been out three times so far. The first monkey I met was named Dude, and I saw him about 20 times yesterday and I think I am already in love. There are about 40 monkeys in this group and they all stay really spread out. There are quite a few that I haven't even seen yet. I have started to learn a few of the females, there are 13, and few of the juveniles, especially Dude who seems to be everywhere I am. There are also black and white colobus monkeys in the forest as well as redtailed monkeys. They are both beautiful, but I have heard the colobus are not very intellegent. I am thinking they are comparable to howlers and about as loud - they start calling before the sun comes up right above our house.

Yesterday the monkeys were great and got down on the ground for most of the morning. We hung out by the station road and then went over to Wilberforce's house. He started the environmental ed program called KEEP in the area and right now is working with one of the grad students. Apparently the monkeys hang out at his house a lot. And yesterday they started to eat his house, I think they were just picking at the clay and eating bits to get the minerals. It was quite a sight. Monkeys sticking their hands in holes, licking the walls, and climbing all over the house.

I think I am finally recovered from jet lag and am starting to get used to things. We are in town right now. We got up early and took the Matatu in and had some breakfast - there is a place with really good samosas - and after this we are going to the market to do some shopping. I have to cook group dinner in a few days!

Kenya-day 1

I made it to Kenya safe and sound!

My flight from Detroit to Amsterdam was a very long one. I wasn't able to sleep much on that flight and when I got into Amsterdam I was looking forward to a short layover so I could sleep on the next one, but shortly found out that my flight was delayed. I walked all over the airport and did some shopping, I only ended up buying a package of stroopwafflen (mom you knew I couldn't resist) and a very expensive bottle of juice. While waiting to board my flight I met a young man from Kenya who is going to college in New York and our conversation started off by him telling me he was on his way back to Kisumu for his father's funeral. He was a very sweet guy but that was a depressing conversation.

Finally, an hour later then scheduled we were able to board the plane and I fell asleep before we even took off. I think I slept through most of the 8 hour flight except for the 10 min I woke up to eat and fill out my declaration and visa cards.

The flight got in at about 8:20 last night and I got my visa, my bags, changed some money, and entered Kenya where I found my ride waiting for me with a sign that said "Terminal Hotel, Collin Mitchell." I figured that had to be me.

The hotel I stayed at is nothing to write home about and maybe I will get into that later but now I have to go take care of my "day of officialdom" in Nairobi!