7am...prime time for big hairy spiders

Day 82 (11/25)
This morning, around 7AM all 3 of us (Tiffany, Pal, and I) woke up to Lia yelling to Cecily “Get out of the banda, go through the back door.” They are 2 bandas down from us, and you can hear everything in the banda area, we didn’t know exactly what was going on but we knew something was in their banda.

Within about 3 seconds, we had ripped our mosquito nets from beneath the mattress, jumped out of bed and rushed to the door. All three of us peered around the corner and asked what was going on. Someone told us it was a huge spider…we all thought a monkey went into their banda, or a black mamba, or something.

Turns out Lia reached for her towel, and the spider must have been on the towel and it bit her. She said she could feel it’s fangs going through her skin…gross. She was fine, she got Benedryl and her hand was a little swollen but nothing too bad.

So, within a minute one of the staff members (Kioko, the center manager) came back carrying a walking stick. Meanwhile…Cecily was in her bed, in her mosquito net watching where the spider was going.

Kioko killed it, and the thing was huge, its abdomen had to be a couple inches long, and hairy with long legs. At breakfast, I was joking with him about it being a good start to the morning, and he said “a good start to the morning?! I’m a murder! What if Jesus was there?” It was really cute, and unexpected because they have to kill things that come into camp all the time.

The last two days we’ve been doing analysis of the data that we collected. Since our group had mostly interviews we’ve been putting it into a software (SPSS) which basically will compare everything, make charts, and more or less do whatever you need to compare results. And we’ve been working with a GIS software which works with the GPS points to make a map of where certain things are.

For the majority of the day we had meetings with Tome (the Professor in charge of our directed research aka DR) to discuss how we would use our data and deadlines on papers and whatnot.

Its continued to rain, off and on, literally the sky will be blue, and less than 50 feet away its pouring and the clouds are dark and gloomy. But this morning, it occurred to me that things have been getting exponentially growing and becoming more green overnight. It’s exciting to see areas that looked like they could never support any growth to areas that are healthy and blooming.