Finally the internet is working well enough to post a blog!

11/13
1st day of directed research (DR) was good. We met with the local guides that we will be working with. Went over all the questions with them to make sure they understood what we needed to ask, and finished with that around 11am. We did 3 interviews because it was the first day, and Kris and I were done at 12:30 and while we were waiting for the other group, we shopped and walked around Kimana, haha. (We all do 10 interviews daily, and go with one guide and us, and every day we go with a different guide, and then one person stays back to do data entry from the day before.)

The questionaire has questions about land use, and how the people feel about their group ranch being subdivided. Basically being community managed to privately managed (where people own their land). And then of course we ask how they think subdivision will effect their lives, wildlife, environment, and livestock. I can explain much more if anyone is interested when I get home.

11/14
2nd day of DR, I was with Edson, the local guide and we went around to the local Bomas by camp. We walked for a long time, we didn't finish til 4, and the other groups were done by 1. But it wasn't too bad, the Bomas were just far away, and some of them had no people so we had to go to the next one. The interviews generally went pretty well. There are always children crowding around you, and the guides have to shoo them away.

Also, women breast feed here for a long, long time, and they are not shy about it at all. Many times, in the middle of the interview, they just start breast feeding and its totally normal. The kids love to watch themselves in my sunglasses, and they love it if I write on them with my pen (not many people have pens here, and they think its awesome that it shows up on their skin.)

And sometimes, the older kids can read and write and occasionally they will read outloud as I'm writing answers. Usually they are really shy and won't speak to me, even in Swahili. Or they will laugh and run away because everyone thinks its funny to hear mzungo (tourists/while people) speak swahili or even english.

11/15
3rd day of DR…I stayed behind to do data entry. It took a few hours to do it all, we have a special program that we enter the data in, and it will analyze it for us. Then I ate lunch with the staff.

I was the only student that stayed behind that day, and when Abdi told me it was lunch time he said "Celena, its lunchhhhh time. But tell the cooks you are here because we eat African food hereee!" He is too funny. The cooks made them a huge pot of beans and corn (generally Africans eat only 1 dish, sometimes 2 at a meal, depending on what it is). And the food that the students get has a lot more options, but also has the staple food that the staff eat too.

11/16
4th day of DR…went with Innocent (a local guide, thats a nick name). We were done by 11:30. And we ended up meeting Daniel's (a staff member) wife, and we interviewed her, and she invited us to her house for lunch. The house was very nice, wooden (instead of cow dung/mud mixture) and had couches and a living room, with a china cabinet, which I've never seen in Kenya. But she made us rice and carrots, which was really cool because we never expected to meet his wife (her name is Diana).

Eariler in the day I watched a little kid pee in a rolley toy, put dirt in it, play in it and put his hands in his mouth…clean.

I forgot to mention that no children wear diapers. And usually the ones under 3 don't wear a shirt or pants either. Girls always wear skirts here, boys always wear pants too...its literally the only way to tell the difference between gender because everyone has shaved heads. Anyway, there are a lot of 1/2 naked children running around, very different from the US, and we've come across a lot of Bomas where the parents leave the children for hours to get water from a stream, or whatever they need to do...also very different from the US.

The drive back was long and dusty but we watched Wall-E when I got back. And hung out for the rest of the afternoon, just like we've done for most of the days since DR started. DR is pretty sweet.