sometimes, shirtless men are walking to nowhere

Day 26 (9/30)
This morning we had class, not to exciting. After lunch we shuttled into the land cruisers once again, went off into the bush and did a field exercise. This involved driving about 45 minutes into the middle of absolutely nowhere. We split up into small 4-person groups and each had a local guide (our group had Daniel as a guide…wahooo.) We all went either north, south, east, or west and then went 100m away from the road, and staked out a plot of 2m x 2m and then evaluated how vegetated the area, what kinds of plants were there (this is where the guides came in, because they know things better than use.) Finally each one of us walked 4 different directions for 20 meters so that we made a circle, then we looked at the vegetation inside the bigger circle and took down observations. Then we walked 200 m (our direction was north) to the next plot. We did this 8 times. We had a compass, tape measure (for the 2 m measurement) and a GPS that really only told us the longer distances (not direction).
Surprisingly, we had a really good time. So much better than sitting in class.

Saw some cool things and Daniel taught us a Swahili song. Out of nowhere (we were in the middle of nowhere to begin with) we saw this man without a shirt walking...just walking. Chris had the compass and I had the GPS so we were infront of the other people and I go "oh look at the size of that giraffe print!" and he goes "uh..look at shirtless man over there."
Daniel stopped to talk to him and then asked if we were scared..haha we just kinda wanted to know where he was trying to walk too. Becuase there was literally nothing for miles.

We saw 2 very dead Zebra carcasses I had to walk right by it when we walked out 20 m., a huge termite mound, ginormous elephant tracks (I could fit 2 of my shoes in one print), and then saw some baby elephant prints, ostrich prints (you know because of their killing toe), and ostrich poop.

Not to mention Daniel is a gypsy. He led us back to the car perfectly without a compass or GPS, and we weren’t following our foot prints because we took detours to go look at cool things(note we went over 1700 meters, which is about a mile off the road.) And when we were driving on the way back, we had to drop off 2 other guides from other groups and Daniel went so far off the road (roads here are more like tire tracks on the ground) and then somehow out of nowhere we ended up back in Kimana, which is the town that our bush camp is in. He continues to surprise me.

We just had RAP (every day after dinner, someone comes up to have a reflection, then people do announcements, and then there is a presentation.) Tonight was Cecily and her quote/reflection was about how people without an education are undervalued by people with an education (which is a lot of what we are learning about, these big-to-do people will come in and try to help the locals somehow but if they don’t talk to them and see what they need or gain their knowledge about the land, the project either fails or makes everything worse.)

Anyway she compared this to how people sometimes look at children, and an amazing quote from an 11 year old boy from Canada is “fear is like a goldfish, if it gets too big you can’t flush it down the toilet” it’s such a deep quote that is a good thing to think about.

My day for RAP is Friday, and I need to think about something good to do.