June has passed, we are in to the second half of the year, and the second half of the expedition. As if this isn’t a momentous enough thought, we volunteers are now in that amazing position where we live in a tented camp in the southern hemisphere, and commute to work at Ol Pejeta in the northern hemisphere. Someone will undoubtedly want to test the direction water goes down a plug hole in each hemisphere; it won’t be me. Anti-clockwise in the north and clockwise in the south? Or is it the other way around?
After another cold clear night, the morning very quickly warmed us up for breakfast and then out to work for an intensive day.
The Geek team set up in the banda (gazebo), all wired together, heads down into laptops working on the new website, and other projects as well as helping those of us who are non-geeks. They were joined by the Video team on laptops pushing ahead with the DVD preparation and editing.
Harriet and Mike from the Video team went out with two rangers to film their routine of buying fresh provisions for the primates from Nanyuki. Today they bought 1,000 bananas which will last about 2 days. On Saturday they will buy 1,200 for the weekend. The chimps’ diet usually also includes avocados, mangoes, beans and some salt to compensate for this deficiency from what would have been their normal diet. On the way back from town, the rangers took Harriet and Mike to a cafe to sample some local food. They ate “Arid root” cooked in chunks and served hot with chilli sauce, and washed down with a cup of tea!! Just like being home. Both Harriet and Mike enjoyed the dish…Harriet finishing her dish.
Back in camp, lunch was freshly made sandwiches with a choice from eggs, onions, tomatoes, white cabbage and cucumber…and peanut butter and bananas for those with American tastes.
After lunch Ash shot a few short clips with me dressed and behaving like a poacher, stalking, shooting and clubbing to death an animal. Ash then converted these sequences to an amazing animation.
The rest of my day was spent catching up with the blogs that had got behind. Sorry everyone, but the combination of our moving around plus difficult internet connections, plus my learning to work with the blogging software which involved optimisation of photo images I took in RAW format all contributed to me getting behind. Catching up fast now.
The Anthropology team went to The Sweetwater Secondary School with Nancy from the from the Community Development Office, to carry out some interviews. Jocelyn spoke with a teacher and four children, and David spoke with Deputy Principal David Muchemi, a couple of teachers and four children. One observation they made was that although the school had books which the children used for reading, there was no sizeable bookshelf on which to store and display them.
Two of the children interviewed had uncles working at Ol Pejeta, so they already knew quite a lot about the reserve and its aims and activities, and about animal conservation.
The Education team remained based in camp today working together with the Video team on the DVD combined project, planning characters, effects and storyboards.
Me? I remained in camp for a change, in the cool darkness of the Somali banda working with the Geek team, catching up with the blogs, and with Luke’s help, optimising my RAW image photos.
As a personal observation, it seemed kind of odd to me, here I was in Africa in the middle of a British Summer with the Kenyans shivering because it is their Winter, a key member of a team of amazing young media students and experts out in the bush filming, and me sitting in the shade of the Somali banda with the heat of fierce sunshine outside, among a hugely talented team of geeks intensely tapping away on their laptops oblivious to the rivers of power cables around their feet. Me, a non-geek sitting on a cushioned rattan armchair, water bottle by my left leg and Macbook cradled in my lap, my body being used like an exercise runway for the colony of tiny non-biting brown ants also sharing the banda. My creative thoughts paused as an image of a cold, long, gin and tonic with ice and lime, flashed though my brain. Heaven.
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