Hi everyone, First I have to say, I have the best field assistant on Earth. I am just so happy to have such a trustworthy, hard working guy looking after things out here! I am back in the field and have a little portable modem with me this time, so I can access the internet (if briefly), which is very exciting and luxurious! I’ve spent the morning meeting with field assistants who are supervised by the superstar mentioned above, each of whom collects data on elephant raids in their own village.. it seems people are having even more problems this year, [View Full Entry]

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Ahhh, this country. It feels like so many things have happened since I last posted, I don’t know where to start! Lots of ups and downs… I’ll start with what’s freshest in my mind at the moment, and which I will warn you is very sad- at least it was for me. On the way back from the field 2 days ago we stopped by a village where a field assistant I worked with last year lives (one fun piece of news- she named her daughter’s middle name after me!!! I am feeling very honored and excited about this). The man [View Full Entry]

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Day 13 - Dar Es Saleem - 11/8/09 We left at 0900 again and only 1 minibus turned up. With number swelling due to people arriving here early needing to be picked up as well there were too many of us for the one minibus. A second one arrived and it was pure luxury; blacked out windows, curtains with uber comfortable spacious seats. We had an hour to kill in Stone Town, which I used to get some cash, post one last postcard and use the internet. The ferry seemed to be less chaotic then the way over though this time [View Full Entry]

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Today we crossed into Tanzania. The border crossing was fine - hakuna matada! The journey was quiet and uneventful apart from Richard (our driver) getting a speeding ticket and running over a chicken. It was very hot in the morning when we stopped for breakfast and I discovered maple syrup on toast - mmm! We arrived at Iringa at about 5pm and put our tents up. I had a nice hot shower and then went to the bar for delicious hot chocolate and amerula - divine!! Amerula is a liquor from the fruit of the merula tree and it tastes a [View Full Entry]

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We spent most of the day on Tuesday in Dodoma, trying to sort out our roof rack. Finally managed to leave at about 2, heading in the direction of Morogoro, an agricultural town some 500km inland from Dar es Salaam that lies encircled by the Uluguru Mountains. The drive down to Morogoro was stunning - we followed the distant line of the Rubelo Mountains on our right and then broke through into the Makata plains which liead into Morogoro. On the advice of our guidebook, which we have now learnt to distrust somewhat, we chose to drive the apparently ‘easy drive’ [View Full Entry]

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We left the coast and headed towards Malawi, it was to far to travel in a day so we headed to our campsite in Iringa. On the way we drove through Mikumi NP where we saw Elephants drinking, Giraffes eating and loads of Zebras. It made a nice break in the drive otherwise we were looking at trees. The only problem was that we couldn't stop for toilet breaks!!! When we got to the campsite the sun was starting to set and there was not many places left to camp because a load of other overland trucks were already at the [View Full Entry]

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Well I've finished with my placement. We had our community festival on Sunday and the finals of our sports league. It was a stressful affair because the day before everything looked like it was going to fail miserably but luckily on the day things seemed to mostly work themselves out. We had a guest speaker from VCT who spoke really well about AIDS and the importance of testing and unfortunately we couldnt get the mobile testing like they'd promised because they just told us that day that its not possible (TIT!!). We also had most of the village leaders and important [View Full Entry]

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Firstly my little calf died :( I came back from Njombe and it wasn't there and Fledita informed me that kitoto kimekufe (baby cow has died). I was so sad, i bet it was those damn ants!! Anyway other than that sadness things are good. I went to Njombe on friday on a motorcycle (2.5hrs) and my god...pain!!! The roads are pretty bad here so it was extremely bumpy and the motorbike didnt have very good suspension, i almost flew off a few times but the pain was intense. When I got off I almost fell over and had to get [View Full Entry]

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07.06.07 6:00 in the morning we left the African Parks house in Kalabo for the ride home. Still pitch black outside we navigated withy GPS to the entrance of the dirt road that would lead us back to Sitoti and further to Katima Molilo (Zambian Side). There is no petrol station before Livingstone at all, so we calculated hard and decided we would make it. Well, we arrived on the vapour in Livingstone. What a ride again. A shortcut turned out to be waterlogged and we had to double back another 50 Km through very deep sand. Once again, the [View Full Entry]

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So a lot has gone down in the last week. We taught a lesson with our real partners, found out where we are placed, had some placement issues, made an SPW calender, wrote a song, said goodbye to Clare and soon (on Monday) we will be saying goodbye to eachother. The lesson with my partner Neema went ok, it wasn't great because SPW had some trouble finding students for us and we didnt teach until about 2.30pm and we hadnt eaten so we were all grumpy and the kids were tired and bored (they had to sit through 3 of our [View Full Entry]

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