Manyara Ranch

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After a bit of a break on a weekend safari it was time to get back to work! Next project: Manyara Ranch. The ranch is part of the African Wildlife Foundation and is set on a beautiful property between Lake Manyara and Tarangire National Parks. Other than the donkeys this was our first opportunity to work with livestock and we were excited to get into it all. There were about 5000 cattle and hundreds of sheep that live within the ranch and we got an opportunity to work with some of the animals on the ranch and also animals in a pastoral community nearby. We treated a foot abscess in a sheep and spent a day vaccinating, deworming and ear-tagging calves. The cows we were working on were Boran cattle (a tropical breed that's part of the Bos indicus family) and they were absolutely beautiful. They came in every colour you could imagine and they're so used to being herded by the Masai people on foot that even the bulls just wander around and don't notice when you walk right by them! They use a live vaccine (not modified-live like we do at home) so the animals are actually infected with the virus and then treated with tetracycline. It's an interesting way to do things but it seems to work well for them! Working at the ranch was also a great cultural experience because, other than Dr. Alex, all the people we were working with were Masai and didn't speak English! We definitely needed our Swahili books at this point. They were as excited to practice their English as we were our Swahili so we spent a lot of time try to talk back and - they got quite a kick out of our butchering of the language!
A typical conversation with look something like this:

Jambo- Hello
Habari? - How are you?
Nzuri- Fine
Karibu- Welcome
Asante sana- Thank you very much
Kwaheri- Goodbye

While we were at the ranch we were also self sufficient. It was the first time that we’d had to cook for ourselves and it was definitely an experience trying to cook in the dark! Although I’ve done lots of cooking when I’ve been camping, somehow this was much more challenging and it was pretty funny when after trying for 2 hours we STILL couldn’t get the water to boil. We’re convinced that water must boil at a different temperature in Africa! We still managed to make a few half decent meals but gave up on trying to have anything boiled. Luckily we brought along some extra bottled water so we didn’t have to worry about boiling off the bugs!

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