Follow the red dirt road

Tomorrow we leave to go to our Nairobi camp site for a two week stay. The trip will take about eight hours driving in our Cruisers over the wonderful bumpy and dusty roads of Kenya (when we drove for five hours from the Nairobi airport to here, I arrived with a solid layer of dust coating me and all of my stuff). It will be quite the adventure.

For the past two weeks here at KBC, not a whole lot has happened, as we just finished all of our exams (four total) today, so most of the time was spent studying and turning in about five assignments before then. We did go to help build desks for a local primary school, and we did have one field expedition where we went around to farmers and asked them about human-wildlife conflict, but other than that it's just sort of been hanging out at camp.

The daily schedule is pretty simple. Get up for breakfast at 7:30 (or if you have cook crew, then you're up at 6:30 to prepare breakfast for everyone else--I'm on Luo i.e. Team Obama!), classes start at 8 and run until noon with a half hour break in between. After a two hour break, classes start back up at 2pm, and tend to run until anywhere from 3:30 to 5:30pm (and we don't really have weekends, but rather one randomly selected day off a week, which is when we take the opportunity to go do stuff like going to Loitokitok to see an HIV/AIDS VCT). After classes finish, we'll lounge around a bit, working or just hanging out, basically waiting until the sun gets lower and the day cools off, so that we can go into our fields and play soccer or volleyball. By sundown we're showering, and then it's time for dinner at seven.

One cool thing that we did get to do was go to watch the Liverpool-Manchester United soccer game in Kimana town in this little tiny wood building on our way back from building desks. The room was jammed packed with about eighty men (the females from our group were the only women) in relative darkness staring at a tiny TV as beams of sun streamed through the cracks in the woodwork.

It was an intense atmosphere. As Liverpool pulled ahead in the game, the entire room would literally erupt at each successive goal. This would be followed by shouting at from the guys in the back of the room to the guys in the front of the room to sit down so that they could see the replay. This is the way that soccer is meant to be enjoyed.

Anyway, I've still got to pack for tomorrow as we're leaving at seven (6am wake up--woo hoo!). However, I feel that I should warn you that I will be without internet access for these next two weeks, so I regret to inform you that you will have to wait a while for new posts. I have an elephant orphanage, an ostrich farm, Nakuru National Park, Hellsgate National Park, and Nairobi National Park all in the future. It's going to be wild.