30-July-2009

I have been in the Serengeti for precisely one week now, yet I still hardly know where to begin.

The house is nicer than I could possibly have imagined. For starters, it’s a house. All of my previous fieldwork was conducted from the luxury of my Northface Tadpole. Here at the Lion House we have a veranda that looks out at the dense woodlands of Seronera – the city at the heart of the Serengeti. Furnished with wobbly table and cushioned chairs, the veranda is occasionally decorated by an especially adventurous hyrax or an especially annoying baboon. The lions steal the cushions from the Cheetah House next door, but leave ours alone. It might be because (we’re pretty sure) there’s something (that bites) living in our cushions. The house is encircled by half a dozen 3000 liter tanks that catch the rainwater that runs off the roof – even though it’s fairly clean, we boil and filter it before drinking because, as Ingela says, “you never know what poops on the roof!” Well, we know at least it’s hyraxes, possibly a leopard, maybe baboons, and almost certainly bats. So boil we do. In the wet season, the tanks are full enough that water flows to the taps, but right now we go back and forth with buckets. Lots and lots of buckets.

Our electricity shuts off at 10 pm, so I am curled up on the veranda, writing by the light of my kerosene lantern. The bats are echolocating above my head, but I wonder if they have faulty sonar. Every now and then I hear a soft thwack against the wooden beams, and the other day one brushed through my knotty hair. (My hair is like 3 inches long. I haven’t had knotty hair since I was 12 years old and had long hair. This is what the dust of Serengeti plus days of not showering does to a person.) Candida, one of the field researchers, pulls down her crunchy laundry by headlamp. I’m not sure why our laundry is crunchy, but I don’t ask. As long as there are no ants in my pants, I’ll be happy. (The ants are a story in and of themselves.)

A buffalo goes crashing awkwardly through the thick grass and shrubs in our front yards. We have a 20 meter radius of mowed grass out front, but the back yard grows tall and dangerous. When braving the nighttime visit to the outhouse I scan for eyeshine at each step forward. The other day Craig came running back inside the house panting. “Don’t worry,” he said, when I nervously peered out to pay my own visit to the loo, “you can outrun him.” I usually take most of what my advisor tells me with no small pinch of salt, and this was no exception – stared down by the African water buffalo, I decided that perhaps nature calling could be allowed to ring for a while.

Fortunately, the veranda seems to create some invisible barrier to the bigger animals with dangerous things like hooves and claws. The buffalo stay in the tall unmowed grass and poop on our path to the outhouse. Occasionally we hear hyenas whooping in the distance, or lions roaring past the house next door, but nobody ever ventures up onto the concrete stoop. So I get to sit here with my half liter of Kilimanjaro beer and stare into the night, immune to the dangers of east African wildlife…well, that is, aside from mosquitos, biting ants, ticks, and tsetses….and the occasional bat that buzzes my head. At least this place is creative.