After inner-city Arusha excursions and watching world cup soccer eating homemade chips mayai, we head to Serengeti for months of dirt and dust and the most breathtaking wildlife in the world.
But we will miss our Pink House Friends.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
The Pink House
The Pink House is the Savannas Forever fortress near Arusha's gated neighborhood. It sees a constant flow of SF employees and affiliates, lion researchers or grad students stopping on their way in or out of Serengeti. It is like a pink stucco fortress next to a village that has burros tied to their bus stop. ( seriously. We think it is a backup plan in case the daladala doesn't come.)
After inner-city Arusha excursions and watching world cup soccer eating homemade chips mayai, we head to Serengeti for months of dirt and dust and the most breathtaking wildlife in the world.
But we will miss our Pink House Friends.
After inner-city Arusha excursions and watching world cup soccer eating homemade chips mayai, we head to Serengeti for months of dirt and dust and the most breathtaking wildlife in the world.
But we will miss our Pink House Friends.
June 18 2010
Even as I walk, it is a struggle to keep my eyes open. I am going on 40 hours without sleep, the world taking on that hazy, throbbing, sleep-deprived glare, the lights are harsh and do not want to focus. I had such grand plans for my 3.5 hours in Amsterdam, but all I want to do is curl up into a ball and sleep.
As soon as I step into the bathroom, a familiar wave of “underwhelm” floods over me. The stalls are floor-to-ceiling plastic laminate, off-white with speckled blue. The toilets feel plastic and cheap; there are no vertical tanks and the water flows weakly into the bowl upon flushing – seemingly impotent in comparison to our noisy, torrential, tornado-like toilets. There is only a short, narrow mirror offset from the two plain ceramic sinks. Even the shadiest Taco Bells in the US have snazzier toilets than the Amsterdam airport, and I begin to wonder if Americans just love their bathrooms. Our bathrooms have colorful tile and big, well-lit mirrors; shiny metal stalls that create an air of spaciousness with their open tops and bottoms. Did you know that you can buy dual aquarium/toilet-tanks? The CBS featured “Fish’n’Flush” is just one of a whole line of home improvement products that lets you blend your bathroom time with some quality pet-bonding. You can watch little Nemo swim around while you heed nature’s call. The “Fish’n’Flush” page boasts that this is what you need if you are a homeowner that wants to make a statement. On the same page is an ad for helping the world’s poorest of poor. We like our bathrooms, apparently.
Amsterdam is simply not as shiny as I feel it should be. It is like my dingy, graying MacBook – dulled in the splendor of the shiny new metallic models – exuding an aura of aging technology. The strange dissonant drabness lingers as I walk around. I stare in bleary-eyed amusement at a woman in fitted pants and high heels, and a gentleman in a gray blazer – his hair spiked into a faux-hawk, the product crispy and shiny – they walk with authoritative strides, collecting stray trash with their bare hands. I’ve never seen such a well-dressed custodial couple. Everywhere there is cleaning. Motorizing and cleaning. They love their motorized carts here – there are carts of every kind – passenger carts with back-to back benches, driven by well-postured flight attendants in crisp blue skirt-suits with bright white trim - that swerve frenetically around rolling luggage and dawdling travelers. Police on gimmicky segways that whirr weakly through the crowds. There are standing carts and sitting carts; blue carts and green carts; carts with metal boxes on the backs; carts dragging wheelchairs; carts - little orange carts – with brushy floor cleaners that spray and scrub the dull tan-gray tiles. Everywhere there is endless cleaning and motorizing.
With my overweight bags stacked on a little pushcart, I meander through the branching hallways. The light drizzles down through a slatted ceiling that looks like someone’s unwanted venetian blinds. Venetian blinds – how I hated them as a child. They were on all of our windows and there was nothing I wanted more than fluffy, billowing curtains or a satin window shag - something to soften the harsh angularity of the vinyl strips and the sharp corners of the window frames. Here in the airport halls, these ceiling slats dull the florescent light, and it fall flat on the drab décor. The floor is a 70’s era gray-brown, the walls alternately paneled peach wallpaper, frosted windows, or tiny coral-colored tiles.
It is almost 11 months to the day that I was here before, lost and scared, an untried mzungu embarking on my first real academic expedition. I am back now, admiring the cheese and chocolate, the well-dressed herds of flight attendants, shopping clerks, and snappy passerby(s?). I am excited and ready for anything, although desperate for orange juice and a nap. I curl up on the sofa near the unending “waterspa” that whirs and buzzes and opens and closes – a massage bed topped with some sort of super snazzy water-massage device that the lonelyattendant runs again and again and again. People walk without pausing, turning their heads as they pass to stare curiously, but they do not stop. So the spa goes on whirring and buzzing and opening and closing, and all around the little motorized carts – blue and green and orange, stand-up or sit-down style – go puttering by. In the gray, muted lights I curl up on top of my luggage, piled beside me on the bench, and close my eyes to this electric lullaby.
As soon as I step into the bathroom, a familiar wave of “underwhelm” floods over me. The stalls are floor-to-ceiling plastic laminate, off-white with speckled blue. The toilets feel plastic and cheap; there are no vertical tanks and the water flows weakly into the bowl upon flushing – seemingly impotent in comparison to our noisy, torrential, tornado-like toilets. There is only a short, narrow mirror offset from the two plain ceramic sinks. Even the shadiest Taco Bells in the US have snazzier toilets than the Amsterdam airport, and I begin to wonder if Americans just love their bathrooms. Our bathrooms have colorful tile and big, well-lit mirrors; shiny metal stalls that create an air of spaciousness with their open tops and bottoms. Did you know that you can buy dual aquarium/toilet-tanks? The CBS featured “Fish’n’Flush” is just one of a whole line of home improvement products that lets you blend your bathroom time with some quality pet-bonding. You can watch little Nemo swim around while you heed nature’s call. The “Fish’n’Flush” page boasts that this is what you need if you are a homeowner that wants to make a statement. On the same page is an ad for helping the world’s poorest of poor. We like our bathrooms, apparently.
Amsterdam is simply not as shiny as I feel it should be. It is like my dingy, graying MacBook – dulled in the splendor of the shiny new metallic models – exuding an aura of aging technology. The strange dissonant drabness lingers as I walk around. I stare in bleary-eyed amusement at a woman in fitted pants and high heels, and a gentleman in a gray blazer – his hair spiked into a faux-hawk, the product crispy and shiny – they walk with authoritative strides, collecting stray trash with their bare hands. I’ve never seen such a well-dressed custodial couple. Everywhere there is cleaning. Motorizing and cleaning. They love their motorized carts here – there are carts of every kind – passenger carts with back-to back benches, driven by well-postured flight attendants in crisp blue skirt-suits with bright white trim - that swerve frenetically around rolling luggage and dawdling travelers. Police on gimmicky segways that whirr weakly through the crowds. There are standing carts and sitting carts; blue carts and green carts; carts with metal boxes on the backs; carts dragging wheelchairs; carts - little orange carts – with brushy floor cleaners that spray and scrub the dull tan-gray tiles. Everywhere there is endless cleaning and motorizing.
With my overweight bags stacked on a little pushcart, I meander through the branching hallways. The light drizzles down through a slatted ceiling that looks like someone’s unwanted venetian blinds. Venetian blinds – how I hated them as a child. They were on all of our windows and there was nothing I wanted more than fluffy, billowing curtains or a satin window shag - something to soften the harsh angularity of the vinyl strips and the sharp corners of the window frames. Here in the airport halls, these ceiling slats dull the florescent light, and it fall flat on the drab décor. The floor is a 70’s era gray-brown, the walls alternately paneled peach wallpaper, frosted windows, or tiny coral-colored tiles.
It is almost 11 months to the day that I was here before, lost and scared, an untried mzungu embarking on my first real academic expedition. I am back now, admiring the cheese and chocolate, the well-dressed herds of flight attendants, shopping clerks, and snappy passerby(s?). I am excited and ready for anything, although desperate for orange juice and a nap. I curl up on the sofa near the unending “waterspa” that whirs and buzzes and opens and closes – a massage bed topped with some sort of super snazzy water-massage device that the lonelyattendant runs again and again and again. People walk without pausing, turning their heads as they pass to stare curiously, but they do not stop. So the spa goes on whirring and buzzing and opening and closing, and all around the little motorized carts – blue and green and orange, stand-up or sit-down style – go puttering by. In the gray, muted lights I curl up on top of my luggage, piled beside me on the bench, and close my eyes to this electric lullaby.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Take 2: Return to Serengeti
17 June 2010
To be honest, I don’t actually know what the date is. We are between time: moving forward, skipping beats. Leaping ahead 14 hours when we really should only saunter 6. We are somewhere between today and tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it to come.
Almost 11 months to the day, I am once again heading into the future. I remember how new and fresh these moments were 11 months ago. I was an untried mzungu waltzing into the bush, some white chick from the American Dream suburbs, raised on lattes and cul-de-sac kickball, and almost reluctant to admit that I thought I might be able to say something insightful about lion-hyena-leopard interactions. But this time I am confident and cool…I am proud of what I have done so far and excited for what is to come. I have a study design that blends novel concepts with a cutting edge empirical pursuit. I have camped out surrounded by hyenas, I have tracked lions and been charged by elephants. I have my name in Smithsonian. I have more than a snazzy-sounding elevator-clip of my research to back up my plans. And, perhaps most importantly, I have money. Not only did I score a sweet fellowship, but I raised $24,000 in grants for the season - for even in academia, money makes the world go round. For the first time since graduate school began, I feel like I just might be able to pull this thing off.
Chasing day across the Atlantic, I am stunned by how different this flight is from my last. It feels small and cramped, and though the plane sits 8 across, we are all entranced in our own worlds – instead of appearing in the aisles, where we all feel guilty for blatantly ignoring the jaded attendants, the safety talk is given on our personal seatback tv’s, by a redhead with a little button nose and unusually prominent cheekbones. I remember her from my last international flight, with her weird wagging finger when she reminds us severely not to smoke.
My traveling companion has not said a word to me, though he gets “special meals” which means that they come 40 minutes before mine and waft alluringly while I wait, half-hungry and half-asleep, for my box meal and cup of wine. I waver in and out of sleep, still in stunned disbelief that I am really going back.
In just a few days, I will be driving out to the Serengeti, armed with nearly 200 digital camera traps (DIGITAL!!!) and 5 months of bug spray. This time, when people inquire what I am doing for my project, I will tell them rather than ask. I am still studying the mechanisms driving carnivore coexistence, but now I know how I am doing it and what the ultimate picture will be. I am using camera traps to collect empirical data on spatial and temporal patterns of carnivore habitat use with respect to their competitors – and I will assess spatiotemporal partitioning as a mechanism of coexistence. But it doesn’t stop there. There are a million mechanisms postulated for species coexistence, but few, if any, have been tested in systems like mine. So I will test for interference-exploitation trade-offs, I will look for costs incurred by one competitor on another, I will find the R* of a lion…All of this I will do by analyzing images from these cameras for the next 2 years. But right now I will sleep. Tomorrow is coming, but it is not here yet, and I will revel in today while it lasts…even if all it means is my little seatback TV and boxed meal on a plane.
To be honest, I don’t actually know what the date is. We are between time: moving forward, skipping beats. Leaping ahead 14 hours when we really should only saunter 6. We are somewhere between today and tomorrow, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it to come.
Almost 11 months to the day, I am once again heading into the future. I remember how new and fresh these moments were 11 months ago. I was an untried mzungu waltzing into the bush, some white chick from the American Dream suburbs, raised on lattes and cul-de-sac kickball, and almost reluctant to admit that I thought I might be able to say something insightful about lion-hyena-leopard interactions. But this time I am confident and cool…I am proud of what I have done so far and excited for what is to come. I have a study design that blends novel concepts with a cutting edge empirical pursuit. I have camped out surrounded by hyenas, I have tracked lions and been charged by elephants. I have my name in Smithsonian. I have more than a snazzy-sounding elevator-clip of my research to back up my plans. And, perhaps most importantly, I have money. Not only did I score a sweet fellowship, but I raised $24,000 in grants for the season - for even in academia, money makes the world go round. For the first time since graduate school began, I feel like I just might be able to pull this thing off.
Chasing day across the Atlantic, I am stunned by how different this flight is from my last. It feels small and cramped, and though the plane sits 8 across, we are all entranced in our own worlds – instead of appearing in the aisles, where we all feel guilty for blatantly ignoring the jaded attendants, the safety talk is given on our personal seatback tv’s, by a redhead with a little button nose and unusually prominent cheekbones. I remember her from my last international flight, with her weird wagging finger when she reminds us severely not to smoke.
My traveling companion has not said a word to me, though he gets “special meals” which means that they come 40 minutes before mine and waft alluringly while I wait, half-hungry and half-asleep, for my box meal and cup of wine. I waver in and out of sleep, still in stunned disbelief that I am really going back.
In just a few days, I will be driving out to the Serengeti, armed with nearly 200 digital camera traps (DIGITAL!!!) and 5 months of bug spray. This time, when people inquire what I am doing for my project, I will tell them rather than ask. I am still studying the mechanisms driving carnivore coexistence, but now I know how I am doing it and what the ultimate picture will be. I am using camera traps to collect empirical data on spatial and temporal patterns of carnivore habitat use with respect to their competitors – and I will assess spatiotemporal partitioning as a mechanism of coexistence. But it doesn’t stop there. There are a million mechanisms postulated for species coexistence, but few, if any, have been tested in systems like mine. So I will test for interference-exploitation trade-offs, I will look for costs incurred by one competitor on another, I will find the R* of a lion…All of this I will do by analyzing images from these cameras for the next 2 years. But right now I will sleep. Tomorrow is coming, but it is not here yet, and I will revel in today while it lasts…even if all it means is my little seatback TV and boxed meal on a plane.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)