July 26th: 9:42am
It's been a mellow, rainy sunday morning. We got to sleep in until 9am this morning which was f.a.n.t.a.s.t.i.c. I'm sitting on my sleeping-area-turned-workspace, listening to a little Django Reinhardt and I thought I would take a minute to say hi to the fam and friends.
I just had a breakfast meeting with Alasdair about our game plan for a series of posters we're doing for CSWCT (Chimpanzee Sanctuary Wildlife Conservation Trust ) and I'm really excited about starting work on them. The three posters will be about Animal Welfare, Community Outreach and CSWCT. There is a Chimpanzee here in quarantine that has had her leg amputated because of a man trap. She dragged this enormous and extremely heavy steel mantrap clamped on her broken leg for 3 days before she was found and rescued. Although UWEC staff has said that she can't be seen or photographed, Al and I are going to go tomorrow to talk to a JGI (Jane Goodall Institute) official who rescued her to see if I can go alone to photograph her. For the first poster, we're going to have a large image of her as the focal point and a smaller image of a mantrap. For the second poster, we're thinking that I will take a speedboat to one of the neighboring islands to photograph the children, the third will be a series of images about biodiversity, slash and burn agriculture/sugar cane fields and loss of habitat. But we'll be meeting with the staff tomorrow to pitch the ideas and hopefully I will begin shooting in the next few days! Everyone has been working really hard to get as much work done as possible while we're here for these organizations. So after a good week of work, we decided to head into town last night.
We all piled onto Nox and drove into Kampala to get the essentials (wine and chocolate) and eat a very American dinner of hot pizza and cold beer. It was thoroughly enjoyable and everyone was in good spirits for our drive back to UWEC. We made it back much more quickly than our trip there, as we were stopped on a back road into town and were not allowed to pass because the President's car was approaching. While we were forced to wait, I was really regretting my decision to not tinkle before we left and curious locals began accumulating around our truck. We were all hanging out the side of the truck waving to the throngs of little children huddled together, giggling and staring at us. I can imagine our enormous, bright yellow truck full of mazungus coming down the little dusty red road through their tiny village was a sight to see. But after 20 minutes or so, we were given permission to pass and drove on into Kampala.
The team is about to head into a neighboring village because we have a soccer match planned with some of the local children this afternoon. That should be interesting in the rain...
July 27th: 7:34am
The rain moved on yesterday afternoon and we had a beautiful sunny day for the soccer match. The school we were visiting had 1020 children, 800 of which lived there full time. I traveled over early with the Anthropology and Education teams to speak with the teachers and some of the students about their views on conservation. Around 3pm the rest of our team showed up, decked out in their Primate Handshake t-shirts, ready for the soccer match. By the amount of people standing on the sidelines, it looked like everyone in town had came out to watch the Mazungas make utter fool of themselves. There were tons and tons of little kids running around in their barefeet, gathering curiously around me to check out my camera. Whenever I would raise my camera up to photograph ANYTHING, they would all run to be in front of the lens, squishing their little faces side by side to make sure that they were in the image. It made photographing anything else a bit difficult, but it was great to watch them get so excited as I showed them their photo on the LCD. At one point, I made the mistake of crouching down to show them the photographs, and in an instant, I was engulfed in a sea of puddin pops, all clamoring to see the tiny screen.
We lost the soccer game (big shock there) but weren't totally pounded.. I'd say that they went easy on us. We did have a blast though and afterwards, we took a group photo of the teams together under one of the goalposts. When we got back to camp, we got dinner together (yummy stir fry), drank wine and had a little jam session.
I'm about to head out with Alasdair and Connor in 30 minutes to have our meeting with CSWCT staff to pitch our ideas.. Hopefully this afternoon I'll be snapping away!
