So it's been a few days (ok almost a week) since I've had a chance to sit down for longer than five minutes and write in.. my apologies family! It's been a really amazing week though, filled with rainforest treks, working with local school children, visiting remote villages, sleeping in a treehouse deep in the rainforest, going on safari, camping at 3 different amazing campsites and sleeping in a tent surrounded by hippos!
THE TREEHOUSE
On Wednesday, Leslie (primatologist), Gemma and Katie (video crew) and myself decided to book the treehouse at Chimp's Nest for the night. Although it was pretty rustic, it was absolutely glorious having a warm bed with clean sheets, blankets and a pillow. The treehouse was deeper into the rainforest than our team's campsite was, so we hiked in about 20 minutes before we rounded the corner of the trail and the circular treehouse, about 75 feet up in the canopy came into view. We climbed the near vertical staircase up and threw down our packs to explore the tiny living space up in the canopy. The staff had lit a fire to warm 50 liters of water for our showers (yay for hot showers!) and the water smelled strongly of wood smoke. There was a window looking out into the treetops in the shower and as I washed 3 days of dirt off, a monkey (I believe it was a L'hoest) scampered across the limb a few feet from the window! To my delight (and my teammates horror) there was a fluorescent orange snake on the front porch too. After our showers, we hiked back up to Nox to have dinner with the rest of our team, had a beer at the thatched hut bar at Chimp's Nest and hiked back (accompanied by a guide for "protection") to our treehouse. We all fell asleep under our mosquito nets on our soft comfortable, clean beds, listening to the sounds of the rainforest.
OLPC
The Primate Handshake is working with OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), an organization that is supplying laptops to schools in underdeveloped countries. An American guy named Ian Wrangham who is working at Kassisi Primary School, a couple hours from our campsite, won a grant for 100 of OLPC's "XO" laptops. We've had 2 of the little green laptops on our expedition for our team to fiddle around with.. so we went to Kassisi to work with the school children and receive feedback about their operating system and software for OLPC.. and our web team is working on developing some new software and games for the OLPC. Every time we've visited a school, interacting with the children has been such an amazing experience for all of us, but Thursday was particularly magical. Walking into a dark, cement school house room, packed with 90 students all huddled around their little glowing screens, grinning ear to ear, you can't help but be a bit taken aback. There isn't any electricity, they work by the little sunlight coming in from a few small windows, the 1400 children at the school are fed porridge for lunch every day.. the cards are certainly stacked against them, but their education is being enhanced so much by these little machines. The children were so excited to "show off" what they could do on their laptops. It was fascinating watching what they had already learned in the 3 weeks that they had had access to their computers.. A lot of the children at Kasiisi are orphans, but with the XOs, children in developing countries worldwide have been able to go home and teach their parents, grandparents or aunts & uncles how to read and write. How amazing is that?
To check out Ian Wrangham's blog and the Kasiisi children's progress go to:
http://olpckasiisi.blogspot.com/
