Earthquakes and Elephants

It all began just after midnight.  Camp was still.  The forest echoed with the songs of cicadas and frogs.  The rats were in the kitchen polishing off our discarded crumbs of rice and flour.  The warm, sticky haze in the air began to give way to the chill of the night.  We were asleep in our tent.  Hours before I’d shoved in my earplugs and given in to the exhaustion of the day, switching off my headlamp and letting the weight of my eyes overcome me.  In an instant my eyes were flung open.  I peeled my sweaty hair from my face and lifted my head, yanking the plugs from my ears to listen to what I thought was the sound of thunder.  The beams of wood that held our platform above the earth began to shift.  The dark canvas walls of the tent bent and swayed.  The forest fell silent. Then it came alive with the frantic roars of colobus monkeys and screams of baboons.  I heard a deep rumble that I thought could only be thunder moving from the escarpment just east of us.  Here comes one hell of a storm, I thought as I jumped from my bed, pulling the mosquito net from under my mattress and ducking out of our cocoon.  When I entered the chilly night air I was surprised to find only a light trickle of rain and a gentle breeze.  Still, I yanked down all of my laundry, ran to the main area and moved my dung samples to a safe, dry place, expecting a heavy rainfall to follow.  When I returned to the tent I noticed that Adam was awake and confused.  He drifted back to sleep immediately, but I just sat with my eyes refusing to shut and my mind racing with questions about this eerie storm.

It wasn’t a storm.  It was an earthquake.  USGS measured it at a magnitude 5.4, with the epicenter not far to our north, at Lake Albert.  Our camp sits in a rift valley along a river.  To the east is a giant escarpment, and to the west is the Rwenzori Mountain range.  I had been stirred awake not by a gust of wind that shifted my tent, but a quake in the earth that shook the whole reserve.  This seemed surreal and exciting all at once, but I had no idea that the day was about to get stranger.

I knew where I wanted to find the chimps today.  Yesterday morning I stumbled upon them at the same spot that we did several times last week.  Adam was in town getting supplies with our camp manager.  Typically on a day like that I would go out with a ranger provided to us by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA).  The director of the project pays monthly salaries for two of the UWA rangers here in the reserve so that we can have two in camp with us at all times.  They carry a gun to protect us from poachers, buffalo, and elephants, especially from elephants.  It also guarantees that one researcher will always have someone to go into the forest with.  It is absolutely against the rules to travel alone in the forest here.  Dealing with the bureaucratic forces of an African country is often the ultimate test of patience and perseverance, to say the least, and on this particular day I was fighting the frustration of being without a single ranger for the fourth day in a row.  We keep two full time porters in camp to maintain our trails, repair camp, carry our water, and gather firewood.  We pulled one of them from his daily trail-slashing duties to accompany me on a chimp search.

Baluku and I did not find the chimps yesterday.  They found us.  Last week, when I had good, open observations for nearly 3 hours I noticed a large fig tree just off the trail.  Right before the whole group left us, I watched an adult female move across a fig branch with her infant tightly clinging to her chest.  She gingerly reached her fingers out over a clump of the green, round figs, giving each one a slight squeeze.  She plucked one, moved it to her nose, inhaled, and dropped it before moving to the next tree.  I decided right then that this was the tree to watch.  While most of the fruits in the forest are quite predictable, following the ebb and flow of biannual rain cycles with their fruiting and hibernating, fig trees scatter themselves among the whole forest, fruiting at random.  Each time one fills with perfectly ripe fruit it becomes the hottest spot for chimp activity in the reserve.  Ficus mucoso, the large tree that I was looking at right then, can feed many chimps for several days.  As soon as those figs became ripe, that female would likely return, and so would many others, spending all day long gorging themselves on the juicy little treats.  So we returned to that fig tree, clicked off our packs, found a soft spot on the trail, and plopped ourselves down.  Within minutes Hunter, the one handed male, silently appeared above me to once again stare down at this strange human with the blonde hair.  We spent nearly an hour with Hunter and a few other chimps before they left.

Today we set out straight for that giant fig tree.  The earthquake left me feeling a bit disheveled and distracted, but my first priority was to find that party of chimps once again.  We marched through the forest, headed straight for the escarpment.  My eyes scanned all around me for prints, leftover fruit pieces, nests, and motion in the branches overhead.  The further from camp we got, the faster we began to move.  After nearly two hours of weaving over and through the river, sliding through mud and ducking under fallen trees, my mind began to wander a bit.  That was when we heard that unmistakable cry of a chimpanzee – not just one chimpanzee actually, a whole group of them.  They began to call out from both sides of us, and it sounded like they were moving toward the same place that we were.  When I hear a chimpanzee pant-hoot, it freezes my thoughts, my breath, my whole body.  Then, impulsively, I run toward the sound.  This is what we began to do.  We picked up the pace instantly, skipping over logs and under vines as we softly moved toward the relentless calls of a large group of chimpanzees.  We were getting closer!  My heart was beginning to race.  My pants and my shirt and my hair were dripping with water from last night’s rain as we glided through the tall grass of the savanna.  I passed over large piles of dung on the trail.  They looked like the rain had washed them.  “Is this buffalo?” Adam asked.  “No,” I answered, “That’s elephant.  Look, it’s been washed by the rain though.”  Then he paused, “I smell something here.  Is that chimp?”  I sniffed for a second, “no, elephant.”  More calls!  I moved even faster now.

We were closer, and closer, and almost there!  I bolted around a corner, dead set on the great day this was about to become, and there they were.  Not chimps.  Not baboons or colobus monkeys.  Not even buffalo.  It was a heard of elephants, and I had run us right into the middle of it.  Now, when you are on a safari in a giant Land Rover, elephants are an amazing and exciting sight.  They were the highlight of my safari in the Masai Mara in 2008.  Right now, right here, however, on a trail at the base of an escarpment with no ranger, no gun, no car, no easy direction to run to, elephants were the very last beings on earth that I wanted to startle.  That is just what I had done though.  Here I stood, just a couple of meters from these giant beasts, paralyzed with fear.  I could not speak.  I could not breathe.  I felt like I was not even in my own body anymore, like I’d suddenly floated over this trail and looked down on us all, laughing at just how out of place I was.  I did not belong here.  They belonged here.  I’ve never felt so small and insignificant in my life.  One step.  It would only take one step of that giant foot to crush me.  For what felt like an eternity, but was actually less than 30 seconds, my mind raced with different strategies.  Could I run?  Even if I were a good sprinter, which I’m not, I would never outrun an elephant.  No, that was a bad idea.  Should I climb a tree?  There were no large trees here!  Do I speak?  Do I turn my back?  Have they seen me?  Right then the chimps called again.  Adam was moving toward me, wondering why I’d stopped moving toward the calls.  I could not so much as raise a hand to him.  My eyes met the eyes of a big, scared, elephant cow.  Like me, she seemed frozen in fear. 

Then Adam saw them, and when I knew he had, like a switch, it snapped my body back to life.  The only word that would softly come out of my throat was, “Shit.”  With that, the elephants swung their heads away from me.  They lifted their trunks, then let their legs follow, and began to storm in the other direction, all with one eye on me.  I took their cue and did the same.  Slowly stepping away, I began to turn my body to follow my feet.  I looked at Adam and realized he was spinning around to bolt. I heard myself say, “Don’t run!”  That seemed like a bad idea right then.  I had this image of us crashing through the bush, acting like a couple of crazed humans, scaring these elephants that were already on edge.  Our only hope was to keep them calm.  I found myself reaching for a tree to climb it.  That was silly, because the tree was not even as tall as the elephant.  I was wearing a giant pack and gumboots.  Where was I going to go?  We just moved back, away from the calls of the chimps.  I’m embarrassed to say that as we parted ways with the elephants all I could think was, “Shouldn’t I try to go back and follow those chimps?”  I think Adam might have carried me away if I tried though.

We tried to get out of there.  That involved some poor decisions on our point though.  We turned a corner, reached a different trail, and began our silly laughter of relief.  “Can you believe that?!”  “What just happened?!”  “That was crazy!”  We weren’t as safe as we thought just yet though.

With a quick glance at the map, we realized the only other trail to take back was a longer one that took us through the swamp.  We would continue to move down into the valley, back toward camp.  In hindsight, a swamp was a terrible idea.  What do elephants love even more than giant expanses of grassland?  They love the deep, thick, cool mud of a swamp, especially after a fresh rain.  And onward to the swamp we marched.

It was not long before we saw more dung, even fresher this time.  We fell silent again.  No gasps, no cussing, just a point of my finger, and a deafening silence between us.  I have never heard my husband hike that quietly and gracefully.  I heard him step more softly than I ever thought he could.  We had nowhere to go but forward.  We were in the middle of a herd of these beasts, and we just wanted to get home.  There were giant tracks all over.  They created small wading pools all over the swamp.  We were walking over crushed branches and logs.  It made my heart jump into my throat to think of the heavy foot that crumbled these trees beneath it.

I saw urine on the ground – a fresh, smelly, heart-wrenching puddle of elephant pee, right next to my foot.  We began examining the tracks.  Where are the toes?  Which way was this elephant going?  Were we just following it?  That was when I saw different tracks – human tracks.  Our staff had not been on this trail in weeks.  UWA did not maintain this trail.  No tourists came here.  Those tracks could only belong to one kind of person: poachers.  Inside each of the giant elephant feet was a human boot, clearly in close pursuit.  For a second these giant beasts that I was so terrified of seemed so weak and vulnerable to me.  My heart broke for them.  I understood why they would want to trample me.  Oh yes, they want to trample me.  That thought snapped me back into the reality of fleeing this whole day.

We made it out of the swamp.  We made it back to the safe part of the forest.  We didn’t laugh this time.  We didn’t shout.  We just sighed deeply, exhaling two hours of tightly held breaths as we reached out to touch each other on the shoulder.  I nearly fell over from exhaustion as Adam touched my shoulder in the same moment that the adrenaline began to leave my veins.  We collapsed onto the trail.  Both of us were suddenly starving.  For a few minutes we scarfed down chapatis and bananas in silence.  Then we began to talk.  Actually, we began to rant.  Those chimps were so close!  A whole group of them!  We almost had them!  We could have followed them all day!  We knew where they were.  I could shut my eyes and picture them shoving figs into their mouths, rolling them around and spitting out the leftovers, all while we were stuck on this side of the elephants.  The only way to the chimps was through the herd, and we weren’t going back there.  We hiked back to camp with heavy feet and discouraged, downward stares.  We spent the afternoon catching up on data, washing dung for seeds, transferring DNA samples to drying tubes, and jumping every time someone or some animal made a sudden move.  This was by far the strangest Independence Day I’ve ever had.

The Research Begins

Dian Fossey, one of the pioneers of great ape field research, spent nearly six months working on her project before she even saw a single mountain gorilla.  Jane Goodall worked tirelessly for years before her study group of chimpanzees was comfortable enough to let her follow them and watch them closely.  Habituation, the process of acclimating primates to human observers, is possibly the greatest hurdle for any primate research project.  Here at Semliki, habituation has proven to be even more difficult than at most chimpanzee research sites, which says a lot.  The project has been running for over sixteen years, and every time the chimpanzees seem to be nearly habituated some major barrier presents itself, forcing the project to bound back after years and years of slow, arduous progress.  Probably the greatest barrier was theinfiltration of rebel fighters from the DR Congo in the late 1990’s.  Our study community (the Mugiri chimpanzees) watched with terrified eyes through the thick forest foliage as men fought one another with automatic rifles and grenades on the very trails that researchers traversed just weeks before.

No student has ever spent one continuous year at this project before, and no graduate student has attempted to conduct a dissertation on these chimpanzees.  So now here I am, taking on the challenge.  Everyone involved in this project is desperately hoping that the only thing this community really needs to reach full habituation is to have one constant, quiet, determined presence in the forest day after day for a year.  I am desperately hoping that I can be the first to weave a complete story of who these chimpanzees are, where they go, what they eat, how they tap the reserve for the limited resources it holds.  To write this story I’m collecting all of the types of evidence that I can.  When you are studying a population that others have deemed impossible you cannot leave any evidence uncollected.  You cannot assume any clue to be unimportant.  That includes poop.

I collect all of the chimpanzee dung that I can.  A small part of the dung is thoroughly dried and stowed away in a crate for DNA analysis that I will carry out later in Germany at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  The rest of it is immediately washed, sifted, and examined for seeds and other parts of food.  My hope is that eventually, perhaps even years from now after graduate school, I will take some of the dung that I have dried to examine yet another level of evidence: geochemical data.  I can test the dried dung for stable carbon and nitrogen levels to write a story of the types of foods that they eat which cannot always be found in seed form.  More specifically, this means asking whether they eat grasses and sedges, fruits and leaves of trees, or even animal protein like meat from monkeys.  Each time I collect a dung sample, whether I can see the chimpanzee that left it or not, I take a set of coordinates down from the GPS.  Later, when I sequence DNA from each sample, I will be able to write a story of where all of the community members were, whom they traveled with, when they traveled there, and what they were eating at the time.  Also, I can answer questions about who is related to whom in the community.  I can tell stories that go back for decades, all with a few bits of their dung.

This collection of dung is only part of my process of story-telling though.  At the end of each day, my greatest hope is to get some precious time near the chimpanzees.  I want to be close enough to see everything that they do, who they are near, what they are eating.  Every cough, grunt, and sniff of a fruit is an important part of the puzzle that I am putting together.  I need some observations to understand this community the way that people have been trying to for nearly two decades.

Every morning I wake before the sun begins to peek over the escarpment.  The air is still cool and moist.  The cicadas and frogs still sing their nighttime melodies as I move on a stone covered path by the beam of my headlamp from my tent to the communal dining room.  I sip coffee from my thermos and scarf down chapatis and eggs as I gather my supplies: bundles of ethanol-filled tubes, latex gloves, tiny notebooks and pens, and enough water to carry me over miles and miles of treacherous escarpment-weaving trails.  Just as the sun reaches the top of the hills I begin to move through the forest, and my senses shift to tracking mode.  I step carefully and quickly in big black gum boots over the forest floor as my eyes continuously shift from the trees above to the trail below, scanning for knuckle prints, dung beetles, and that ultimate glee of a big, dark shadow of a chimpanzee on a branch.  I smell all around me for dung.  The scents leave me a detailed record of who has been on the trail – colobus monkeys, baboons, buffalo – They all leave a trace that my nose discerns immediately.  Most importantly, I listen.  The forest is full of sounds that flood my brain.  There are countless birds and monkeys and insects shouting their own morning calls at once, but all I want to hear is the unmistakable tone of a chimpanzee pant hooting, grunting, or screaming.  When that call occurs, to my ears it is as if the entire forest goes silent and only one animal exists right then.

Yesterday our ranger, my husband, and myself hiked toward the escarpment quickly and early.  My husband and the ranger found chimps two days earlier in a giant Cynometra tree on a hill while I was stuck at camp recovering from a bout of bronchitis.  I knew that there were fruits of Ficus and Saba there as well, and I hoped with urgency and optimism that another travel party of chimps would return today.  The ranger trailed far behind us, stumbling and mumbling about the steadfast pace.  I refused to slow down though.  I spent four years of graduate school working for these precious hours of observation, and every second we lost getting to that group of chimps was one less second I got of observation before they moved on.  We reached the tree at 8:47, after nearly two hours of my swift-paced hike to the escarpment.

At first it seemed there were no chimps to be found.  The leaves rustled in the breeze, and the chill of the high elevation cooled my sweat-saturated face.  “Here we wait,” I told the ranger.  He let out a deep sigh of relief.  I unbuckled my pack, shoved my wet, dirty curls out of my eyes, and slumped into a heap on the trail at the top of a hill.  Then it happened.  Just over my head sat a large, dark shadow, and it started to move.  Just as Adam dropped his own pack he caught the excitement in my eyes, and his own gaze immediately followed mine to the tree.  It was a chimp!

Rule number one of habituating chimpanzees: Do whatever you can in the first five minutes that you find them to not scare them away.  My first reaction was to instinctively jump back to my feet, then dive back down into a crouched, submissive form.  I grabbed for leaves, tore them, sniffed them, pretending to munch away.  Adam followed my cue.  I made soft noises.  (It is best to let the chimps know that you are not trying to hide from them, but you are not going to disturb them either.)  In between sniffs of leaves and fruit I snuck glances above.  This chimp was intrigued – perfect!  He stared down at me, moving in for a better look, perhaps wondering what sort of leaves this strange creature eats.  After a few minutes he seemed bored enough with me and sat in a branch above, where he could keep one eye on me, and the other on his fresh Saba fruit-feast. 

That was when I began to use my binoculars to get a better look, and as it turns out, I knew this chimp very well.  Two years ago I spent two months at this site to conduct my pilot study, and when I met Hunter at that time he was still a juvenile, just becoming a sub-adult male.  He was starting to spend less and less time with his mother, and more time roving around the forest with adult males.  Hunter was a tough male to forget.  I was shocked the day I first saw him, screaming and carrying on, swinging through the trees, because I quickly realized that this swinging chimp was missing one of his hands.  We think that Hunter probably lost one hand to a poacher snare.  We fight a constant battle with poachers in this reserve, and it is likely that if this project wasn’t here then no one else would deter them.  Hunter probably got caught in a snare that was meant for a cob.  He was lucky though, because most chimps that face this fate find their death.  Hunter got away with one hand, and here he was: two years later, now a thriving sub adult male, stealing glances at me between mouthfuls of Saba fruit.

It was clear within minutes that Hunter wasn’t alone.  Further back, in a large Cynometra tree, I saw a giant huddle of chimpanzee body parts.  I searched through my binoculars as hard as I could to try to make out just how many individuals were grooming one another. Hunter was the lone male in this party.  Traveling with him were two adult females, both with infants.  Neither of these females seemed to match any of the descriptions in my list of community chimps, so we do not yet have new names for them (see below).  One female’s infant was getting pretty old.  He/she spent most of those hours riding ventrally on mom, clinging to tuffs of her hair with tiny vice-grip fingers.  After I was there for a while he got brave and began to move on his own though, shakily moving across branches and hanging by one wiry, uneasy arm.  The other female held an infant so tiny that his/her little eyes only struggled to open after I had been with the group for over two hours.  This infant did not have the same vice grip fingers as the other yet.  He reached with one little hand to attempt a clasp on his mother’s hair, but still she had to clutch him tightly and steadily, constantly reaching to secure his weak little neck with her other hand.  The older infant moved precariously from the clutch of his mother to the arms of a juvenile nearby.  The juvenile received the infant warmly, engaging in a gentle game of hang-and grapple, catching the shaky infant each time his tiny arm gave out.  A second juvenile sat near the females, stuffing his mouth with figs.

This group let Adam and I sit within 10-20 meters of them, us completely captivated, them mostly uninterested (except Hunter, who seemed quite curious) for two hours and forty-five minutes.  Just before they dropped down to the river and then scrambled up and over the escarpment, away from the trail, one of the juveniles left a gift for me.  As soon as I saw the poop drop from the branch down to the floor I nearly leapt with joy.  They moved on, and I rushed to the forest floor, sniffing and scrambling on the side of a steep cliff, determined to find at least a speck of that dung for some precious juvenile-DNA.  When I smelled the dung I knew I was close.  I tried to grip rocks and trees and keep myself from falling over the edge as I began to search leaf surfaces.  The dung had splattered all over layers upon layers of foliage and never reached the ground, but I managed to find enough pieces to carefully slide them into my tube of ethanol.  Adam took a GPS point, and we struggled back up the cliff face to the trail, beaming with pride after a successful day.

Note: We may be searching for names for one or two of these females now.  If you are interested in the opportunity to name a chimpanzee from the Semliki Chimpanzee Project, please see ourwebsite.  The project works as a non-profit organization, and donations support staff, camp and trail maintenance, and ultimately the survival of this community.  In exchange for a donation, you can name these adult females.

Goodbye Kampala, Hello Entebbe.

Entebbe is so close to Kampala, yet it seems a world away.  The drive is barely 30-40 km.  It can take anywhere from a brief hour of travel time to a grueling four hours, depending on the infamous traffic of Kampala.  Yesterday it only took me an hour.  I began in the dirty, smog filled Kampala.  I’ve been there for nearly a week now, enjoying luxurious meals and fast internet while trying to cope with the buzzing traffic of people, cars, bicycles, and motorcycles without losing my patience.  My Nile-induced sinus infection has been lingering in the smog, red dirt filled air of the city, and my ears have been ringing with the sounds of shouting, honking horns, and screeching brakes.  After two months in the field and two days on the Nile River, bustling, restaurant-rich Kampala was a thrill.  By yesterday, however, this thrill had long faded, and I was ready for Entebbe.

I awoke from another sleepless night and lay awake under my mosquito net for a few extra minutes that morning.  I listened to the clanging dishes in the restaurant downstairs and the singing of the hotel maids as they scrubbed the hallway floors.  I could already hear horns honking and boda drivers shouting on the street below when I decided it was time to peel back my net and stumble out of my room and into the shower.  The showerhead was not working, no surprise, so I tried to duck under the cold water rushing from the faucet to give my hair a quick wash.  I threw on a skirt and a gray t-shirt and made my way down the steep staircase and into the bright sunlight of busy DeWinton road.  Boda drivers immediately kicked on engines and flooded towards me, honking, slapping seats, and shouting, “Mzungu! Where to! Let us go!”  Staring forward, I kept marching down the road and towards my usual café, where I spent the next several hours enjoying internet, reading, and sucking down my giant latte.

A few hours later, when I’d packed my bags (something I’ve become very good at) and went to the desk to check out, the hostess gave me a shocked look when I replied to her usual question of “where to next, Ah-lee-see-ah?” with Entebbe, then the USA!  “You will not return?”  She looked a bit hurt, so I reassured her that one day next year I would be back.  I walked downstairs and stared up and down the street at the available cabs waiting, trying to place my bets on which would be the safest, fastest, and least likely to try to rip me off.  I picked an old, beat up Toyota and asked the driver how much one should pay to go to Entebbe.  This is my usual test to see just how reliable and honest the man is.  He gave me my fair price, so we loaded my luggage and were off.  Within minutes I knew I’d made the right choice.  He had a sticker for a private Muslim school for girls on his dash (probably where his daughter goes) and reached below his seat to un-crumple a traditional Muslim cap and smooth it onto his head.  I thought of a conversation with my friend Will about how Muslim drivers are the best score in Africa.  Because Muslims are forbidden to drink, they are the least likely to drive you around while intoxicated.  Score.

I tried to appreciate my last few minutes in Kampala, to feel nostalgic about leaving the city, but I could find nothing but relief to leave the noise, the smell, and the constant madness.  An hour later, I felt like I was a world away in the tourist-rich, relaxed city of Entebbe.

Entebbe sits right on Lake Victoria, and is the location of the only major and international airport in Uganda.  This makes it an odd mix of tourists-meet-traditional-lakeside-African-culture.  I spent a bit of time on the other side of Lake Victoria when I was in Kenya, and found some similarities.  The lakeshores are beach-like, with sand and pretty birds.  Here in Entebbe the shores are littered with hotels, resorts, and small bars for tourists.  Local teenagers fill the beaches and water in the afternoons, swimming, flirting, and making noise like teenagers do.  The villages are rural African-like, with grass thatch and tin roofed houses, barefoot, half dressed children, and women in their layers of bright, mismatched fabrics.  The main road into Entebbe is amazing for East Africa with its pavement and painted lines, but every side street is the typical red mud, rocky road that I have seen elsewhere.  Like I said, an odd mix.

It is a good place to reflect though.  Some people like to spend their first few days here, but I prefer to toss myself headfirst into Africa, then spend my last few days in this resting place reflecting on my adventures and experiences, examining whether I’ve changed at all (in more ways than those usual, extra few starch-induced pounds, that is).

I’m staying at the zoo.  I read in my guidebook that you could stay at the very simple, yet safe hostel here for only $10 per night, and I loved the idea of sleeping at a zoo.  I spent just about every weekend in college leading overnight tours of the Pittsburgh Zoo, and sleeping there became a familiar, comforting thing for me.  So here I am, sleeping at a zoo in Uganda for my last few days in the country.  What I am calling a zoo is officially known as the Wildlife Education Center, and is a world-renown wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center.  Most of the animals at the zoo have been rescued from poachers or confiscated from the black-market pet trade.  It’s amazingly clean and well maintained for an African park, and I feel good giving my hostel money to help maintain their work.  My room is basic, but much larger than what I had in Kampala.  The hostel is empty enough that they gave me a free upgrade to a private room with two twin beds, two windows, and a desk.  Like my hotel in Kampala, there are communal bathrooms/showers in an outbuilding.  Hot water is unavailable, but the showerheads actually work and the toilets flush.  Best of all, I went to sleep with the sound of lions, and I awoke to the sound of screaming chimpanzees.  When I stumbled out my door toward the bathroom I heard vervet monkeys in the trees next to my window and instantly felt at home.  Yes, a good place for reflection indeed.

So here I am.  My last full day in Africa, again.  My flight leaves tomorrow evening, and all I have planned for today is writing, reading, sitting, eating, and reading more.  The zoo is close to a fancy hotel with a lovely café on the porch, and I’ve been walking back and forth here for meals down a red clay road where two tiny girls in bare feet shout “howareyou! howareyou!” from shy, beaming smiles each time I walk past them.  There is a beach within the zoo, and there is a chimpanzee exhibit where I plan to sit for at least an hour.  So begins my day of reflection, and my final step of departure.

Sanyu Babies Home

I knew I was apprehensive about visiting the orphanage.  It was something, for some reason, I felt I needed to do, but I also knew it would have strong emotional effects, whatever those may be.  “Spending time at a place like that will force you to focus on everything but yourself,” my mother kept telling me over the phone, “you really should give it a try.”  I love children, and I prefer to experience as many sides of a place that I visit as I can so that I can feel like I almost know the place when I leave.  The intense poverty that East Africa faces leaves countless babies and children without homes, and it is a side of the place I am in that I could never ignore.  Still, I knew I was putting off the visit.

One day, finally, I hopped on a boda and made my way towards the Sanyu Babies Home.  It is a Catholic orphanage that houses abandoned or mistreated babies from one day old to four years old.  After that the children are either adopted or sent to other orphanages.  I had a brief meeting with the administrator in which she asked a few questions about my background, then how long I’d be staying in Kampala.  Then she told me the best times for me to come would be the next evening from 3:30-7:00 and Saturday morning from 8:00-1:00.  I was instructed to bring my documents for photocopying.

The documents were never photocopied the when I arrived the next day.  When I went into the administration office with my passport I was told to wait outside.  The secretary would be right with me.  Just outside the offices is a large pavilion with a grass thatch roof and picnic tables.  I was going to sit in here and read while I waited, but today there were balloons hung and a large cake in the center of the table.  Everyone was sitting around as though they were waiting for a birthday party to start.  In true American fashion, not wanting to intrude, I walked down the walkway and a set of stairs to sit on a cement wall and read my book while I waited.  This did not last long.  If there is one thing I have learned over the last 24 hours it is that these children do not wait for you to come to them.  They are not shy or polite or discriminatory when choosing whom to love.  That is not what life as an orphan does to these babies.

After I’d been reading for about five minutes a little boy of about four years old caught me from the corner of his eye and his tiny, snot covered face unfolded into a beaming smile as his hand began violently waving in my direction.  “HELLO! HELLO!” he began shouting as his short, wobbly legs began running towards me, his uneasy body teetering above.  I didn’t even have a moment to recognize that this child was coming towards me.  He just came running, jumping into my space, throwing his wiry arms around me until his hands clenched onto the back of my shirt like robot fingers.  His head was buried in my lap and he was mumbling in half Swahili-half English about my name and his name and what I was reading.  Within seconds I was surrounded by toddlers, tiny fists clenched to my skirt and my shirt, scrawny arms and legs reaching up and grabbing my hair and climbing into my lap.  I had no idea how to react.  I looked around to the adults for some guidance, but they all seemed completely unfazed by the display, distracted by other babies and toddlers in laps and arms and on the floor.  Another little boy with droopy cross eyes and a roly-poly belly latched onto my hand and started pulling me, “COME! COME!” he said in muffled English.  And that was my introduction.  No, “here are the children, here is where we work, here is what you will be doing.”  No, “what is your name? where are you from?”  No one ever asked me anything, the children just pulled me in and sat me down at the party.  Soon another volunteer handed me a baby, “You don’t have any baby in your arms,” she said, “and I need to go do something so hold Sylvester.”  Then she added, as an aside, “oh, and they were out of diapers so he’s not wearing one.  Sorry!”

The party happened to be for a little girl that had just been adopted.  What an introduction to the place.  I could tell instantly which girl it was.  She had braids weaved into her hair and this brand-new, nicely pressed hot pink dress with rhinestones on it.  All of the other children were covered in old food, dirt and snot.  They were wearing mismatched clothes of every size and wear.  Boys were in girls shirts and boys shorts.  Everyone had closely shaved hair.  There were babies with skin problems, poor eyes, babies that looked emaciated, some that were chubby.  Some had signs of parasite infestation, others looked perfectly healthy.  All of them had a distinct odor of urine, feces, puke, old food, and general mustiness of poorly dried clothing, and every one of them smiled back at you when you made eye contact with them.

The party began when the giant drums were brought out.  I’ve seen them in gift shops, but never seen them used.  The drums are just what you’d picture, large enough to reach the seat of a chair when set on the floor, covered in cowhide, and incredibly loud.  A couple of women sat down and drums and began playing.  The beat felt immediately familiar to me, and set little toddlers’ hips into swinging motion.  Then the words began and I felt a chill spread over my body, beginning at the bottom of my spine and tingling to the tips of my fingers.  It was the same song I’d sung over and over again at church camp when I was young.  Everyone know it and began clapping and swaying along, and the older babies tried to sing along.  The scene felt so oddly familiar yet shockingly African all at once.  All of these tattered bruised babies swaying to the same song that I did as a child, clapping and smiling all the while as I always did.

The party was scheduled in honor of one little girl’s adoption, but was also being celebrated for a four-month old infant that looked as if she was a premature baby born yesterday.  She’d just come home from the hospital the day before, and they were rejoicing at her improving condition and increased weight.  Increased!  This girl looked so frail and thin to me that she seemed not even alive, not even human.  Yet she was a girl, a living, breathing, feeling girl that had been abandoned and left to starve in the cold night.  Looking at her then, I could not believe she’d survived, or that she’d been worse when she first arrived.  In three days she was scheduled to return to the hospital for surgery, what for no one mentioned.  I could not help but wonder what a fight a child of this size must have when entering surgery.

You might think an orphanage is a fun place to be, an uplifting experience, but I am not going to lie and say that it was any of these things for me.  It was eye opening.  Uncomfortably, hauntingly, disturbingly eye opening.  Over the next several hours I tried to help, but I felt like I was wondering around looking dumfounded, lost, and silly.  Children were constantly crying.  Crying, fighting, falling, escaping, peeing, pooping.  There were so many babies (49 to be exact) and so few adults that it seemed a child stood no chance of ever really being noticed each day, and it was clear that being noticed was the only thing that any one of them desired in this world.  When one of my nephews wants to hug or cuddle the moment always seems fleeting.  They reach out for brief affection before running off to play and test their own independence.  Not these children.  They crave adult connection, interaction, and affection like nothing I have ever witnessed before.  If a child’s little robot fingers latch on to any part of my body or clothes, there is no prying those little hands open, no separating yourself from the child.  Everywhere I stepped there were little hands reaching up to me, begging to be lifted or hugged.  It was overwhelming, and that seems like such an inadequate way to even describe the feeling.

I’d been sitting at the party with little diaper-less Sylvester in my lap for thirty or so minutes when a sudden warm shock spread over my leg then dribbled down my ankle.  Yep, I got peed on.  I picked him up and held him out in front of me, looking around for any giggles or guidance as to what I should do, but no one seemed the slightest bit shocked or concerned by the moment.  I quickly rose in my pee-soaked skirt and rushed Sylvester into the nearest building, searching for a changing room.  Eventually I managed to find someone who showed me how to use a towel to form a makeshift diaper around him before I rinsed my own leg and returned to the party.  These children sure do know how to initiate someone.

After several hours of playtime it was dinnertime.  Women started grabbing babies and carrying them in by the handful.  I was ordered to grab a baby and move to the back of the orphanage in a dark room with tiny tray-chairs everywhere.  There were benches, individual tray chairs, and one long bench with a tray in front.  Not a single seat was left empty.  Babies were filed in and plopped down in their proper spot as a large mama in the center of the room filled bowls with rice, chicken stew, and avocadoes.  She shoved a bowl of food and a spoon in my hand and pointed to a row of babies, then kept shoveling.  The food was piping hot, and I was afraid to put it in a baby’s mouth, but most of them were all screaming for food at once.  Speaking of screaming, you have never heard the sound of chaos until you have been in a single room with 49 babies waiting to be fed all at once.  It is a deafening, disturbing sound that I cannot even describe here, and I hate when words fail me like that.  The crying was so intense that I could not sleep that night.  Every time I tried to shut my eyes I swore I heard the sound of more babies crying.  I stood there, amidst this deafening sound that was just a part of each day for everyone else there, and tried to shovel food into babies mouths, moving up and down the row as I gave each baby a spoonful.  I watched as rice ran down mouths and into laps, trying to monitor as closely as I could which babies were getting enough to eat.  It seemed an impossible task though.  Soon enough a nurse was grabbing the bowl of food from my hand and shoving a hot bottle of what smelled like a flour-water mixture into each of my hands.  I held bottles to mouths as best I could, trying to minimize choking and liquid running down chins and faces, but they were all just a mess by the time everyone started grabbing babies and heading into the changing room.

Once again, I tried to keep up, grabbing a soaking wet, porridge covered, screaming little baby from its seat.  I carried him into the next room, where there were piles of clothes in the middle of the floor, all sizes and types mixed together.  Two changing tables to the right were being loaded up with rows of three screaming babies to each.  The toddlers were in the attached room, all lined up on plastic training potties, faces still covered in dried rice stew and dark little feet caked in red mud from the day’s play session.  Women were scrambling back and forth, stripping toddlers, wiping down babies, grabbing for random articles of clothing.  A large-hipped, shaved head woman with a commanding presence pointed to me and then to the changing table full of babies.  I tried to gather my thoughts as best as I could, jumped in next to a few others, and started changing diapers as best I could, throwing random clothes onto random babies.  I wiped all of the caked-on grime from their little mouths and chins.  All the while, I was feeling more and more dizzy, almost ill even.  I knew I wasn’t sick.  My mind was just running out of space to deal with all of the noises, and smells, and heart wrenching realities being thrown at me at once.

As I finished with each baby, I tried to find his or her bed.  Nurses would point to one of the three rooms full of cribs and say something like “Briana” or “Norman.”  I wandered around until I thought I’d found the right crib, then placed this tiny, tired mass into it and gentled lowered their cocoon of a mosquito net over the bed.  No good night story, no coddling or cradling or whispers of “I love you,” like so many babies in this world get every night.  Just feed, wipe, change, plop in bed, and they all went to sleep immediately.  They expected no more from an adult than this.

The next day was a similar scenario.  Crying, screaming drama.  I arrived early enough to help with all of the waking routines.  Women were handing me wet, freshly bathed babies and sending me into the next room to rub their African skin with cream then dress them.  This was the first time I realized just how frail some of their little bodies were.  A little girl was shoved into my arms and the weightlessness instantly shocked me.  She felt like nothing, yet the intense focus of her chestnut eyes told me the child was much older than she felt.  As I rubbed the cream down over her smiling face, under her bony chin, and down to her arm, there it was, a strip of gauze wound around a plastic catheter insert.  The catheter barely fit into her wiry arm that was nothing but infant bones and a paper thin layer of dark skin.  The image shocked me.  I paused from my robot-like routine and removed my hands from her, suddenly acutely aware of my own strength and worried I might break her.  Sunken chestnut eyes stared back up at me, begging for more touch and interaction.  It took me nearly 15 minutes to pull a sleeve over her poor fragile arm, and I fought back the lump that rose in my throat.  I did not even want to wonder what this girl’s story is.

That’s just the thing.  You try not to wonder what each child’s story is, but you know there is a powerful one behind each set of eyes.  You know that each of these babies have endured things that most adults are not strong enough to consider.  Yet they forgive the world for this pain.  They accept it.  They know nothing else but to cling to the hope that someone will pay attention to them, show them affection, give them a few basic daily needs.  What else could a baby do or know?

Later that day I was holding a baby that I realized was in desperate need of a change.  This seems the most basic daily need for a baby.  I carried him back to the changing room, only to realize there were no diapers around.  No pampers, and no cloth nappies or towels.  I went into the nearest administrator’s office and asked where the supply was.  She gave me an annoyed glance, then stared back down at her desk and replied, “I gave you the last one an hour ago.”  I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to do then, so I kept pushing, “so should I just wait?  Or should I go somewhere to get more?”  “There are no more,” was all she kept replying, then finally gave me a look that read, you can leave my office now.  I went back to the changing room and stood over this baby in a dirtied diaper, face covered in dried food, eyes seeping tears, and felt completely helpless.  Completely and utterly helpless, that’s what this feeling for the last 24 hours has been, I thought.  I did not know what to do.  I did not know what to do about this baby with no clean diapers.  What to do about this place that needed so much.  What to do with the realization that this was one of thousands of such places, and that thousands more babies existed on the streets in far worse conditions.  What to do?

I honestly have no idea.  I left that day with a heavy heart, feeling completely drained, dismayed, and yet grateful that I’d forced myself to confront this side of my beloved East Africa.  I’ve decided sometimes that’s all we can do.  We can confront an issue.  Confront it, acknowledge the complicated manner, and hope that when the chance arises you will have fostered the compassion needed to do something.  It may sound like a cop-out or a way for me to cope with the troubling issues that I encountered, but the human mind is usually compelled to resolve such conflicts somehow.  This is my temporary resolution.  Head-on confrontation.  I know some of those haunting moments will never leave me, and I am thankful for that.  Haunting moments are what motivate action.

It's good to see you again, Solitude.

I am lucky to have a career that constantly provides me both intellectual and personal transformation.  Each trip to the field leaves me with a greater understanding of my subjects and countless new research questions, but it also leaves me a different person each time.  Or maybe it leaves me the same person, but always reveals something about myself of which I was never aware.  Either way, I never seem to realize anything has changed until the end, and I think that realization came yesterday.

I had one of those quiet, no-plan days that you can only really enjoy when you are traveling on your own.  The last week I spent traveling with one of the interns from the site before seeing him off to the US.  While this was fun, it was the first time I’d really traveled in another country with someone else, and I realized that I find it more challenging than I’d ever expected.  I knew I was fairly independent, but I did not realize until I was surrounded by other people 24/7 all summer just how much I value solitude.  When I tried to tell my mother and my boyfriend about this, they weren’t at all surprised.  I guess it is something that everyone else was aware of but me.  Either way, I’m trying to revel in some solitude now.

Perhaps the problem that I had with this desire in the past was that it conflicted with this idea I got from somewhere that being seen alone certain places was something to be ashamed of.  I never realized how much I felt this way until yesterday.  To say it out loud seems silly, but how many of us feel someone would only go out to eat or to a movie alone because they are forced to, and how often would we feel sorry for them?  I’ve done these sorts of things on my own a lot before, maybe even more than the average person.  I’ve moved places on my own, and I always spend those first few months going places all alone, but after that, I never really do.  And when I was in Nairobi alone, or even Kampala at the start of this summer, I spent evenings locking myself up in my room, sadly waiting for the morning to come and missing my life back home or in the forest. I think a part of me has always been afraid to really enjoy the comfort of this solitude rather than just accept and submit to it.  When the solitude was no longer an option, however, I began to crave it.  So yesterday, perhaps for the first time, I made the decision to really enjoy it.

After running some errands in the morning (doing one thing in Uganda always seems to take at least twice as long as expected) I treated myself to lunch.  After that, a movie.  When my advisor suggested months ago that I try seeing a movie, I was skeptical.  Why go to a movie theater in Uganda when I can spend my money sitting in a digital, sound-enhanced theater back in the US?  I’ve discovered, however, that when one of those moments where I just feel completely overwhelmed by Africa and can’t take another cultural complexity, sitting in a dark theater and watching an American-made film will make me forget everything, including where I am.  So when the café was too crowded, the internet was not working, the boda drivers were harassing me more than usual, children were staring, I threw up my hands and said, “it’s time for a movie.”  I drug my tired dusty feet into the middle of the empty, dark theater and plopped my heavy, tattered pack in the seat beside me.  The silence, the darkness, the absence of anyone staring at me or harassing me, all of it just elicited the biggest sigh of relief that I have felt in weeks.  As the picture started (of course 15 minutes after the scheduled time), I felt my tired traveler-body sink deep into the chair and my mind left Africa for a solid two hours.  I had no other person to focus on, and it felt so great to be so alone with the characters on the screen.

After the movie I decided that I needed more spoiling.  Last week when I was with my friend we went to dinner at a fancy Indian restaurant with another American researcher living in Uganda.  It was the best Indian food I’d ever tasted, and the restaurant was beautiful.  I’d already taken a trip to the US that day, so why not take a trip to upscale India?  I had a few phone numbers of other mzungus in the area that I could call if I felt desperate for human companionship, but I decided I wanted to revel in this food experience all by myself.  I went back to my hotel and put on the new dress I’d just had made for me.  I was saving it for a special occasion, to really impress someone.  I decided tonight that I needed to impress myself more than anyone.  I put it on, added some nice make-up and my new earrings, and was out the door.  Should I take a boda-boda?  No way, I was taking myself out on a date.  I splurged on a taxi to the restaurant (a whopping $5 fee).

I arrived at the restaurant a little after 6:00, only to discover they don’t open until 7:00 (seriously, Uganda?).  This left me with a great opportunity to sip a girly drink and read my book at the bar next door.  An hour later, I was at my restaurant, and I hesitated when the staff had to ask me three times, “someone else will be joining you then?”  I almost felt a twinge of embarrassment wash over me when I said, “no, just me,” but I paused to push this feeling back.  Then I realized that this should be flattering.  These people were having a difficult time believing that this young woman would ever have trouble finding someone to take her to dinner, or that’s what I decided to tell myself.  After all, most of the world refuses to acknowledge that someone might choose solitude over the company of others.  This thought made me smile, and it made me proud of this new, more confident me.

So I sat with my book and ordered a full meal.  I should take this moment to mention that I have spent two months eating nothing but starch and beans, literally.  Indian food is some of the most diverse, flavorful, rich food that there is in the world, and it was just what my tired taste buds were screaming for.  It was the greatest experience of this trip to Kampala.  I did not have to share my naan!  I did not have to rush through my meal, to conceal how much of it I was eating (the whole thing, of course!).  I savored every bite, focusing in on the beautiful food in front of me and the sheer pleasure that eating gives me.  Food is, after all, the only thing I love more than running.  The pleasure that food like this can give one is far too good to be diminished by the distraction of conversation building.  Guilt-free, food-induced solitary pleasure.  Naan-dipping, flavor-bursting, finger-licking food pleasure.  That was my evening.  After I ate I decided to savor the moment and the atmosphere by reading alone at my table for a while.  Why rush out on an evening like this?  When the taxi dropped me off at my door I decided I was not ready to give up on my evening of gluttony.  I slipped into the small market next door and bought a Cadbury chocolate bar.  After rushing to my room and into my pajamas, I sat down to my DVD full of pirated chick-flick movies that I’d bought on the street and reveled in my gluttonous finale to the night: chocolate and bad romantic comedy