Monday, August 4th

NOTE: I write this blog throughout the day so my tense is probably different in every paragraph (and I’m not even going to talk about my grammar). I hope it’s not too painful to read.

Monday

As of today we have to start waking up and have breakfast ready by 7am. This is so we can get more work hours in the day. Since we are working off a generator we only have it running during the daytime hours so the noise doesn’t bother the other visitors of Chimp’s Nest.

I do have some very frustrating news to report! They didn’t pre-book our chimp trekking expedition and now they are fully booked!!! WE are PISSED (especially the primatologists/ anthropologists of the group)!!! They keep saying they are still going to try and get us in but they don’t understand the laws. They can’t just add more people to the trek if they want to, legally parks are only allowing so many people a day to see chimps in the wild. That’s why you have to book them ahead of time. GRRRRR, I’m so mad!!! I would have booked it before I came if I knew they didn’t have it organized like that led us to believe. I’m so frustrated about it! However, I did talk to Gaynor today and told her that I need to be on top of the waiting list if they have any drop outs, but I doubt it is going to happen. Okay, I just have to stop talking about it or I am just going to get madder. SOOOOOO MAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I shake my fist in disgust!

The ants are marching more than two by two! Jessica was hanging up her laundry on the clothes line when I heard a scream. There was a mountain of ants going across the trail and they started to climb up her pants biting her along the way. Their bites are so painful and they are so big. Throughout the day you hear people batting at their clothes yelling to get the ants off of them. I did my laundry as well today and I am definitely not good at it. It’s pretty impossible to get all the red dirt that is engrained into all your clothes here, so mainly I am just doing it to get a bit of soap smell on my clothes instead of my own stench. My sweatshirt just absorbed all the water I was using to wash my clothes and no matter how much I try and ring it out more water just drips out of it. I imagine that particular item will be hanging on the line for a few days. The only problem is that it has rained the last two nights here so hard to keep stuff on the line all the time. That being said I don’t mind it because there is just so nice about camping on the outskirts of a rainforest falling asleep to the rain hitting your tent. So very relaxing!

This afternoon Lucy and I are just typing up our notes from all our interviews and doing some stats on our surveys we did at UWEC. Yea for stats!!! Most of you know just how much I love stats. Lucy seems to be just as enthusiastic as I am for stats, so in other words….we be screwed.

During cooking dinner we started to hear thunder and soon after it started to rain. We threw on our raincoats and put up a tarp on the side of the tent so the cook group could continue cooking. After dinner we had a group meeting to discuss the next few days plans. Tuesday will be just another work day around camp, Wednesday we get to go into Kibale Forest and go on a nature walk and meet up with the organizations we are going to be helping out. They said there have been a lot of cancelations recently because the economic crunch so hopefully something will come up in the next few days so I can get with one of the groups. I’m still so mad about the whole thing, but I am trying to put on a good face.

After dinner we went up to the bar and had dessert, chocolate crepes. They were disgusting, they literally tasted liked an apple flavored gummy worms. It was quite impressive actually that they could make a crepe taste like that. That being said, I stuck to my Tusker beer, then took a very hot shower and off to bed.