tuesday, Aug. 4

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Woke up this morning with my hair was stuck on the Velcro of my sleeping bag. I spent about 30 minutes (6-6:30) laying there slowly trying to pull it apart with totally ripping my hair out. I think I did an okay job, no one has come up to me this morning to ask what the hell happened to my hair.
We are now sitting on the truck because the workers are fixing the roof over where we were working yesterday.

Jess and I met up with Lucy and Katie for lunch at the café instead of eating yet another vegetable sandwich. Jess and I both wanted to order the Fried Chicken, but when we did they asked how long we had because they would have to go slaughter the chicken first. This deterred us rather quickly. Yes, we are carnivore but when the killing the animal just for your lunch it’s much easier to be a vegetarian. So we stuck to the fish stick (yes, not veg but we didn’t have to hear a chicken die behind the café). Ordering food in Africa is a very slow process, we asked how long it would take and they said 30 minutes actually they said “African 30 minutes” which turned out to be 2 hours.

After that Lucy and I sat around waiting for our work to be approved that we gathered from our time in Entebbe but that never happened. Instead around 3, Lucy, Laurence, and I went and had an anthropology meeting up at the café to discuss his MPhil that he is working on and wants us to do research for him when we arrive at the school on Thursday. The school has won 100 XO laptops (check out www.laptop.org to learn more about the idea) and Laurence is studying if digital media can help Africa using the XO laptop as a case study. The education team and web team are making games to go onto the laptops to teach the kids about primate conservation. After that meeting, Lucy and I had a meeting with Alasdair to teach us how to put up new stuff and create the anthropology/research page for the new website. I really can’t stress enough how much you all should go check out the new website, it is so much better than the last one (www.primatehandshake.org). We are posting new stuff throughout the day almost everyday. Jess is updating with her blogs and they are great especially mixed in with her professional pictures!

We then had dinner and then began a showcase so the volunteers could see what all the other volunteers have been working on the last two weeks (yes it has been two weeks now)! The web team started first showing off the new website, then went onto show the games they have started to design for the XO laptop, and finally some of the amazing pictures Jessica had taken of the trip. The focus then went to the Anthropology team where Lucy and I showed our lovely pie charts showing the results of all the surveys we collected from visitors and discussed some of the interviews we had with local community leaders. After that education showed the projects they were working on which was an educational video about snare/man traps and a powerpoint UWEC will be using when school groups come to visit the center. Last but not least, we got to see the Video team videos. Some of their were still rough cuts but we got the idea. That have already got about 6 completed. They really are amazing and their topics range from snares to introductory films for JGI, Ngamba Island, and UWEC that they can use on their website or in schools. It was very nice to finally see what exactly everyone has been working on because usually we are all just slaving away over our laptops and no one really knows what everyone else is doing.

By the time the showcase was done it was 11 and we all needed to get some sleep as we were needed to be up by 6am.