Day 3, nighttime:
Veronica is cutting Kendra’s hair with a pair of paper scissors, a Swiss army knife, and a headlamp. K-pop screams in the background. Life without wifi.
Today was a lovely mess of sun, stretched muscles, and learning on the fly. At 9 am we started class with a hike to a nearby kopi, (sp?), basically a series of precariously balanced boulders. They aren’t actually, they’ve been in this formation for millions of years. But the valley around us has dropped around them, and so we sit, high above the Savannah, able to see all the way to Mt. Kenya twenty miles away.
While we sit, Dr. Martins, our professor, tells us about the history of the land and current conservation efforts. I am learning that our ecosystem is an extraordinarily delicate chain of interlocking life forms. Take away one, and the others crash, overwhelming each other to compensate for the loss. I am struck by the extraordinary nature of our earth, and time and time again I feel a sharp shock of pain when I am reminded what human impact has done in the last 100 years alone to harm it.
Science, I am learning, in my non-STEM student naive wonder, is quite similar to art. We walk around this world, eyes wide with curiosity, asking as many questions as we can about the life in which we live. Art, I think, does the same thing. I am grateful, actually, to be coming into this program with this perspective. I haven’t really taken a science class since high school, and these courses are a gift. I am learning to see the world anew. I absorb our classes and readings with this childlike wonder. The details being revealed are like a veil being removed to see new colors.
While Dr. Martins lectures, his two dogs, Du-du and Bora-Bora, sit in my lap. When I move to pet one, the other whimpers. I cannot stop giggling. Du-du keeps licking my face. I try to stay quiet, a serious science student, but I am on the top of a mountain with a dog licking my face, and the wind in my hair. C’est la vie, apparently.
After the lecture, I climb to the absolute tippy top of the structure, staring out into the Savannah. Alone, I feel like air, or sunshine, a part of something unseeable and free. In the distance, I can see giraffe walking along the ridge, behind me, somebody exclaims after finding an elephant herd through their binoculars.
Later, I went to the gym with Auset. We turned on music and just danced.
I can hear a hyena outside. Yesterday morning, on my early morning walk, I found leopard and hyena prints. I see this leopard’s prints everywhere. He’s the big male, and he has an extra toe. I feel like a tracker, but actually, in the mud, his prints are obvious.
The effects of climate change are lovely but upsetting. The rains have come at the wrong time, and the landscape is green and flush. But their early arrival means a longer dry season, and therefore, a longer drought. The small shift throws the entire system slightly off, and things will start to go wrong in a chain reaction.
Yesterday, we learned about Mpala’s ranching efforts. They herd camel, goats, and sheep here to sell the milk and meat. Many of the research efforts here are devoted to finding out how livestock and wild animals can coexist on the same land without harming their environments or each other. Right and wrong make no sense, when the obvious answer to fixing the ecosystem is removing human presence and existence. That’s not going to happen... so as scientists work and climate change progresses the answers become more and more complex. Often, different experiments lead to unexpected outcomes. Some are useful. Today we also went to visit KLEE (the Kenya Longterm Exclosure Experiment) in which (in basic terms) researchers are trying to see the effect of different variables on the environment. I.e…no mega-fauna (giraffes, elephants) but yes to cattle and other wild animals, or no cattle and all fauna, or no fauna, or everything…etc. The experiment has about twenty two hundred square meter plots to test this. The results are fascinating.
It’s only day three…but I am no longer supremely intimidated by the science here. Instead, I am simply excited to learn.
As I finish this post, it is morning. The mountains in the distance are covered by an early morning fog. Guinea fowl bicker at each other in the distance, and dik-dik hop through the trees in a serene sort of panic. The day will begin with another hike, and we'll go from there.
-Carolyn