I Like Cows

When I was at Maasai Mara, one of the women I was with was telling a story about her 5 year old cousin who lives in Uganda. She had control over a camera on some vacation that her family took, to places where you can see giraffes, lions, elephants, zebras and other exciting animals. When they got back and she showed her pictures to everyone, they were mostly of cows, because they are her favorite animal. It's hard to believe that someone would find cows more exciting and photo-worthy than the wildlife in this part of Africa, but I can definitely understand why she likes cows. Last year at Mpala I was so frustrated by the fact that I couldn't get close to any of the enormous amount of wildlife that we saw, so when I had the opportunity to play with a dog or pet a cow I was super excited. Yes, that happened less frequently than seeing exotic wildlife.

Today I had a great time out in the field for the training session. We arranged for a man named Julius who works for a study that we are collaborating with to come up and teach our animal health assistants about how to take certain samples including how to make, stain, and read blood smear slides. I loved getting to interact with the cows, and learning some clinical skills. One of the cows was super friendly with Darryn, unfortunately I missed the photo op of her licking his face, but here she is being curious about what we're doing with all these slides with her blood on them.

On the other hand, I am unfortunately having some trouble getting FrontlineSMS to work on the computer in the field lab, and having trouble with FrontlineForms on the phones for the animal health reporters. All around troublesome. Based on this, and the fact that the lab isn't yet ready to process samples from the project, and so we can gauge how many reports we will get, and for a few other reasons we're going to start out by implementing the system on an even smaller scale than our original limited implementation plan. That means doing it in two villages, with limited sample collection and limited clinical signs collection until the systems are up and running. I think the training we did/are doing this week is still really useful, but having done some training doesn't mean the project is ready to be launched. In a few weeks when the software is ready and the lab is ready we can really get started, and we'll do another more realistic training then, because we'll have everything ready (hopefully). Darryn's leaving at the end of next week, and I think that will be a great kick in the pants for me to take charge and not rely on him so much, or rather, I guess, start relying on a wider range of people. It makes sense, too, that he wanted to do the training before he left, and to push me to get things going, but it's fairly obvious now that there just wasn't enough time, even though I was making powerpoints late at night for several days in a row.

The time has gone by pretty fast, as in I can't believe this week is almost over, and it's also strange that I have now been here exactly one month. I think this is a good opportunity to spend some megabytes and post a few more pictures.

This is me preparing my veggie concoction the night that the others ate freshly killed goat at Maasai Mara, the goat is on sticks on the leaves on the left side of the picture, the woman behind me is Marisa.

Birds are often crazy, but this one was especially crazy and was always always playing with the mirror of the car.

The dogs that live with me, Kiki and Nene, briefly sitting still.


These next two pictures are for Sarah. Delicio ketchup ("Tasty just got tastier") and an elephant in the now super green glade at Mpala.