How has it already been two weeks? Crazy! This week was our first full work week, after spending the previous week touring Uganda and getting a lay of the land. 

Week of June 23rd - June 29th

Monday, June 23rd: Our first full day of work! After breakfast, the conservation team and I walked over to the conservation education (CE) office for our weekly team meeting, where we went over the week's schedule and plans for World Chimp Week and an upcoming conservation career day at one of the schools.

The conservation education team runs special programming for World Chimp Week, visiting each of the KFSP's 16 schools to share information, watch performances, and celebrate chimps! This week is an important celebration for the program, whose work is closely tied to the goals of the Kibale Chimp Project, which aims to protect the chimps in this national forest. 

After our team meeting, we had a general staff meeting where I presented what the CE Laidlaw Scholars did the week prior and also what we would be working on for the week ahead. After lunch, which was accompanied by some torrential rain, the CE headed back to the office for more World Chimp Week prep, where I was tasked with coming up with a fun game for students to play in addition to creating educational posters about chimpanzees. 

After work, we all headed back to the guest house where we finally got to try the long-awaited Ugandan "daddies," which are a type of biscuit that tastes similar to a beignet, minus the powdered sugar. I then ended the night learning how play Cabo with some of the other scholars. 

Tuesday, June 24th: Tuesday the CE team schedule was jam-packed! Our team woke up extra early to visit the Kasiisi farm for the bi-weekly hive checks. These bees produce honey for the farm and help prevent crop-raiding by scaring away any elephants from the neighboring parks. Kenneth and Valnce got us all dressed up in our bee suits, and I was tasked with carrying one of the smokers. Unfortunately, due to both time and a few stings (both Kenneth & Eavan were stung on their faces), we were only able to check two hives, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. 

After hive checks, we came back to Kasiisi for tippy-tap training with the health team. A tippy tap is a type of handwashing station, made from available materials like sticks, rope, and gallon-sized bottles of water, that does not require users to touch anything with their hands, besides soap. This way of handwashing encourages good hygiene and prevents recontamination, decreasing the amount of respiratory illnesses amongst communities and schools. Respiratory illnesses are lethal to chimpanzees, who can contract them from humans. 

Post-lunch, the CE team created a PowerPoint about general conservation for Wednesday's mobile clinic and then attended our improved cookstove training. These stoves are made of bricks and mud and are referred to as "improved" because they burn less wood and release fewer fumes into homes, in comparison to the traditional stoves used in Uganda. 

We ended our super long day by playing Heads-Up and enjoying pineapple with cinnamon for dessert, which was delicious!

Wednesday, June 25th: Mobile Clinic Day! Following a hearty breakfast, both the health and conservation education teams headed off to our mobile clinic location, which was a 3-hour drive from Kasiisi and featured many monkeys along the way! When we arrived, we set up our stations outside of a local church as people began lining up. Shami, the head of the health team, assigned me to registration duty, where I worked with a Uganda Wildlife Ranger to write down patients' names, sex, age, village, and take their temperature. This location was a lot more rural than Kasiisi, and more people were less educated, could not speak English, and in many cases were illiterate, making communication with them difficult; however, the park ranger and other volunteers helped translate for me, and we made it through! 

While I was working registration, Eavan and Luke presented the conservation PowerPoint we had made on Tuesday and showed some chimp videos to entertain the kids. At other sites, other team members (not Laidlaw Scholars) were prescribing medication, picking up prescriptions, and conducting data entry. 

After lunch, the CE team went with two of the wildlife rangers to a local school to gift the students with wildlife-themed notebooks for their classes, and then we did a demonstration on improved cookstoves, which I narrated and Cathy translated. 

After a 5-hour day at the clinic and hours-long drives there and back, I took the best hot shower of my life! It was truly an amazing day, and great to see firsthand the work that KFSP conducts to help local communities and protect wildlife, and I enjoyed being able to contribute to this work in a small way. 

Thursday, June 26th: The CE team was back in the office to prep for World Chimp Week. We updated several PowerPoint presentations, developing games for all the existing curricula. I also demonstrated the game I came up with for World Chimp Week, which teaches kids about the tools chimpanzees use and allows them to try and make their own out of the same materials, with the goal of getting honey out of a plastic water bottle (symbolizing a crevice in a tree). 

Professor Machanda joined us for lunch, and then it was back to work! In the evening, I got to play soccer with some of the other scholars and the kids at Kasiisi school, which was definitely my highlight of the day. I even scored! 

Friday, June 27th: A pretty average day, the CE team continued to work on updating curriculum and prepping for World Chimp Week. Elio and I collected the materials we would need for the game I developed, and then we got most of the afternoon off to relax.

In the evening, we had our second guest speaker talk with Dr. Zarin Machanda, a professor of primatology at Tufts University and one of the leaders of the Kibale Chimp Project. She prepped us for World Chimp Week by teaching us all about chimps and other apes; fun fact, chimps dance when it rains! Zarin joined us for dinner so we could pick her brain about primates, and then I ended the night stargazing with Eavan and Luke. 

Saturday, June 28th: Our first full day off this week! Our group had originally planned to visit a nearby resort to use their pool and then get dinner there. After a morning spent playing soccer with some of the boarding students at the school and some scrabble with some of the other scholars, it started to rain and we decided to change our plans to just going out for dinner (we couldn't miss one of our favorite lunches, the pasta with white sauce!). We let Francis, our driver, know our new plans, but he did not end up responding and had not told us he was sending a different driver. Sam, who was tasked with taking us to the resort, showed up at 2 pm, unbeknownst to us. He ended up waiting 3 hours until we were ready to go, and when our food (which was pretty mediocre) ended up taking an hour to come, we realized we had to buy this poor guy dinner. When we finally made it back to the guest house, only to discover the power was out!

Sunday, June 29th: Alexa and I woke up at 3 am to a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, which no one else felt (no one around us was injured), and then I woke up again at 7 to go running before church, which five of us decided we wanted to check out. After getting ready for church, which we were told started at 9, we learned that a special service was going on because the archdeacon was visiting this week. We ended up going at 10:30 am and were unable to leave until 3:30 pm. The church leader sat us right in front, and no one could figure out if/when we were allowed to leave. The music was beautiful, but the service also included a live chicken auction and a reading of a 6-page report about the church's wellbeing, which was definitely a new experience for me. Finally, Jane, one of the wonderful women who takes care of us at the guesthouse, came to free us because we were 2 hours late for lunch! 

Following lunch, which was a total debrief of what we had witnessed at church, I called home and relaxed before the CE Laidlaw Scholars all met to plan for the week ahead. What a weekend!