Treehouses!

In a few hours I head back to Shimoni to help Staff finish the work from this expo and prepare for the next one in January - but till then I'm still on vacation! After a few days in Mombasa with friends, Karen and I headed to the lovely beach town of Diani where we stayed at STILTS!!

TREEHOUSES!! While I have some great pix of bushbabies being fed and crazy fuzzy caterpillars..I can't upload them yet. Needless to say, we fell asleep to the sounds of the crickets and birds an woke up to monkeys and more birds. Some cheeky sykes monkeys tried to ransack our bags for food, but wound up empty handed.

Enjoy the pix!

I'm staying in Kenya...for a while...

So the news is this: I have been offered and have accepted a position as an Intern with GVI for the next expedition. This means that I will be working for GVI through March of 2009. I'm very excited and grateful for the opportunity. Not entirely sure what my job will entail - but I know that it will probably focus on the Community aspect: teaching English in the primary school in Mkwiro village on Wasini Island where we live...as well as possibly teaching in Shimoni village on the mainland where we do our Forest research. I will also still be involved in the Forest and Marine research that we conduct. It's been really cool to see how all the data that we gather is compiled for the local community, Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) and others. At the end of the day it's all only as relevant as the community uses it. I wrote in my last post about the Friends of Shimoni Forest CBO (community based organization) - but even the wildlife education classes, extracurricular activities and weekend student groups are significant, as those are the people who will inherit the benefits and responsibilities of this environment.
While I am not considering a career change - and while I still plan on returning to the states (eventually) to head out to Cali and pursue Acting - I recognize that this is an amazing and unique experience that warrants further exploration and study. And I'm living in a tropical paradise...so there's that, too.
The sad news, though, is that I will miss getting to see many of you at holiday time. Spending Christmas in summer weather will be a bit of a shock...but hopefully, I will have a few GVI staff friends here that I can chill with over the break. Planning on going to a family wedding of a Kenyan friend of mine and travelling a bit over the next few weeks. Oh and improving my stick-shift driving, learning to pole a boat through shallow waters, improving my swahili and reviewing my animal species...
While I won't be able to spend christmas with you...if the holiday spirit so moves you then go visit http://www.gvi.co.uk/about-us/gvi-charitable-trust - you can donate to the GVI Charitable Trust Fund that helps support the local orphanage on Wasini Island where I live. We spend Monday afternoons with the boys there reading and playing games. I've also had a number of these kids as students in the classroom...and a few of them have royally kicked our butts in football (soccer) games from time to time...
As always, I do love getting letters and emails, so please keep them coming! I hope to get a phone soon so those who are feeling really adventurous can try and ring me sometime. Please know that as much fun as I am having here I miss you all and want very much to hear all the big and little things going on in your lives. Again, as I've said before, I will try to post pictures up when I can - for those of you on Facebook, my fellow EM's have thrown a few up there already, so enjoy!
LOVELOVELOVE,
Sara

Don't mess with our forest!

Hey friends and family! Hope everyone is well and happy and enjoying the festive holiday season back home - or wherever you are in the world...We had a creative Thanksgiving here in Kenya - but a wonderful meal shared with friends Swahili style where there was a whole lot to be thankful for. I'm kind of finding that every day I am thankful for so much. And while sometimes I wish I could spend one day without humidity, dirt, bugs and a dozen other people constantly around me - I wouldn't trade this for anything. I'm very proud of the work we're doing and the amazing community that this expedition creates.
One of the many surveys that we do in the forest involves recording all the human disturbance that occurs. Shimoni forest is an amazing coastal forest that is home to so much biodiversity. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of illegal logging and charcoal burning that takes place here - often by people outside of the community - and the forest is rapidly being destroyed. In one year 10% of the forest was lost to logging and burning. As we hike through we take detailed accounts of the fires, timber, clearings etc that we see. GVI works with Friends of Shimoni Forest - a local community based organization that is trying to protect the forest while earning sustainable alternative livelihoods from it. I helped create a presentation that illustrated the damage that is happening in the forest for the members to see in a more visual and dramatic light. I was lucky enough to tag along to a meeting yesterday (3 hours in swahili!!) but it was super gratifying to see how impactful that presentation was. The next step: forest patrols!! Tomorrow several members, two police officers and some GVI staff are heading out to start kickin butt and taking names! Any loggers or charcoal burners found will be arrested and taken in! It's really exciting to see the community take action and it's very cool to be able to participate in some small way.
Wish I could show pictures and share more - but as always, internet resources and time are limited...gotta drive back to town to catch the boat crossing across the channel before the sunsets! Continue sending emails and whatnot - miss you all and sending you big, happy and humid hugs from Kenya!!

Serengeti!!

I wish I wish I wish that I could share my pictures with you...but alas...the internet gods do not wish it to be so.

I can say that Sat Camp was amazing - so much work but so good. I think we were able to help the local communities strengthen their wildlife education and expand their alternative sustainable livelihoods now that they switched from poaching animals to protecting wildlife. We were dusty and dirty and tired but we made many new friends, learned a great deal from the community members and got to see Killi everyday!

Another week of work in Wasini and Shimoni - which included a dugong spotting! There are only 30 dugongs recorded in all of Kenya - so our sighting was very exciting and the info was immediately shared with KWS. The dugong is like a manatee - known as the "cow of the sea" and a really special animal. I also got to swim with a sea turtle last week and that was hands down one of the coolest things I've ever done.

This week I was lucky enough to travel to Tanzania with my good friend Karen and we went on safari in the Serengeti where I finally learned to drive stick shift - in a land rover on the roughest road I've ever driven! We saw all the big five - buffalo, elephant, lion, rhino and leopard. we also had elephants hanging out at our campsite 10 feet away from us and buffalos again this morning before we left! Such an amazing experience. so many pictures and stories to share, but once again the internet access is sparse. Sending you all love and happy wishes - yay obama!!! (ps kenya called last thursday a national holiday in honor of the presidential win!) Ndiyo tunaweza!! (Yes We Can!!)
Love,
Sara

Elephants and Whales and Satellite Camps!

Hey everyone! Internet is hard to come by and slooooow so this blog will have to be a bit briefer. Sadly, I probably won't be able to put up pix for another week or so...but you'll just have to use your imaginations!

Last weekend we volunteered with our partner, Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) and participated in a beach clean up with schoolchildren from 5 different towns in the neighboring community. It was a few hours of hot trash gathering, but the kids worked really hard and we gathered loads and loads of garbage that had been washed ashore and helped protect the environment. I was impressed by how passionate the students were to protect their natural resources. Lots of teachers and students and volunteers and chatting and fun. And KWS gave us all sodas afterwards, which never hurts :) Last Sunday we went to Mwaluganje Elephant Reserve and learned about this amazing conservationist community based organization. Check out the GVI blog (link below on this page) for the blog I wrote about it. Basically, in order to protect a longstanding migratory path the elephants use, the community members made their area (which had included farmland) a reserve for the animals. One of the biggest challenges there is human-wildlife conflict - ie when elephants trample farmers crops. One solution they found - and taught us about - was using elephant poo to make recycled paper. I know, it sounds grody, but elephant poo is pretty impressively clean - lots of fibers. They boil it and dry it for 2 days, mix it with scrap paper, water and paste and make this awesome recylced paper to sell to tourists. Way to go sustainability!! Our goal is to take this skill to the satellite camps near Tsavo West National Park and share this transferable skill with them. We head out for a week of dusty, exciting inland Africa tomorrow!
But one of the coolest occurrences this week was HUMPBACK WHALES!!! The other group saw them the week before and I'd been practicing yelling out "whale" for when the moment came. Turns out, speaking Whale, like Dori does in Nemo, is the best way to get them to come. On Monday we spent an hour with a mother and calf (followed them all the way to Tanzania!) The calf was pretty siked to see us and kept jumping jumping jumping in the water for us - they were swimming about 30 feet away from us!! At one point, just before we parted ways, the calf snuck up on us and splashed behind the boat within 5 meters! It was unlike anything I've ever experience before. We've got loads of videos and you can hear the whole boat cheering with joy! Then Tuesday we saw ANOTHER mother and newborn - this one was nursing. We thought we were spotting tail dive, but they tail just stayed and stayed out of the water - she was upside down, head underwater, nursing for over 10 minutes at a go. It was 9am and I was hanging half out of the boat holding the underwater camera towards them trying to photograph these whales 20 feet away from me - how crazy!!
This next week will keep me completely away from any internet, but please still feel free to email and tell me how you all are. Miss you tons!

Mzuri Sana

In Swahili when someone says "Habari?" they are asking "How are you?" The response, "Mzuri Sana" means "Really good". And these days...that's pretty accurate!

We've finished our first week of training and I passed my tests with flying colors!! I can now identify 6 species of dolphins, 3 species of monkeys, 2 sea turtles and a host of other animals in the wild! We've already seen about 20 Bottlenose Dolphins when crossing the channel from Wasini Island to Shimoni Village. Earlier that week some of the others saw 300 at one go! I've been snorkelling in the Kisitie-Mpunguti National Marine Park - and while we haven't yet seen Sea Turtles, we have seen loads of tropical fish, a moray eel, flying fish and a few African Sea Eagles!

I'm getting used to living on a tropical equatorial island...all of our showers and washing is done with salt water from the ocean that we haul up in buckets every day. It really makes you awayre of how much water we use! Getting to shower outside under the stars is a pretty cool experience...and you get used to sharing your space with millipedes, slugs and all sorts of other creepy crawlies pretty quickly...though I

haven't yet found any in my bed...that would probably change my feelings about them... Not having much electricity (we use solar panels or a generator for a few hours of the day to use the computers for scientific data entry) has changed the social activities significantly. We actually have had some great nights playing games like Celebrity or telling stories or singing as we look out over the island sunsets. This picture is a view from our "lounge" area on base out onto the ocean.

In the forest portion we've already seen troops of Colobus monkeys, sykes monkeys and vervet monkeys..as well as a couple of impressive yellow baboons. We spend a lot of time studying the behavior of the Colobus...but I'm starting to feel like they spend just as much time studying us. I hope to have some better pictures of them to share with you soon..my wildlife photography skills are only just beginning. This picture is taken using both the zoom on my camera and my binoculars!

In the village of Mkwiro, where we live, the community isn't exposed to tourism, so we mzungu's (foreigners) are pretty novel. The kids come up to us yelling Jambo! and are ready to grab our hands and ask us our names and basically giggle at everything we do. We had a short reading session with some of the boys from the orphanage and I was so impressed with how eager to learn these guys were. I'm really looking forward to working in the classrooms. As it is a Muslim community we have to wear head scarves when we leave the base, but that doesn't take a whole lot of getting used to either. And, as you can see at the top of this page, some of the Kangas (sarongs) the ladies make are pretty cool.

Last night was our first night off in over a week and we went to the nearby tourist beach town of Diani where we were able to get in some fun and relaxation. Reggae is pretty popular here in the coast so I've been treated to the sounds of Bob Marley pretty often. Lots of dancing and fun and sleeping in all the way till 9am!! (most days we are up by 6 cooking for each other and preparing the gear and in the field by 7:30...very different from my After School hours!!)

Lastly, if anyone wants to write to me, there has been a change in my address, please send mail to: Sara Mayer c/o GVI PO Box 10 Shimoni 80409 Kenya

I hope you are all happy and well back home - don't forget to vote this election! (Kenyan's here are pretty interested as you can imagine) I'll leave you with this picture of a Baobob tree...the Colobus Monkeys love to climb them, and our friend will help to give it some scale for you. Remember, I always love hearing from you!!

First Impressions in Kenya

As I exited the Nairobi airport to transfer to Mombassa a little boy of about 2 years old sized me up, smiled and gave me a high five.  I considered that my official welcome into Kenya. 

I am writing you from the Reef Hotel in Mombassa - a very swank place that we stayed at our first two days as we all arrived in waves.  The swimming pools and showers will be a nostalgic memory by the end of the week as move on to bucket showers and no electricity. 

 However, the warmth of the Indian Ocean is very inviting and the abundance of wildlife that we've seen even here at the hotel is encouraging.

While I haven't been able to put my pix on disc yet and upload 

them to this site (look for that in about two weeks, I think...when I have access again to internet)  I have plucked a few fro

m the web to share with you.  The following picture is another of the Reef Hotel and includes one of its many visitors: Vervet Monkeys.  These guys washed over the tin roof this morning at breakfast like a storm - all thundering and peaking about to see if there were any extra food scraps. We've also seen gecko lizards, rainbow colored lizards, giant spiders, cats and a number of brightly colored, beautiful sounding birds.  

My visit to London and friends was wonderful - though I was slightly impeded by the many tropical meds I've been taking.  Typhoid and Malaria meds waylaid me for a bit...But beyond that I had a wonderful time going to the Globe, riding the London Eye, seeing Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park and enjoying the company and the sights.  Hopefully, I'll have pix of that trip to share later...

Now we're off for a 2 1/2 hour drive south to Shimoni and then the boat on to Wasini Island where we will begin this adventure!  Our group is only 8 people: 3 Brits, 3 Americans, an Italian and an Australian.  Though we will be joined by 3 Kenyans in our 2nd or 3rd week.  I look forward to hearing from all of you and hope that you are well.  Please feel free to leave comments and send mail to our address in Ukunda!  (it'll be an interesting experiment to see how long it takes to arrive)

Love,

Sara

PS favorites include the following signs at the hotel: Beware of Falling Coconuts and Please Do Not Feed the Cats or the Monkeys.  Also, we arrived on Eid, the end of Ramadan, so on my first day here the place was filled with local families swimming and relaxing and celebrating. :)