Florence and First Monkeys

TUESDAY

Florence arrived today. She’s a lovely Ugandan woman in her mid twenties.

She is making bread for us, a local flatbread made from flour, baking powder, salt and water. It looks a bit like a tortilla, but is tougher. Of course, it's fried, but then in Uganda--what's not?

We have been eating alot of fruit and peanut butter sandwiches.

She has also agreed to wash our clothes, as we were not doing very well with that and always seem to have dirt under our nails and dust in our ears from the towns. For her, it is great to have the work, for us she is our angel.

We would not have time for our jobs here if we had to wash clothes every day. There is no washing machine, so she uses a washboard and basin, and wrings everything by hand. Then she hangs it on a line to dry, where the insects lay larvae in them, so each piece (even underpants) has to be ironed to put an end to what’s living inside. It’s quite a process.

She has also agreed to help us with the water situation. We boil 2 gallons everyday on a kerosene stove. She has very white teeth and a peaceful smile that lights up easily. We notice this because she is constantly laughing at us making mistakes. I can only imagine the stories she must be telling...

We took a primate walk this afternoon that took us two hours into the forest. All the vines are woven around trees and roots, and the ground is rough. Butterflies move about constantly, with 20 to 30 in every glance…they are everywhere.

A person tracks monkeys by what they leave on the ground and the smell in the trees by the trail (monkeys don’t bathe, it’s not too tough). And come across them in the last hour jumping from tree to tree. We found two different types, the Mangabee and the red-tailed monkey.

These groups will often live close to each other and share the same fruit. We watch for an hour while they play, eat, chase each other, and occasionally stop to stare at the wacky humans on the ground with binoculars. On the way back, we stop to look at where elephants decided to knock something over, and heard one very close by. We all FROZE! We have been told if they break toward us we are to RUN FAST, because they would certainly trample us.

Some of the field assistants at our research station who have actually BEEN chased have told us that the thing to do is to drop a jacket or backpack and head for the nearest tree like the chimps do. The elephants will then toss your backpack around for a few minutes and then leave. The research assistants suspect that the chimps play tricks on elephants from the trees, hence they are pretty irritated with them as a whole, and we look enough like them to get on their last nerve.

Tonight when we returned to camp a group of black and white monkeys greeted us in the trees overhead. Apparently we have good fruit in our area.

Exausted, we fell into bed serenaded by the forest acacia, deep monkey hoots and all manner of buzzing, snoozing, flying, crawling and multi-legged friends. We are becoming more comfortable with the foreign voices and feel lucky to be able to see all of this.