I realized from emails I've gotten that I haven't done a great job of explaining that basics of my experience in Kenya. So I'll start at the beginning. I'm in Kenya until mid December with 33 other students from the United States. Two others are from UW-Madison and the rest are from colleges across the States. We are studying at the Center for Wildlife Management Studies and are living at the Kilimanjaro Bush Camp. The camp is located between Tsavo West and Amboseli National Parks. Good luck finding it on a map, I have yet to find a map with our location on it. We are living in Bandas. They're sort of a cross between a cabin and a hut. The walls are four feet tall and made of cinder blocks. The ceiling is an A-frame and is made of thatch. Each banda has four twin sized beds complete with mosquito netting. Our classroom/diningroom/main room is a larger version of our bandas with a kitchen, library and computer room attached. We have only cold running water which comes from glacial melt on Kilimanjaro. The main room is supplied with electricity all day by four solar panels in the yard. Electricity in the bandas and internet are available for only four hours each day. Best of all, each morning we awake to a clear view of Kilimanjaro! There are Maasai living nearby, but the closest town is about 15 minutes down a dusty, dusty road. Our camp is fenced off and guarded day and night by Askaris. The food we've been enjoying has been pretty variable. We've had a few traditional things like chai for breakfast, ugali (a white polenta like mash), and some curried dishes. The food is influenced somewhat by the Middle East, but, since we're all states kids, they throw some pasta and the like in as well. Our program is run by a United States organization called the School for Field Studies. The professors that instruct us are doing just as professors in the states do, they're taking the research we aid them with and putting it up for publishing in the hopes that the Kenyan government will put more time, effort and money into conservation and preservation of wildlife and wildlife habitat. Our semester will be the final semester for data collection of their five year research plan. The final stages will include visiting with locals and helping put together ideas for addressing the changes happening in Kenya right now. The focus of the project has been to come up with ways Kenya can address how to manage wildlife in Amboseli National Park and Nairobi National Park as climate change, population increases, and a huge city influence the animal's lives. There's obviously no easy answer, so my professor's have their work cut out for them.

I'll be updating this as often as I can, but the internet is very slow and I don't anticipate being on it very much.