The past five days we have been doing research in the park on elephants impact on biodiversity. My group is testing the effects on dung beetles. The first day of our projects we had a long day in the field setting up 10 sites full of traps to test for small mammals, ants, beetles, spiders, scorpions, and herps. The next three days we spent all morning collecting beetles from the traps. At night we pin them and identify them. It's certainly been a lot of work but it is a pretty interesting topic. Yesterday I stayed out from the field to work on a group paper (some valentines day, I know). Then we rolled elephant dung into balls in order to make the dung beetle traps. Stay far away from elephant crap, it smells. Tomorrow is our final day for collecting data. It is a lot of work but it is nice to be doing hands on projects.

As far as Valentines Day goes we had "secret valentines" and every chose a name and wrote a silly poem for that person. My friend Hannah made a brown paper bag puppet of me haha and wrote an awesome poem that made me laugh super hard. I wrote a poem for my roomie. Everyone here has a great sense of humor so we had a really good time reading poems to eachother.

Daily life here is pretty relaxed but we work hard constantly. It is nice to be in a large campsite because I can always escape to the coffee shop or do homework by the river. The days in the field are very hot but it is such a wonderful opportunity. Today we were 20 meters away from a baby elephant, on foot! Every day when we drive out of camp we see lions, elephants, baboons, etc. It is almost unreal that I am doing this and spending each day in the Savannah. The lecturers have done a really good job of keeping us happy yet pushing us to learn as much as possible. The other day I played soccer for the first time ( a mandatory homework break) and it was amazing. Our group played with locals and although it was intense everyone had so much fun. AFter long days in the field or doing work we often play soccer or swim for at least an hour to relax. Overall life is constantly exciting here. We will be in the park for another weekish so I will write again soon.