Busy Week With The Field School

The guest house has been super lively and fun since the U of C students came to stay. At first I think many of them were a bit apprehensive about the idea of living here for a whole month. Personally, I love the life style and living conditions at BFMS … key word is SIMPLE. However, not everyone feels the same as me from the get-go. As the days progressed and students started getting used to taking bucket showers, constantly having 1000 mosquito bites evenly distributed across their skin, eating lots of starchy foods, and waking up early to spend several hours in the forest watching monkeys, then going to bed early exhausted, they have started seeing BFMS from my perspective: peaceful, relatively worry-free, quirky and – for lack of a better word – simple. I think everyone (even those people that are already convinced that field work is not for them) is genuinely starting to enjoy the “primate” life. I can tell people are having a positive experience here when all they can talk about is monkeys. Meal times are constantly being filled with lively re-tellings of what their monkey study groups did; how cute the Monas were eating human food out of a tin can thrown away by the villagers, how intimidating the colobus alpha males are when they grunt and display above your head, how cute infants are when they are nursing or being allomothered, and how scary it was the time when a colobus infant fell from a tree (but still remained unharmed). Then again, I guess when all you do is collect behavioral data on monkeys, what else is there to talk about at the end of the day? Well actually, after monkey talk, poo is the next most popular topic of conversation, but that is usually initiated by Teresa who is collecting fecal samples for her project … all she ever thinks and talks about these days is feces … “beautiful precious colobus poo”. On the mobile phone one evening, I was telling my best friend about Teresa’s field work here. Simply put, Teresa bought a bicycle so that she could commute to many smaller forest fragments that surround BFMS, in order to collect fecal samples from the colobus monkeys there for DNA analyses. To clarify things, my best friend repeated what I had told him in a much more concise manner: “So basically, just to clarify, Teresa rides her bike for several hours each day, doing strenuous exercise in the infernal African sun and humidity, to get poo?” The answer to that is yes … that is what she does and she’s damn proud of it! Lol