Today Minah took us to the smaller islands in the boats. We found fresh tracks at the place I’d seen the pygmy hippo last year, so we set up a camera on video mode to see what we could get. Exciting!! I can’t wait to check some camera traps. The BBC dude is still here – I am about to go to visitor’s center to meet him to go walk around to find some hippo tracks. It’s a little warm today. Rainy season is really really here. It rained 1.5 inches last night. I guess that is not incredibly excessive but this is just the beginning! The rains start around 5pm and go all night more or less. The forest is constantly drippy. I’ve now got quite the tan! It is a little strange to see the difference in how I treat the “locals” and how I see some visitors treating them. They kind of act like the local people don’t exist. The travel journalists came and were grilling me all about Tiwai, and I am trying to explain to them that the local people know so much more about the island than I, and they should interview them, but they dismissed that idea. I guess they see white person and automatically assume ultimate expert?
Am I too involved in the culture? I eat communally with the local people. I know there is the risk of contracting some diarrheal infection this way, but it is worth it for the bonding experience I have. In this culture, if you take your own plate and eat by yourself, you are really seen as stingy and not a good person. It’s kind of amazing the importance put on inviting other people to eat with you if you have food. Eating alone is bad. I couldn’t really explain this concept to BBC dude when he invited me to lunch. I can’t go eat stuff in front of my field assistants without offering them some; however, that is sort of seen as rude in our culture (to give away food somebody has given you). There was one time when we’d been working hard all day and we didn’t have much food prepared for the amount of people around. I suggested we go inside the library so that just we three could eat it. We did it, but then my field assistants both looked so uncomfortable, and they told me after they felt so bad that the other people who were standing around were not invited to eat with us. So now I always put a couple extra cups of rice in (it costs about 30 cents to do this) so that if anybody shows up they can join us. Having bonded with the villagers has actually really helped my research. People are more likely to tell me they have seen a pygmy hippo and invite me to their fields if there are hippos travelling there. They have given me the name Gita this year and said I am now a part of their community. Plus I like going and sitting in the village every once in awhile to people watch and relax.
Kenewa and Bockary are now going through some writing exercises. I want to improve their reading and writing (well, for Bockary it is starting from scratch and Kenewa is almost from scratch). They are very excited about the idea of learning. I had a 2 hour break from the BBC dude so I declared it school time. I bought some dollar store writing books that are pretty pink princesses (thankfully they don’t know this).
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