Yay villages

I’ve been going to a lot of communities to inquire about the presence of pygmy hippos. We’ve been to…let’s see…14 or 15 in the past couple weeks. The roads are all pretty horrible so it takes forever to get there. Sometimes the villages are inaccessible even by motorcycle so we walk the remaining few miles on bush paths. Just to give you some idea of how remote these places are, at one of the villages, Towobu, I was the first white girl ever to enter the village (they did have 1 white guy visit about 30 years ago), and at another they couldn’t remember a white person visiting at all. Strangely enough, the children were a lot more polite than in other villages. I am not sure they even knew the word “Pumwi.” They just looked at me.

Towobu, the village we slept in one night, was very welcoming. They made enough rice for our team of 4 to feed about 10 people. They tried to have me eat separate from my men (Kenewa, Bockary and their brother Mediwa) but I refused. We’d all brought tents and thermarests but the village insisted that we were their guests and gave us beds. The 3 boys shared an almost twin-size bed, and my bed was about a foot too short and possibly had bedbugs, but it was very sweet of them anyway.

Another of my favorite villages was Jewoma. We’d travelled to 4 villages that basically all asked “What’s in it for us to help you?” and didn’t offer us food or anything, and then arrived in Jewoma where we were exhausted and frustrated. We sat down and they presented us with a basket of bananas. Everybody was very polite with their questions and nobody said “So now you’re going to give us money right?” When we were preparing to leave, they presented us with a bag filled with oranges (about 3 dozen oranges).