Boooooooooooo

Damn damn damn. Still no hippo. Running out of training ideas. Michele is very sick and is in bed today. Not sure what is up with her. She doesn’t want anything so just have to let her rest. I’ve been boil free for 2 days. Hurrah! One good thing for the day. And really, having your one good thing being no boils is pretty sad!!!!

Example of fun cultural stuff we get to deal with when having Mende’s as field assistants. I set the guys out to follow a fake hippo (Alusine) through the forest. The instructions were for them to take a bearing, then take another bearing within 5 minutes of the first one, then wait 10 minutes, and start again to get the new location of the moving hippo. Get it? Oh well, I can explain better in person. Anywho, one of the field assistants (not mine for the record), wrote down on the data sheet exactly 5 minutes, with exactly 10 minutes in between. I looked closer and saw he had erased some different times below that. Suspicious! So I confronted him, and he said “well you told me you wanted the times to be every 5 minutes, then every 10 minutes” and I said “Well did you do the bearings at those times” and he said “well no”. So basically he took his time doing the bearings, and just put down whatever darn times he wanted to to fit in with the 5 and 10 minute rules. What he didn’t realize was that by putting fake times down, his bearings would not correspond to where the hippo was at the time of his bearings. I really can draw a picture of this for those of you who want further clarification.