Gorillas!

 This post is all about GORILLAS! Kathy and I got permits from the Rwanda Tourism Board a few weeks ago to track gorillas on November 27th. We have a friend, Patrick, who was funded by the Dian Fossey Research Fund to study the gorillas for 4 months. He was presenting his dissertation the same week that we were going to Musanse (the city by Volcanoes National Park where the gorillas live), so he decided to stay on for a few more days to greet us. He got us a room at a decent hotel, and we had most of our meals with him at a convent where they made delicious Rwandan food. The day before tracking gorillas we went to the huge Musanse market and spent a long time looking at Congolese fabrics, and then we went for dinner at our friends' who are here for 2 years from Korea. They had made a korean bbq in the back yard so we had a huge feast! It was wonderful.

On Saturday morning we had to have an early breakfast to leave the convent at 630am. Patrick arranged for 2 taxi-motos to come pick us up and drive us where we needed to go. It was about 15 km to the park head quarters where we were served coffee and tea while the guides arranged us into various groups. Some people were there to track Golden Monkeys, visit the Dian Fossey Research Centre or visit her grave.

We were placed in a group of 6 people to track the Amahoro Group consisting of 17 gorillas, including 2 silverbacks (a rare occurrence). Normally each group is formed by a silverback (a male gorillas with grey hair on his back) and many women and children. The silverback is the only one allowed to mate with the women. So males will normally wait until they know a silverback from another group has died and then they will go claim it as their own. This is followed by infanticide where the silverback kills all of the babies so that the females will have his babies. So it was rare that these 2 silverbacks lived together in one group. Apparently they still keep their distance from each other as the lesser silverback normally sneaks off with other ladies from the group.

I have a lot of pictures so I think I will just tell my stories in the captions! The first few were taken from my moto on our drive to Volcanoes National Park. This park is at the intersection of three countries (Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC).

Note the misty mountains in the back. "Gorillas in the Mist" was definitely an accurate name for the Dian Fossey movie! We watched it the week before going to see the gorillas to prepare and we were very impressed as the footage of the villages and people in Rwanda seem quite accurate to what we've experienced.

After we made our groups at head quarters we had to travel for another 16 km to get to where we started our hike. This entry point changed depending on where the gorillas are that morning. They moved around every day and make new nests to sleep in every night. Our hike started off by going through agricultural land of the locals before reaching the stone wall that marks the edge of the park and also functions to keep the elephants and buffalo from destroying the crops of the locals.

In addition to our guide we also had this tracker who was there to guard us from rogue buffalo. 

After hiking for about 2 hours we reached the trackers who were to remain close to the gorillas all day. They made us leave everything behind, except our cameras, when we were about 100 m from the gorillas. We had to go through a very narrow path, and our first encounter with a gorilla snuck up on us! We were going single file and our guide pointed to a gorillas to the right that was eating bamboo in the bush. Each person was going slowly to take a picture as they passed, and as the girl in front of me had her turn the gorilla made a noise and decided to cross our path. The girl tried to move out of his way, but he went right for her and pushed her over with 2 big slaps on the back and then continued on his way. It was crazy! It all happened so fast that i wasn't able to get a picture, but it was pretty exciting! We continued on the path until we came to an opening where there were about 12 gorillas lounging about.

THat's the silverback. We were SO close! You are supposed to stay at least 7m away from the gorillas but that wasn't really possible in our case because of the location, and because they kept coming at us!

Young gorillas playing...

THat's the silverback in the middle with one of his ladies to the left and a baby on the right. They were rearranging themselves and all ended up in the same position on their backs with one arm on their head. Their feet are really strange!

I'm so happy that I got this picture. All of a sudden the mom with the baby on her back came out of the bamboo and decided to cut right between us. The guide was telling us to move back and not to take pictures but I snuck this one, and it was a pretty steep incline so I didn't really have anywhere to go. Right after this the baby got off his mom's back and reached out to touch my leg as he passed! Pretty amazing.

This is the youngest of the group (16 months) breastfeeding. 

This guy was hanging out in the trees above us and at one point fell down and we all had to move again as he came too close to us. Lot's of excitement!

Crazy hair!

There was a lot of this lounging going on. Especially when the sun came out.

Wrestling

Look at that hand!

At one point the big brother came over to grab the baby by the leg and they started wrestling a bit. It was really cute!

Baby biting his brother.

Me and the gorillas! After 1 hour of observing the gorillas we had to leave. It was a great experience!

In the afternoon we met up with Patrick and he took us to the Karisoke Research Centre in town where tourists aren't supposed to go. Inside there were many pictures of gorillas and Dian Fossey as well as a signed picture of Sigourney Weaver from Gorillas in the Mist.

Update on our project: It became certain last week that we would not be doing the formative research for Sprinkles. Now we are trying to figure out how to move forward with the project in the new year, and we are working on wrapping things up in Kibungo. We only have about 2 weeks left here! I can't believe it's almost over!

A long overdue update (ah! an unintended pun...this is a very long entry!)

Hello again! 

My apologies for not keeping this updated—we’ve been very busy! I will try to fill you all in on what I’ve been up to in the last few weeks. I know I mentioned before that in November we were planning to start working on our second research project, Sprinkles micronutrient powders. Well, we’ve been hanging on a thread since the first week in November waiting to get approval from the Ministry of Health to conduct our research. I was hoping that my next blog entry could start with a “Hurray! We got it!”, but unfortunately we got some unexpected news Friday informing us that we need approval from the National Ethics Committee which doesn’t meet next until December 11^th...just a few days before we leave Rwanda. This was pretty hard for us to swallow because we’ve been working SO hard on this project and we were all so excited to do it. I’ll explain more about the project as I tell you about what we’ve been up to.

The weather is beautiful. I heard that Vancouver is in a snow storm! I think it’s ‘winter’ in Rwanda too, but that just means that sometimes the sky is cloudy and it cools down to maybe 15 degrees at night. It rains most days but usually just a short, heavy rain and then it clears up. You get a fair bit of warning though because the wind always really picks up right before it rains, when usually there is just a slight breeze. I’ll brag a bit more and then stop...the temperature is such that the other day I was wearing capris and a long sleeve shirt while my friend was wearing shorts and a tank top. Not too hot or too cold! And the flowers are always blooming and there are soo many different birds. I wish I had taken up bird watching like I had planned last year when I wanted to work in the Great Bear Rainforest! Ok, that’s all. Enjoy your snow!

One of the lovely paths on INATEK campus

The view when you look to the right from the very spot the previous picture was taken

So, I think I left off at around Halloween. At least that’s where I will start. We had finished surveying in the villages on Oct. 28^th, I believe. I came down with some sort of illness the night before the last survey day so I was unable to go. It was just a 24-hour thing in which  I was dizzy and feverish with unpleasant stomach issues.. Anyway, as soon as we finished in the villages we had a meeting with UNICEF to discuss plans for our research and it went SO WELL! We were all really pumped after because they fully supported our project and were ready to help us in every way. So we left Kigali that day on a high and started planning the logistics of the project. The goal was to interview mothers in focus groups (2-3 hour sessions) as well as semi-structured interviews with fathers, grandmothers and health workers. We were going to do the research in 2 different districts (one in the West Province and one in the East Province), spending 4 field days in each so that we could visit 10 different villages in each district. We worked over the weekend to set the wheels in motion with our partners at INATEK because we would be away the next week at a conference.  This involved putting together a huge project proposal with the logistics and methodology all laid out as well as a budget. Our plan was to spend 2 weeks in the field, starting on November 15^th, so we were really rushed to get our proposal into the Ministry of Health. We were all extremely confident that things would go smoothly and we’d get our approval in time, but things always take longer than you plan...  We had our first training session with 11 INATEK students on the Monday and then left right after to take the bus to Butare for our conference.

Butare is a big city in the South Province. We heard that it used to be the capital of Rwanda (not sure when...). I hope you understand that my scale of ‘big cities’ has been skewed after living in Kibungo. By big, I’m talking Crescent Beach size if you put a university where that metal stair case is at the far end by the nude beach. Or maybe 2 blocks of the main strip in the Glebe (Ottawa) if you take out every second building and put in a tiny shop. Anyway, we really enjoyed it because of the variety of food options! We had Chinese food, grilled club sandwiches, pizza bread and even ICE CREAM! It was wonderful. This place was like the Kitsilano of Rwanda. The ice cream place reminded me of a frozen yogurt place in Kits so much that it felt like new-age hippie mothers with their lulu pants and expensive baby clothes could have come pushing their fancy strollers in at any moment! We found out that the ice cream place was actually a co-operative set up by some Europeans that is run by a girls’ traditional Rwandan drumming group. We had the pleasure of watching (and even participating in) this drumming group perform at the conference we attended. 

The drumming performance outside of the main lecture hall at the National University of Rwanda

Gurjeet learning how to drum Rwandan-style

 The conference, ‘The 3^rd International Scientific Research Conference: Food and Nutrition Security and Integrated Pest Management’, was held at NUR (the National University of Rwanda). It was a big deal! It was 3 full days and they provided tea/coffee breaks, and lunch every day, and they even gave everyone nice over-the-shoulder book bags. The presentation were mostly very interesting and well-done. We learned a lot and schmoozed with some academics who were very surprised to hear that we three undergrads were given the opportunity to do such interesting research. And I have to agree, it is quite the opportunity! After the closing ceremony a bus took us to a hotel for cocktails where we did more schmoozing. We met a lot of intellectual boys who spent a surprising amount of time taking pictures with us. One of the students spent 4 months research gorillas like Dian Fossey so we’ve been in touch and he might join us when we go on Saturday! So exciting!

While we were in Butare we also took one afternoon to hike in Nyungwe National Park. It’s one of the biggest rainforests in Africa and it is home to 15 different  species of primates. We went for an easy 3 hour guided hike and just as we were heading back to the visitor centre we saw a group of blue monkeys! It was great. They were just swinging around in the trees and eating fruit. The most prized monkey in Nyungwe is the white-faced Colubus and I was fortunate to see one while we were taking the bus out of the park! An old man that was sitting beside me spotted it and elbowed me so I just got a quick glimpse. This same old man kept announcing everything we did to the whole bus so that they would all turn around and stare...”The white girl is sleeping! Look!”, “The white girl is eating!”, “The while girl is listening to her ipod!”. Kind of annoying...

View of Nyungwe park while on our hike.

After spending 4 nights in Butare we took the bus to Gisenyi, in the West Province, where we had our in-country debrief organized by UBC Go Global. We got up early that day to finalize the Sprinkles project proposal and we were hectically trying to get everything done before getting on the bus. We ended up emailing it out from the bus so that we could get it to the Ministry of Health before the weekend. Gisenyi was beautiful. It’s near Volcanoes National Park so on the drive in you pass a large chain of volcanoes and the terrain is so hilly and fertile. The road to Gisenyi was really windy, by the end of it the people on both sides of me were throwing up...good thing this happened at the end of the trip! We arrived at our beautiful hotel that is right on Lake Kivu (part of the Great Lakes chain in Africa). We had Friday night to ourselves to have dinner on the beach (fresh tilapia) with fireflies all around us. It was nice to have some time to unwind after our stressful project planning.

The view of Lake Kivu from our balcony. It was beautiful! And to top it all off we had stiff mattresses and hot water for showering!

I woke up early on Saturday, so before starting our workshop I read on the beach and watched the fishermen.

This is a huge fishing boat...three large dugout canoes tied together. I don't really understand how it works but it was interesting to watch.

Another view of the fishing boat.

Busy town. This is looking out towards the area where all the fishermen gather and where the women wait for the fish to take to the market.

Gourmet breakfast...yes, those are large wooden utensils...not very practical, but quite amusing.

On Saturday our 2 debrief facilitators arrived and we spent the rest of the weekend going through a reflective workshop. We each had to pick a an issue that we wanted to discuss and work through. Since I have been reading a lot about international development and we’ve been discussing the ethics of our project, my issue was what we are contributing here in Rwanda and why we came to do this research when other people are just as qualified and have been doing similar research anyway. This is something that I will hopefully get into more in another blog. But it was really interesting to talk about it in our group. Before dinner one day we went on a tour of the town with one of our facilitators. Our hotel was way out of town so we didn’t really spend any time there. But while on this tour we went to the border of the Congo! It was exciting. In the past this border has been quite dangerous, but the two bordering towns, Gisenyi and Goma, have been very safe for the past few years and are now tourist towns. Just looking over the border the Congo looked very different from Rwanda. I guess that’s just from seeing the style of housing materials and such. We were given a ride back to Kigali on Sunday and spent the night in a hotel there after having dinner with our friend. It was a lovely end to our week away from Kibungo.

This is looking at the border of the Congo. Very busy as people were returning after spending the day selling goods at a market in Goma.

I almost forgot to mention that we’ve moved out of St-Joseph and now live in a house owned by INATEK! We moved our things over the day before leaving for Butare. So before heading back to Kibungo we went shopping in Kigali to get all of the things we needed for cooking: hot plate, dishes, utensils, soap, sponges, and some food. We had to pay for an extra seat on the bus for all of our purchases. From November 8^th-17^th we enjoyed many home-cooked meals, and we watched many tv shows and movies. On the 17^th we had some friends over for Mexican food and a movie and it was really great. The next day we woke up and had no power...since the power goes out a lot here we thought that it would come back on again soon, but it didn’t. We haven’t had power since! We found out on Friday that we had used all of the power allocated for the house! We are greedy muzungus that use too much power charging all of our electronics...kind of embarrassing! So we’ve spent the past week camping out at INATEK and St-Joseph charging all of our things. We’ve also been eating lots of baguette sandwiches, cold porridge (I even went so far as to make cold Nescafe coffee...), and a lot of our vegetables went bad! The other day our friend lent us his gas burning camp stove thing. So Gurjeet and I ended up spending about 3 hours making a vegetable stir fry and Mr. Noodles...and to make things worse I don’t think we cooked the vegetables enough because we all had upset stomachs the next day. We’ve discovered that electricity works as a pay-as-you-go, cash power thing. So Gurjeet is in town right now to buy us some more. From now on we will try to ration ourselves! I look forward to a hot bucket shower tonight (kettle water) and hot porridge/coffee tomorrow!

Drying our clothes in our new living room!

 After we got back to Kibungo we spent the week prepping ourselves and the students to do the Sprinkles research. Qualitative research is something that none of us had ever done so we spent a lot of time reading up on the methodology as well as the data analysis. We trained the students as best as we could and we got our interview questions translated into Kinyarwanda. We were expecting to leave for Karongi ( our first research destination) on November 14^th. We found out on the 12^th that our project proposal had been sent to the wrong governing body, so we quickly sent off an amended letter, but by that point we obviously had to postpone our research by at least a week. So we rescheduled to leave on November 21^st.

So during our unexpected week off we just kept reading  and preparing and we had many meetings to plan the logistics in each district. The project was being funded by both UNICEF and World Vision and we were meant to be heading out to Karongi with 11 INATEK students to stay in a really nice hotel on the lake and eat good food for the 4 field days. I went into Kigali twice last week to follow up on our proposal, and we found out on Friday that the project wouldn’t happen. It was a sad day! We had to call all of the students to explain what had happened, and then we bussed back to a powerless house and cold food. We were bummed to say the least. We’ve been talking with UNICEF today and it seems like there is still a glimmer of hope for the project, but we’re cutting it so close that even if we get approval we’re not sure if it would be a good idea.  I will keep you posted. 

This is a giant grasshopper-like insect that was on the table at St-Joseph

I congratulate you if you actually read that whole post!