It's not a weapon...

...if I'm going to use it as a wall decoration, right? I bought a genuine Maasai sword and spear. They weren't that expensive and how many opportunities am I going to have to do that? Daniel (who I've talked about before) goes to Tanzania and special orders them, so they are forged specifically for us. Then Daniel is going to teach everyone who has them how to throw them. I can't wait for those lessons. We have a fantastic group of people, but a lot of them are prone to giggle fits. I can just see the group collapsing into a fit of giggles while a spear sails off in an arbitrary direction. It's gonna be great. The Maasai use these spears to bring even elephants down and we're not going to be able to lift them above our heads. Apparently it's one of the challenges of the program to figure out how to bring them back home on the plane.

We have our first non-program day tomorrow which means we won't spend the usual five hours of the day in class. We only have one "day off" per six or eight days, so it's a pretty heavy schedule as far as school is concerned. My only complaint is that the wooden chairs are a little hard on my twice-broken tailbone. Our classes are at least 1.5 hrs apiece and so far all but two of them have been in the chumba. As our semester really gets going, we're going to be out in the field a lot more. All of my classes (Wildlife Ecology, Wildlife Management, Socioeconomic and Environmental Policy, and Culture/Swahili) are GREAT! My teachers are really enthusiastic and very knowledgeable. They all live at the camp so their office hours are basically whenever you feel like knocking on their door. My wildlife management teacher (Dr. Okello) went to grad school at the U of I (1993-1996) and he LOVES Idaho. He says I'm the first student he's ever had from Idaho and he's very excited about it. His exact quote was, "People ask me if I love America and I say, 'I love Idaho! America was not good to me; Idaho was!'" He mentions Moscow at least three times every lecture and talks about a lot of wildlife issues from back home. A lot of students are from the west too, so it feels very different from the student body I'm surrounded by in New York. The student body is fairly representative of all the states though.

This particular picture will have to be enlarged to really see the animal. I have better pictures, but they haven't been uploaded yet. We're going to Amboseli National Park next week where we are guaranteed to get even better pictures. Until then, the plan for tomorrow is to go for a hike and then hit up a grocery store in a bigger town nearby to resupply on snack food, i.e. chocolate. The Landcruiser drives are growing on me. It feels almost IDENTICAL to the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. It's just a little slower, a lot more dusty, and there's a greater possibility of blowing a tire or getting stuck in a hole. The wildlife, the landscape, and the stories we hear from our drivers more than make up for it though.