Thursday, July 29, 2010

Thursday July 29 2010 - one nasty virus, 5 beef hearts, and a dead gorilla baby

Well, it's been quite a day! Didn't start off that well - last night I gave up in disgust with my computer - it had been working perfectly until after we came home from the training, and then it fell apart and refused to do things properly. We were going out to someone's house for a visit, so I turned it off and that was that. This morning, it still wasn't behaving and a virus scan came up with a bunch of Trojans. Cleaned them but it was still on strike and misbehaving. I managed to get through my morning lecture, but just barely. The lucky part of all this was that the IT guy for MGVP was out today fixing stuff, and to cut it short, my netbook has gone on a trip to Kigali to have its registry repaired and hopefully get it back into a proper frame of mind. Bugger. If he has to wipe it and start over then I will lose a bunch of programs I loaded at home, as well as access to any of the files that use those programs. Like the last four days worth of blog that I couldn't upload that are in Word Perfect! And I know exactly whose memory stick it came from - Julius'. That's the last time I trade files by anything other then email! My computer is not going to have relations with anyone else's memory stick again.

However, the educational part of the day was good. Today was rounds - the monthly meeing where the MGVP staff from Rwanda, Congo and Uganda get together to discuss issues and do CE and planning. I was the CE part. After the business discussions were finished I went through some theory on necropsy dissection of the heart, and then after lunch we dissected beef hearts together. It actually worked really well - everyone was keen, we discovered a number of inconsistencies in the protocols and how different people are doing things, and I think everyone got a lot out of it. And nothing went to waste - after we were finished the hearts were taken off to be boiled up and will be used to feed the dogs for the next few days!

The surprise part of the day was the dead baby gorilla. Two weeks old, it had been last seen alive with its mother 3 days ago, but this morning she was noted to be carrying the dead infant, which she dropped when the rangers came near. Let's just say it was not in the best of all conditions. In fact the face rather looked like one of those shrunken heads they use to scare people in movies about cannibals and head hunters. So after finishing the beef hearts and fortifying ourseolves with a good cup of tea, we donned our PPE (personal protective equipment) and necropsied what was left of the gorilla. A good chance to work through the PM forms and make suggestions, but I'm afraid most of the organs were liquid instead of solid so there may not be a lot of diagnostic value in it all.

Necropsy finished, we scooted round the block to the Karisoke office (the Dian Fossey Gorilla Foundation) for an interesting talk on mountain gorilla skeletons. An American woman is spearheading a program to gather, collate, and describe the skeletons of all the mountain gorillas that have died in the last 10-15 years, plus historical collections. It is the biggest collection of mountain gorilla bones in the world and will be featured in a new natural history museum in Kigali. They have exhumed and cleaned the bones from the majority of the recent gorilla burials, and now when a gorilla dies it is buried in a special location near the park entrance, and then exhumed after an appropriate time when the soft tissues have returned to the earth and the bones are mostly clean. Because they have names, ages, and medical histories on many of the animals it is a really unique opportunity to make sense of the skeletal data and develop norms for growth rates, bone maturity, tooth eruption, etc. Neat talk.

Then back to the pizza place for an MGVP dinner thanks to one of the US sponsors whose friend is here for a few days and was told to "take us all out for dinner". No complaints on our side - Leon has been having it easy this week with us all out for meals most of the time. Again, great pizza cooked over the open wood fired pizza oven. Served with beer or soft drinks served "conge", or cold. If you don't ask for conge you get them how most people like their sodas and been - warm.

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