Tuesday July 27, 2010 - Training day 1 and wood fired pizza

Tuesday July 27, 2010

It’s 8:30 PM and we’re all tuckered out and settling down to books and computers for the evening. The internet is off, which is rather a blessing as no one can be on-line which means there is all sorts of work that can’t be done. It’s a lovely evening - the stars are bright in the sky and the moon is an enormous orange hunter’s moon. The road leading up to the MGVP compound is lined by huge monkey puzzle trees, apparently a South American import, and they make the most incredible shadows. We are down to the girls now as Mike headed back to the US for a few weeks. Jan and I, and Andrea and Dallas. After the training we walked round the block to Karisoke, which is the headquarters of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Foundation, or DFGF, for a talk by a PhD student on maternal investment in nursing in mountain gorillas. There is certainly an interesting selection of expats and locals/regional people working on a range of conservation projects in the area. A lot of the North American and European researchers go back and forth, spending up to 6 months per year here although mostly in shorter stints. Anyway we listened to an interesting talk and then walked down the road a ways for pizza. A Moroccan/German couple has opened a combo bar/restaurant business and they have a real wood-fired pizza oven so we went for pizza. It was great! It would have been a great pizza anywhere in the world as all the more unexpected here. Ordering was a bit of a challenge though, they have 5 versions of pizza on the menu, and I think the waiter came back at least 5 times to double check our drink and food orders. In the end we got what we wanted, although we had to do some trading around on the bills. A good 8-10 people from the talk followed on after us, so it was definitely a “gorilla group” there tonight.

The training today seemed to go over well. We started bang on time at 9:00 - I gave Benard a hard time about Rwandan African time vs Ugandan African time as it was rather a job getting people there on time in Kampala. We’ll see how it goes at 8:AM tomorrow. We had about 25 people from a variety of different backgrounds and organizations, and there was a lot of good discussion and questions so I think the objectives are being reached. The highlight was again dressing a volunteer (a real one this time) up in the PPE outfit - white suit, apron, goggles, mask, booties and double gloves. Heaven help them trying to work in the heat in all that! We were well fortified with tea, mandazi - a deep fried dough lump that has a certain relationship to a doughnut, without the sweetness, a big cooked lunch, and then spicy samoosas in the afternoon. I’m sure I’m gaining weight!