Finishing

Hey all!

Sorry to whoever’s day I’m stealing/interrupting, the internet stopped working on Thursday before I could post. I learned, however that it works when you are right next to the server technology, so I am reconnected and can communicate with you all again! Today feels like the last day of school before summer here, and it sort of is. I finished my research paper (after countless hours and late nights, drafts, three complete rewrites of my results because agriculturalists who have livestock are agro-pastoralists, etc.), and it is a monster of a beast. It’s 50 pages without the appendices, and 132 with (but the majority of the appendices is appendix C, which is the analysis used for the results, and because it was so big I didn’t include it in the hard copy I turned in). I’m proud of it, although I wish I could have had more time on it, which technically now I do. Because all we have left is the community presentation of our results on Wednesday and closing activities (basically stuff to try to reduce culture shock), it feels like it’s all over, and I just have the next few days to relax. The grass is green (because of all the rain, it’s the start of the rainy season), the stream by the camp is overflowing (it’s constantly orange and was roaring last night), bugs are everywhere and so are the swallows eating them. And in my bird count I’ve seen/identified 233 birds so far, and my goal is 250 before the end of this week, which is totally possible. Each time I go birding around camp I get around 3-5 new species, and we went to the slopes of Kilimanjaro yesterday, which was amazing, and I saw 16 new bird species there. Anyway, I have 6 days left here, which is both sad and exciting, but I’m ready to get on that plane again.