Orientation Week

Hi everyone!

So now that I'm two days into my orientation week here in Montreal I thought I would let you all know a little bit more of the information I have about my trip now. I don’t have a detailed itinerary but I can tell you about some of the places we will be travelling too.

We arrive in Nairobi on Monday evening. We are spending the rest of the week there, at the Nairobi campus of ICIPE (http://www.icipe.org/). At the end of the week we fly to Entebbe n Uganda, where we travel overland to Kibale National Park (I’ve posted that website on the right of this page). After a week there we travel overland to the shores of Lake Victoria, stopping in a few places along the way, including Jinja which is the source of the Nile River. From there we continue down into the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, the northern extension of the Serengeti Plains in Tanzania. We continue traveling overland over the next few weeks visiting Lake Bringo in the rift valley, Mount Kenya, and several other sites. Finally we travel back to the coast and fly from Mombasa to Zanzibar for the last part of the program. When you sketch all of that out on the map it makes a bit of a zigzag pattern across southern Uganda and Kenya. We are covering a lot of ground in those weeks.

We found out today (finally!) the final schedule of courses that is being offered as well. There are two “context” courses that everyone takes throughout the trip. The first is Natural History of East Africa, and many of the game drives, and other trips to natural sites that we are doing as a group will be part of this course. The other course is Peoples and Cultures of East Africa. As part of this course we’re going to be doing some research projects which span the length of the trip. We will be spending some of the first week in Nairobi developing these projects. Our other three credits are done in three intensive sessions, with three courses to choose from in each session. In the first session the choices are Primatology, Conservation Biology and a Development course with a health focus. I’m not sure how I’m going to choose! Some of the other courses being offered include Ornithology, Swahili History, Archaeology, Biological Diversity in East Africa, and two other Development courses. This week we are mostly participating in introductory lectures by many of the professors who will be traveling with us, as well as by other McGill faculty with expertise in the area. Today’s included dangerous creatures, tropical diseases and our second Swahili lesson! Tommorrow our schedule includes a lecture by Romeo Daillaire’s second in command in Rwanda, Major Brent Beardsley.

That’s all for now I think. I need to get up early tommorrow to continue wrestling with the McGill administration a bit to sort just a few more things out!