Little Anna, Big World: What I Will Be Doing for Three Months

6/27/13

DEFINITIONS TO BETTER YOUR COMPREHENSION:

Yenzi Camp: This is where the management staff lives with their families. These are all long-term employees, both ex-pats and Gabonese. The longest time here is four years. It has a school and a clubhouse and some other nice amenities.

Vembo: There are dorms and an eating area here for very short time fieldwork employees, who don’t bring their family. Here they work for about a month, take a month off, and so on. Their days are from 6 AM – 6 PM every day. We also have our lab here, in a separate building. I like it, there’s a nice patio to eat lunch and a lake right nearby. Watch out for the crocodiles.

Gamba: This is the actual town, also called Plaine because it's pretty flat, and it’s where I live! It’s not very big, pop. 9,000, but compared to what it used to be (a tiny fishing village) it’s huge. I live on the main street in the dormitory, which is one of the few nicely paved roads and has lots of open-air shops and such. Apparently there’s a nightclub somewhere too. I have yet to see any police.

Anyways:

Today is my fourth day at work! Yesterday Lisa and I figured out a solid set of projects for me to work on. The first one I’m starting on today is doing short biographies of main researchers that are working in the Gabon Biodiversity Program, as well as some short articles of what the different teams are doing. Today I’m going out with Lisa, Michel, and Gabriel to a research camp until Sunday. Like I mentioned in the “Bienvenue à Gabon” post, Gamba is seeking to develop its infrastructure, especially when it comes to accessibility for cargo and people. So they already have the big boat, and they’ve been trying to build a road that will connect a highway near Loumbodo to Moungangara, from which people/cargo/cars would be shipped to Mayonami and then Gamba.

I say trying because apparently there have been a lot of issues with money, time, bureaucracy, basically everything it sounds like. Anyways the Smithsonian team is doing studies to figure out the best way to build the road, and also so that they can study the area after it is built to see the impact it had.

I’ll be going out there to interview people for their bios, as well as doing short pieces on their work. Lisa also just wants me to get a better grasp on what it is that they’re doing out there. I'll be trying to write them up in French first, and then English.

Secondly, I’ll be working on the ongoing elephant camera traps. Mereille, the elephant specialist here, and Lisa along with some others have been trying to identify individual forest elephants who commonly walk through the Yenzi camp here. It can be a serious problem because there are bike trails, a golf course, and a lot human activity that are in close quarters with these elephants. From my short time here, one thing that I’ve learned is that elephants are not to be trifled with. They are ridiculously strong, very intelligent, and don’t react well to human contact. Usually in a situation when they feel threatened, they will charge.

This elephant-human relationship is very present, and yet we don’t really know anything about the elephants coming through here. We don’t know how many different families there are, what they’re social behavior is, how many babies there are, males or females, or how many individual elephants there are. So using a set protocol for distinguishing different features (with these camera traps, Mereille has identified 50 individual elephants. But nobody has been keeping up to date with the data on the camera traps and now my job is to look through 90,000 files and memorize the previous 50 elephants, and categorize new ones.

Thom is working on developing a program that will hopefully make this process much easier, so that I can actually compare new photos to the profiles of the individuals. But he’s leaving this Saturday and so I’m really hoping that he’ll finish it in time.

Speaking of Thom, I went fishing of the beach on Tuesday with him, his father, two Dutch contractors, and another lady. We didn’t catch anything but it was nice to see the beach again. The shells here are absolutely incredible. They’re all huge and intact for the most part.

And I forgot to mention the third project, helping with the mini-jungle! Apparently it has been very neglected, and there’s not much going on with it so Lisa asked if I could help out, as in finding a gardener, finding plants, identifying the ones inside, etc. This is one of the projects that has a little less urgency, so I’ll probably work on that intermittently.

Here are some photos from fishing on Tuesday: