Starting with purple: Megan, Catherine (shes crazy!) me, Doug aka Mbwa, and Noah

There is a lion hunting a group of Germans in a safari car to the right....I swear =)

TWIGA!!!!!!

Female Lion....not too happy.

Farren and I on top of a mountain overlooking the Serengeti

A lion eating a Warthog, so cool!!!!

This is the famous bird study team from Serengeti!!!!! We were the best group by far, I mean look at us! =)

Adam and I after the Safari (you get incredibly dirty from all the dust in the road, haha)

So as you all can see from the pictures I was on quite the safari. I was not able to write about it because of finals week. Following probably my best two weeks of my life we were thrown back into the city to start our finals. Now that it is all over I can share some of my experiences with you. The first week we went to Serengeti National Park. That was so amazing, it seems so long ago. Basically we were split into research teams. I drew the lucky straw and was able to study the birds……NOT! Haha. No one wanted the birds and the 6 of us who ended up studying them drew the short end of the straws, haha. I wanted to be in the predator or at least the hippo group. It ended being such an awesome group though. We had a great time together. We had to be up the earliest, of course as if studying birds wasn’t awesome enough!! Every morning we needed to be out of the campsite at 5:30 am! Haha. But once again it ended up being great. What most people didn’t know is we stopped frequently for lions to cross the road or watch the hippos slip into the water. Most activity within these National parks happens during sunrise and sunset. Oh seeing the sunrise over the Serengeti every morning wasn’t too shabby either AMAZING!!!! Anyways we also went on sunset game drives where we saw so much: Lions hunting and killing a warthog, leopards in the trees, lions having sex, (crazy, they do it every 10 mins for 48 hours straight!!) hippos, Elephants fighting, and on the last day in the Serengeti we saw a the world renown Tanzania Cheetah walk across the Serengeti plains during the sunset. We had been looking for a Cheetah since the day we got there, and it was soooo cool to see it the last day during the sunset. So much other stuff happened. Our campsite was literally smack dab in the middle of the Serengeti. Anything from Hyenas, lions, and elephants would walk across our campsite. You could shine your flashlight by the bathrooms at night and would see hundreds of eyes all over the place!!! I was going to the bathroom one night and on my way there I heard a high pitch scream. I thought to myself, oh crap someone just got attacked by a lion or something. So I ran over to the stall and saw my friend Chloe running out of the bathroom screaming and laughing. Apparently a bat lives in the drop latrine and while she was going to the bathroom a bat flew up and smacked her right on her butt!!!! Funniest thing ever! She had to be checked for rabies the next day!! Haha, but she is fine. So that is a very short clip from my time in the Serengeti. So much more happened, but it’s hard to type it all out! Haha. The next week we went to Lake Natron, where the famous Maasai tribe lives. I will hopefully get some more time tomorrow to write about that.

I’m having a great time. I just started my Independent Study Project yesterday. I took a 10-hour bus ride to Dar es Salaam and was supposed to catch a plane this morning to Kigoma. A lot of logistical failures occurred and I will not fly out until Wednesday. It was very stressful at the time, but everything happens for a reason and I know it will work out. I’m going to be studying the Burundi Refugees from the 1993 Genocide. My study question is:

My study will examine the following question: If given the opportunity, would 1993 Burundi refugees choose to naturalize, repatriate or resettle? To help understand their choices, I will document their living situations and experiences of their life just before 1993, and their current living situations in Tanzania now.

So basically this question will give me the opportunity to find out about their history and experiences during the genocide. It’s going to be pretty intense, but I cannot wait! These 1993 Burundi refugees are not given any choice but to return back to Burundi (repatriate). Some of these people saw their entire family get killed, it’s pretty awful that they will have to go back to that same house, especially because a lot of the killers have not yet been brought to justice. Some of them are even receiving death threats that if they return they will get killed. So hopefully my study will shed some light on their thoughts, and maybe even help their story be heard to the government. Please pray that logistical stuff will work out and I will be able to leave on Wednesday!