African Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
It's been a good day here at KBC. We had the day off and we spent it relaxing, playing games, and helping cook. We got a hold of two turkeys, which, in true African fashion, we prepared from scratch. Some of us visited club Kimana, a bar and restaurant in town for about an hour before dinner. Then we feasted on our turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic bread, rolls, and other goodies until I was ready to burst. Right now we're watching Elf in preparation for the next holiday.
In other news, DR is in full swing. The project I'm working on with 9 others is with the environmental policy professor, Tome, and we're examining the economic viability and wildlife compatibility of pastoralism as a livelihood. We've been going all over the district interviewing people about their livelihood strategies with a questionnaire about 45 minutes long. We have an outrageous amount of data that we've been working on entering into our statistics program as well. Also we have lots of articles to read to prepare for writing the paper, which should end up being around 60 pages total. We have one more day of data collection tomorrow, and then it'll be data entry and analysis, and then paper write-up. We'll also talk to focus groups of different age sets of Maasai and representatives of several organizations. It's a very big project and it will require a lot of hard work. For today, though, I'm taking a day of rest. Nobody works on Thanksgiving day!
We recently got a detailed schedule of our Kilimanjaro climb. It's very exciting. On summit day, we'll wake up at around midnight to reach the top. They make it sound very challenging, but definitely doable. We start climbing in about 17 days. It's very close! Crazy.