Cabin Fever

            Adventure begets boredom.

            I’m sure nearly all of you have come to the same realization somewhere in the middle of your third extra hour in the terminal waiting for the airport guys to finally figure out how to deice the plane. European explorers had to suffer through day after identical day of voluminous sky and ocean before any meaningful exploring could really begin. Heck, astronauts even have to go through isolation training to combat the boredom they’ll experience in space. And it doesn’t get too much more adventurous than space.

You bet it doesn't.

            I’ve mentioned before that the days at Mpala tend to blend into each other, but now that I’ve gone a couple of weeks without a major adventure (and possibly also because I’m nearing the end of my time here), I’m feeling a touch of cabin fever set in. The Mpala complex is not large—it’s no more than a five minute walk between any two points within it—and since buffalo, elephants, and predators roam freely ouside its electric fences, you’re not allowed to leave the boundaries unless you’re in a car or doing research accompanied by a field assistant or an askari (security guard). Since I don’t have my own car and do most of my work in the Caylor lab, a typical day for me occurs entirely within the same small space. There are mornings, like the one a few days ago punctuated by a gorgeous sunrise and double rainbow, when I’m struck by how fortunate I am to be interning in such a unique location. But there are also mornings when dik-diks and hornbills seem more common than squirrels at Princeton, and I long to see pretty much any non-acacia tree.

            Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: boredom begets innovation.

            With no television (sadly, no access to Elizabeth’s telenovelas), spotty internet, and nowhere to go, Mpalans have to be creative when it comes to thinking up things to do after work and on Sunday (Saturday, or at least Saturday morning, is generally considered a workday in Kenya as well). Ten weeks in, here’s the list of my go-to MRC activities:

Wikipedia: This one only works when the stars align (or when our tech guy, George, actually decides to come into work) and the internet is reasonably fast. In preparation for those times, though, I keep a running mental list of those things that I simply must know more about. Pieces of Wikiwisdom I’ve amassed so far:

-Trix comes from Kix! Same recipe, but with added fruit flavoring. Which when you think about it, makes so much sense.

                                     

How did we never notice this before?

-Venus is the most spherical planet.

-In the eighteenth century, the word "mango" meant "to pickle." So you might mango your cucumber.

Or you could make mango-cucumber salsa. Leah, that's on our agenda for when I get home.

-Q-Tips, for reasons unfathomable, were originally called "Baby Gays." This little bit of Wikipediaing also led me to this mildly interesting column by Joel Stein published in Time some years ago.

Counting Things: Since I have pretty much the same routine every day, I’m able to get a pretty good estimate of the number of times I’ve done or consumed something here. I’ve calculated that 69 days equals, among other things:

            11 gallons of tea and coffee

            138 bananas

            7 pineapples

2,100 water vapor samples collected (which translates into 52.5 hours of sampling time)

300 laps around the 0.85-mile-long track that runs around Mpala’s inner border

414 omnipresent tiny black ants, mercilessly smushed

Bananagrams: Hasbro, Mattel, and Milton Bradley ought to stop wasting money staging those scenes they put on their game boxes and just take pictures of us, because we (well, mostly me), get more into our games than all of the white-toothed, racially diverse families ever depicted on a Sorry or Connect Four box combined. 

We freaking LOVE Connect Four!

           Our hands-down favorite, as my Facebook friends may have guessed from my current profile picture, is Bananagrams.

If you're not my Facebook friend, you should fix that. In the meantime, here's the pic.

            Bananagrams is a set of 144 lettered tiles (like Scrabble tiles, but without point values) that come packaged, oddly but wonderfully, in a cloth banana. I am told that one can also acquire Scrabble Apple, which is similar to Bananagrams, the main difference being that the tiles come in a cloth apple. Let me say for the record that should the manufacturers ever extend to more exotic fruits, I would be first in line to buy Rambutangrams.

Rambutan.

            We used to play Bananagrams the normal way, where players tried to be the first to use all of their letters in an interlocking grid of words when there are no more letters in the central pool to draw from. After a little while, we ditched the speed element and played for style instead, trying to use the longest and most esoteric words we could. At this point, I’ve bought the Bananagrams set off Chrissy, who originally brought it, I play almost daily with Kathleen (the only other person whose B-grams ardor continues to burn as brightly as it did when at the beginning of the summer), and nearly everyone else here groans whenever we pour out the tiles again.

Social Drinking: An activity with a wider following than Bananagrams. Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.

Perhaps.

            Every few days, someone decides that it’s time for a “sundowner,” which requires everyone to haul out any sort of beverage they’ve got stored in their room, cram into the few cars at Mpala with working headlights, and drive somewhere to drink and watch the sunset. For a successful sundowner, it’s best to have as wide a selection of beverages as possible: vodka, hard cider, Coke, whisky, boxed wine, passion fruit juice, bitter lemon soda, ginger beer, tropical juice, rum, the mysterious Kenya Cane, and, of course, the giant ubiquitous bottles of Tusker beer. It’s also best to have the sundowner on a cliff or near a river, where one has a greater chance of falling to our deaths or being charged by hippos upon excessive consumption of the aforementioned. 

Sundowner at Lookout Rock. I don't think anyone's fallen off. Yet.

         Like I said, we’re always on the lookout for a little extra excitement.

         But don't worry, I won't go too crazy, because one thing my cabin fever has made me realize is that I'd better never get arrested, ever. If I can get restless here, there's no way I'd ever get through any time in jail. Especially since I don't think most inmates are too big on Bananagrams.