I like to know what a place looks like when I'm reading about it. In case you do too, I've created this brief virtual tour of Mpala. On the day I made this, we had had four straight cloudy, rainy days.
Welcome to Mpala Research Center
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The Princeton dorms. Four rooms with two twin beds each, two rooms with one double bed each, and two bathrooms with two toilets, two showers, two sinks each.
Inside one of the Princeton dorms. Looks a lot like a dorm room on campus. Except here we have mosquito nets.
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The showers are heated by solar power, and usually run using groundwater drawn from a borehole towards the northern end of Mpala. This makes for a lovely shower--until you have four straight cloudy, rainy days and a broken borehole pump, in which case your shower is cold and brownish and less lovely.
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| The staff of Mpala collect and hand-wash dirty laundry every day. After the clothes dry, the staff fold them and leave them in the laundry room for pick-up. This makes for a lovely system--until you have four straight cloudy, rainy days and your clothes do not dry. |
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Mpala is a small complex (it only takes about five minutes, maximum, to walk from any one building to another) encircled by a dirt path about 0.8 miles long that people use as a walking and jogging trail. Though running loops around the path can get tedious, it's nothing compared to this race.
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If running around Mpala gets old (or if you have four straight cloudy, rainy days), then you can go visit the very cute and relatively new Mpala gym, which consists of one rowing machine, one bike, one elliptical, one weight machine, and one strange machine in front. The walls are all mesh screens, so instead of watching TV, you watch dik-diks and birds outside, and if the wind is blowing during your four straight cloudy, rainy days, you sometimes get wet anyway.
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| Breakfast is always the same: white bread, peanut butter, jam or marmalade, honey, granola, corn flakes, puffed rice cereal, Weetabix, shelf-stable milk, yogurt, and a fruit, usually bananas. It's kind of like Iron Chef or Chopped--what delicious meals can you prepare using only these eleven ingredients? Points will be given for appearance, creativity, and taste. |
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| The outdoor dining pavilion. There's always coffee, tea, and hot chocolate supplies available, and at 10:30 AM, charmingly, the kitchen staff puts out a snack for teatime. Kenya was once British, after all. |
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| Outside the Caylor lab, where I work. I'm still not really sure why we have such an impressive collection of skulls. We do research water--perhaps we want to remind people what happens when you don't have enough of it? |
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| Path running through the center of the complex. |
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| Mpala's small library. |
