¡Ay, caramba!

Off to Mexico...

Very excited! Will be leaving in approximately 32 hours. I've been a little busy lately trying to sort everything out before leaving. There's been a couple of hiccoughs at work so things were definitely a little hectic. Alas, I am now looking forward to Jason and Kirsten's wedding in Mexico. After, I will be spending a couple of days in London with Kara and then back to Nairobi! What a little jet setter I've become! Who knew?

Other than work things have been going well in Nairobi. Our life here is definitely settled now and wouldn't you believe it? It actually feels like we live here! I have to say we're much more spoiled than I thought we would be! Good food, clean place to live and...TV! Haha, even though Ive tried to resist I can't help but watch all the goodies...Grey's Anatomy, Prison Break, 24, Lost...it's all here...only one season behind! Ripped illegal DVD's are pretty easy to come by here though so it's pretty easy to catch up!

Anyhow, just thought I'd give a brief update. I'm sorry I haven't been as diligent as Matt has been about the blog but it seems like I've been here for so long that it doesn't really seem like there's a whole lot of new to report! Things are going extremely well though and I look forward to coming back here and doing more Sexual Education workshops and finishing up my work at the lab! I'm also looking forward to Matt and my year end trip when I return...has everyone figured out where we might be going?

Well, off to my farewell dinner I'm having with Matt tonight...we're going to try out a new Japanese restaurant we heard of...hopefully it's good!

See you all soon!

Jess

Working hard

A mad scramble to write up the proposal for the grant mentioned in the last post made for an incredibly busy week for me. It was an interesting process that I learned a great from as we had about 5 people contributing to it from 3 different continents. Keeping the draft synchronized could have been very difficult, but was made easy by using Google Docs. It is now almost finally almost done, and just awaiting a few signatures before we submit.

I was glad to see that my ploy to get more comments in the last post was somewhat successful! We now have only about 8 weeks before we depart, and here is yet another clue for those of you that haven't figured it out quite yet:


Jessica will soon be off to Mexico for her brothers wedding for two weeks -- I will let her blog about it, but I know that she can't wait. I wish I could go too, but a Nairobi-Cancun return flight is a bit pricey at the moment! In the meantime we don't have too much planned since we are basically saving up for our upcoming big trip. We'll probably go on another small safari pretty soon, and we are leaning towards one of two parks down towards the Tanzanian border: Amboseli or Masai Mara. We'll keep you posted...

Happy New Years!

Christmas & New Years were good to us, and now we're back to work in what we're calling "Phase 3" of our African trip. We will only be here in Nairobi for another two months or so, and then we'll be spending a month or so traveling before returning to Canada somewhere around mid-April.

The holidays were great, and we had good times with Jenn & Paul on our return to the Aberdares, our trip to Tanzania, and lounging around the house playing cards and drinking holiday concoctions.

In late December we were somewhat annoyed to discover that Housing had made a mistake here at ILRI which would necessitate our moving from the house back into the hostel. We put up quite a fight, but in the end nothing could be done. The guy in charge of Housing felt pretty bad about the whole affair, and ended up hooking us up with the one of the nicest rooms in the hostel. It is much nicer than our previous room here, and in addition to having our own balcony and a queen size bed (we used to have to push two singles together), the room has a killer view:

It's much brighter than our house was too, so all in all things are pretty good in our new abode.

Things at work for me are going quite well. Without nixing myself for talking about it too much, a team I'm part of has just advanced to the final stage of a competition for a fairly significant governmental grant. We find out in mid-Febuary if we get it, and if we do it'll have a huge impact on what I will be up to for the next 3 years. I'm crossing my fingers...

In other news, we have finally decided where we will be going for our end-of-trip trip (that's not a typo). Here is a big clue:


Can you guess?? Post your answer in the comments if you know...