Out in the Field

After my one-day rest, the real work-week began: I would spend it out in the field with a film crew, who came here to shoot a documentary about the mountain gorillas. I should mention that the cameraman is Ted Turner’s son (yes, THE Ted Turner), so the expectations were quite high all-around. Here I was, brand new to this organization, all of a sudden “in charge” of these people – who, in all honesty, didn’t really know what they were doing-doing either (i.e. not sure exactly what to focus on).

So here we were, Monday morning in Kinigi, the facility for the captive mountain and Grauer’s gorillas. They are held behind a big fence, and we were not allowed in as we had not yet cleared the quarantine period. So we would go atop on of those big safari vehicles and shoot from there. My mind was constantly running between the journalist in me (I would have loved to conduct some interviews and get some footage with that EXTREMELY expensive and fancy equipment) and the PR-ish person in me (who was actually supposed to coordinate everything from the other side – logos, pertinent interviews, etc.)

We spent most of our Monday and Tuesday morning there, and gradually I and they also caught onto the job better. We interviewed people at the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project as well (they arebased in Musanze, just down the street from us), and then went up to the Bisate clinic (which serves 32 villages and some 20,000 people) to see how they deal with controlling diseases going between humans and wild animals.

There has been excitement all around, of course. On our first day, following a CRAZY storm, a flood of water was gushing down from the mountain, basically ruining a good part of this brand new road. We also happened a few minutes after a horrible accident, where a Burundi car had slammed into a house, destroying half of it in the blow. A day later our driver killed a baby goat. I decided I would never leave the office anymore. The streets are just TOO dangerous, and FULL of thousands of people just running around at l times.

We also had a different kind of experience: the driver took us to a “nice” lunch place – one of those super fancy lodges, where millionaires come and stay before trekking gorillas (if I didn’t mention it already, a tourist permit for a day is $500…) Lunch was indeed a very good buffet (I chose tons of avocado dishes and spinach), but the bill came to almost $100 for three people (we were there maybe for half-an-hour). Of course Rhett Turner paid, but it did indeed feel as almost a shameful waste, thinking of where we were and that we had just killed a family’s goat on the road…