Dippiest Dipterist

Reboot

2011-11-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Well it’s been a while, to start with a bit of a blogging cliché. I took a bit of a break from blogging, and indeed from my PhD and much of my life, because of depression. I was going to write about the depression but then I realised you're here to read about insects and poo (at least I thought you were, though according to my page view statistics you're here to read about Crowded House and David Attenborough). If you really want to know what depression feels like I'd recommend reading this, which has to be one of the most heartbreaking things featuring pasta I've ever seen.

So I’m back at university, and I’m just about coping, and I’m going to see how far I can go. I want to get what I’ve done out there so it can be useful, and I’m assured that some of it would be publishable quality with a little bit more work, even if I have trouble believing that myself. Whether or not I go on to try for a PhD is a question for the future. I think that the focus of this blog will change a bit though; concentrating on my PhD to the exclusion of everything else probably contributed to my sprained brain, so I’m going to aim to write some more general entomological posts, reminding myself why I love this subject in all its multilegged glory in the first place. Hence the name change; I won't be doing any more fieldwork, and Geek in South West London doesn't have much of a ring to it.

Happy Halloween everyone!

2011-10-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

Source of the awesome: Biodiversity in Focus

A quick plug

2011-04-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

If anyone's been missing tales of bad weather and body odour in exotic locales, a friend of mine is cycling across South America at the moment. We're running a sweepstake on how long it takes him to become a Colombian drugs baron.

Ever seen a maggot under an electron microscope?

2010-08-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Huhurhur, yur goofy lookin!

Dangers at dusk: is it time to move beyond bednets?

2010-08-25T04:39:00.000-07:00

I originally wrote this for The Guardian's "Write the World" International development journalism competition. You can see the winning pieces here, some of which are excellent. I'd particularly recommend "Aid: Dead or alive?" for a more balanced discusion of the benefits and pitfalls of western aid than you usually find in the papers.

Cattle amble lazily back to their night time pastures as the sun sets over the tiny Gambian village of Wellingara. In dusty compound courtyards women stoke the fires that will cook the evening meal of rice and oily stews, while in the streets their husbands wait for their dinner, brewing tooth-achingly sweet attaya tea over charcoal braziers. As the coals smoulder and light-hearted banter or serious matters of village politics fill the evening air you could be forgiven for thinking this was one of the most tranquil places on earth. But all is not as peaceful as it appears.

“You can tell the people who are not from around here because they fight themselves” laughs Tumani, a fieldworker for The Gambia’s Medical Research Council, as he demonstrates how foreigners slap their faces and arms when they feel mosquitoes landing. Locals enjoying the relative cool of the evening know instead to brush the pests from exposed skin, their hands in continuous, fluid motion. Whatever strategies are employed against it though, early evening mosquito biting before people go to bed is a problem which mosquito nets are unable to tackle.

Uptake of bednets in The Gambia has been extraordinarily successful, with almost three quarters of households estimated to own at least one. Although malaria-focussed health education campaigns have doubtless increased their use, like the elaborately carved hardwood beds bought for newlyweds bednets have become something of a status symbol with perceived benefits that go far beyond malaria control. They catch detritus falling from traditional thatched roofs, provide a measure of privacy in a country where large extended families typically share a compound and are appreciated as interior decoration. In the local markets gaudily coloured nets swing in the breeze, adorned with lacy ruffles like some bizarre cross between a jelly fish and a wedding dress. While there are of course caveats – many of the locally produced nets are untreated with insecticides that protect people sleeping against the nets from bites, and the youngest children most vulnerable to malaria may not be the ones sleeping under the nets – with malaria infections and deaths in decline in The Gambia, this tiny country provides an encouraging example of what could be achieved by widespread adoption of insecticide-treated bednets.

Unfortunately it seems that in some areas bednets are becoming victims of their own success. The most effective nets are those treated with pyrethroid insecticides, but in some parts of Africa populations of mosquitoes are evolving resistance to pyrethroids and as treated nets become more common resistance will offer a greater survival advantage and so is likely to spread through the population.

Concerns are also emerging that malarial mosquitoes may be changing their behaviour to bite earlier in the evening before people are protected by nets. To complicate matters humans are also changing their behaviour; particularly in urban areas where development may bring electric light and flickering televisions beaming Brazilian telenovelas or Kung Fu movies to rapt audiences, people are staying up later after sundown and remaining exposed to mosquitoes for longer. Taking into consideration the fact that malaria is not the only disease transmitted by mosquitoes - the species that transmits yellow fever, for example, is active at dusk – the importance of preventing early evening biting becomes increasingly apparent.

Large-scale mosquito control programmes, such as those treating water sources where mosquitoes breed with chemical or biological insecticides, have had impressive results in some areas but require a great deal of political will, organisation and stability to scale up and so may not be appropriate everywhere. Instead the use of repellents, chemicals that smell unpleasant to mosquitoes, is being suggested as an approach that can be targeted at the household level as bednets can.

Tourists and travellers visiting malaria-endemic areas have long protected themselves with DEET, the plastic-melting personal repellent that can be rubbed on skin, and with the development of gentler personal repellents such as those derived from lemon eucalyptus oil there has been interest in extending the benefits to the local population. This work is in its early stages, but results from work in Bolivia on the effects of personal repellents in addition to nets are encouraging. However, as campaigns to promote handwashing with soap in Africa have shown, encouraging a change in habits is difficult and attempting to foster a culture of repellent use from scratch where none existed before would be challenging to say the least.

Another approach is the use of spatial repellents, odorous chemicals which disperse and so could make a wide area, for example the veranda of a house, unattractive to mosquitoes. Here signs are perhaps more encouraging; families in The Gambia already regularly burn mosquito coils or local herbs to deter evening biting insects, and as our knowledge of mosquito behaviour and biology increases we will be increasingly well placed to evaluate the effectiveness of these particular blends and to design new mixtures of odours and methods of delivering them.

Of course the use of repellents may simply provide a different pressure for mosquito populations to evolve their way around. Peaceful as the streets of Wellingara may appear as the tropical sun slips below the horizon, in the ongoing war between humans and mosquitoes they are in fact a battle ground.

Home

2010-08-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

I isolate the individual odours attractive to my flies from a complicated blend using a process called chromatography. Although this is done at Rothamsted with a fancy piece of equipment the basic principle is very simple: you have two different substances or "phases" which have different affinities for the different components of the blend you're trying to separate. The mobile phase, a gas or liquid, is passed over the stationary phase which could be a polymer or wax. Things with a greater affinity for the mobile phase will spend a greater proportion of the time in it, so will come out of the system faster than things with a greater affinity for the stationary phase. Use a long enough system and different constituents of a mixture will reliably come out separately, one after another.

The random chemistry lesson comes courtesy of a brilliant demonstration of the principles of chromatography that I saw at Gatwick airport on the way home. A mixed crowd of Gambians and British people got off the plane and started walking through the terminal building. We all walked together until we reached the first moving walkway, which interestingly the British people got on but the Gambians didn't. Three walkways later, the airport-sized chromatography system had acheived perfect of a mixed group of human beings on the basis of nationality with the Brits emerging 50 metres ahead of the Gambians.

So now I'm home, with my bloke and my family and my knitting and my tea and my 24 hour amenities and I'd be lying if I said it was anything other than a huge relief. Apologies to everyone I haven't been in touch with yet, I've needed a little time to recover but I plan to get in touch with all of you very soon. And everyone I have managed to speak to, even if it's just on facebook, thanks for the lovely welcome.

I think Hounslow Borough Council also wanted to welcome me back, I got home to find this poster on the bus stop on our street!

Photo time!

2010-07-29T23:07:00.000-07:00

I've got my photos up on Picasa:

The international language of suspicion

2010-07-29T14:47:00.001-07:00

So I'm back down on the coast, with a few samples, a few pupae that I hope are still alive and the majority of my marbles. I've just come back from visiting my fieldworker D's wife, daughter and extended family who touchingly and quite out of the blue presented me with a dress for myself and a shirt for the bloke.

The Gambia is so different from everything I'm used to that it sometimes feels like I've landed on a different planet, until something startles me into realising just how connected we all are. Meeting D's wife's aunt, who dresses like a traditional village wife and speaks flawless English after living in Bromley for two years, was one such event but the person who really surprised me was D's brother in law, a school headmaster. We got talking about how I'd get back to the hotel, D explaining that he would accompany me in the taxi, a plan which the headmaster approved of. He then announced, and I quote pretty much word for word:

"It is good that you are going with her because it is not safe now in The Gambia. Before it was safe for a woman at night but now they let anybody into the country, all these Senegalese and Nigerians. Sometimes now I go into Banjul and all I hear are languages that I don't understand."

I burst out laughing, a bit of a courtesy fail that I had to talk myself out of, but I think that just goes to show that whatever our cultural difference people all over the world are all the same. We're all so frightened of each other but even the more prejudiced members of society are prejudiced in exactly the same way.

That's about as philosophical as I get when sleep deprived, high on Coca Cola and demob happy, so I'll leave you with that thought and try to finally get some sleep. Night all.

Nightmares

2010-07-20T04:06:00.001-07:00

Fun day yesterday, it was so hot you could actually watch beads of sweat forming on your skin and the generator exploded. Actually, genuinely exploded – Sarah, one of the MSc students had to put out the fire and in doing so discovered that the fire extinguisher had already been discharged. A miscommunication with the guards sent me and D off yomping round town to try and sort out a problem with the NAWEC (National Water and Electricity Company) that didn't actually exist, and to top it all off one of the kittens is missing and has been for several days, presumed... well not presumed anything good anyway. Just about the only thing going well here at the moment are the sores on Mission's ears – I didn't expect the antibiotic powder to do much but they're about half the size they were when I arrived. He may even be ready for a photo before I go (I know they'll just get worse again when I leave, but at least I can give the poor dog some relief for a short time).

In the evening wrote a long email to my supervisor, summarising how my work had been going (badly) and the internet cut out as I was sending it – I lost the whole thing. So I decided it was finally time for the five tiny strips of streaky bacon the students had picked up for me in Senegal, that I'd been saving for when things got really bad and cooked this:

And incidentally facilitated cannibalism in the process, by unthinkingly lobbing the plate of peelings over the wall to the pigs the way I usually do and forgetting there was bacon rind on there too. So I cut my losses and got an early night.

A few hours later I woke up, needing to visit the toilet to give the mosquitoes their midnight snack. Getting back into bed by the dim illumination of the security lights is always tricky - I don't know if you've ever seen that daft film in which Catherine Zeta-Jones writhes around in a catsuit to dodge laser beams, but if you imagine a mosquito net that has inexplicably multiplied overnight into a dozen layers instead of laser beams and me with a sweat-stained t-shirt and hair like a refugee from the eighties instead of CZJ in a catsuit you'll get the picture. I'd managed to get inside from the waist up and was leaning on my hands to pull my legs in when something largish and indistinct in the feeble light darted across the sheet and came to rest against my hand.

My heart started beating like that of the average teenage audience member watching CZJ writhe in the catsuit, but I didn't move my hand ("Must...not...disturb whatever it is, spider? Baby scorpion? World's largest tick? It doesn't seem to be biting me yet. WTF is is???"). Instead I cautiously, slowly reached for my torch with the other hand, flicked it on and carefully moved the circle of light closer so as not to startle the...... @(**$%@ing rubber earplug that had rolled across the sheet into the depression made by my hand (I keep the box inside the net with me to be easily accessible in the event of enthusiastic mosques or rams, and it had come open). I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry so I settled for passing out asleep instead, falling into feverish dreams in which the person I'd expected to most disapprove of my involvement with Mission was paying to bring him over to the UK and helping me to choose a crate for him for the flight. I think all things considered that if my subconscious is going to torment me with anything I'd rather it was phantom insects.

The people who look like baboons

2010-07-17T02:47:00.001-07:00

Whilst making a collection in a family compound today, D got chatting to some of the women and soon the whole group was doubled over in laughter. Feeling a little left out I asked him to translate the joke for me.

"These people come from the South Bank, so they are Jarankas." He explained. "I am Nionka and I was telling them that their old people look like baboons."

I was momentarily stunned, seeing as this wasn't really the sort of thing I was hoping a diplomatic fieldworker would be saying to a family helping with my study. But everyone seemed quite happy, so on the way home I pressed him for further information.

D explained that many years ago, the Nionka man and the Jaranka man were brothers living in a village on the north bank who decided to set out to seek their fortunes. The Nionka man went first and was able to find a lot of food on his way so did well. The Jaranka man came after him, but he wasn't so good at finding food and in any case the Nionka man had already taken most of it so he quickly became very hungry. One night the Jaranka man came across the place where the Nionka man had crossed the river and set up camp. He found his brother getting ready to eat, surrounded by good food and clean water. The brothers greeted each other and the Jaranka man asked for something to eat, complaining of how hungry he was.

"Of course you can share my food" said the Nionka man "but first please go into the bush and fetch this thing (some sort of seasoning?) so that we can enjoy our food together."

The Jaranka man (who seems to have been a bit of a proto-bumster) pleaded that he didn't know how to find whatever it was, couldn't his brother see how hungry it was and didn't that show he was no good at finding food? The Nionka man agreed to go looking for it instead, and while he was gone the Jaranka man ate all the food and drank all the water.

When the Nionka man came back he was furious and hurled insults at his brother. The Jaranka man tried to calm him down, saying that he had been starving and if he had not eaten he would have died and never seen his brother again, but the Nionka man would not accept this so they ended up fighting. The Nionka man was tired and hungry after hunting in the bush for that time's equivalent of Maggi cubes, so he lost the fight to his well fed brother and went home to his village in disgust.

Many years went past and the Jaranka man prospered in his new land, marrying and having lots of children. But he started to feel bad about the way he had treated his brother, so he made the long journey back to the village where he had grown up to find that his brother had also prospered: he was now headman of the village, with many wives of his own. At first the Nionka man was angry with his brother and insulted him, which made him angry in turn and he insulted the brother that he had come to apologise to. But eventually they remembered that they were children of the same mother and that if they hurt each other they also hurt themselves. In this way the brothers were reconciled, and the Jaranka man returned to his new village on the south bank, which became Jarra. All the people from that area now call themselves Jarankas. The area where the Nionka man stayed became known as Nioni, and all the people from that area as Nionkas.

"So now" explained D "when a Nionka meets a Jaranka we must always insult each other, but it is a joke. The Nionka and the Jaranka are brothers. If a Nionka is hungry the Jaranka must give him food, if a Jaranka travels abroad the Nionka must pray for him. A Nionka cannot steal from a Jaranka or a Jaranka from a Nionka because it would be like stealing from yourself." Wouldn't it be great if all regional and national rivalries operated on the same basis?

Greetings from The Gambia!

2010-07-13T13:27:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone, just to let you know that I've arrived in Farafenni and just to confuse you all am going to upload my Farafenni blog posts out of sequence. If anyone who talked me down after my little freakout over the generator is reading this, just to let you know that it has now been fixed and it turns out that it wasn't actually me who broke it – apparently the guards broke it a couple of weeks ago and got one of their dodgy friends to patch it together with bits of rusty wire (Firefly fans think Serenity's engine room, but not rigged up by a genius) and the generator just chose my watch to finally say Do Not Want.

Frustrations and a Mission update – 12/7/10

2010-07-13T13:07:00.005-07:00

A blog I'm rather enjoying and sympathising with is http://whatsgambianforbluescreenofdeath.blogspot.com/, maintained by a VSO volunteer trying to get various virus-riddled Gambian computers into some sort of working order. He perfectly captures the frustrations involved in trying to get anything done out here, where everything is a little bit more complicated than you expect and nothing quite goes according to plan.

A perfect example of these difficulties is the little saga of the water tank, which concluded today. The Catholic Mission's water tank is supported on a platform three metres or so in the air, to produce enough pressure to get water through the taps and showers and so the sun can warm the water to the perfect temperature for the breeding of assorted nasties – shower with your mouth closed please. When he was up here last week The Professor noticed that the planks supporting the tank were nearly rotten and decided to get them replaced before they gave way and the falling tank made someone considerably shorter. This involved contacting a carpenter, to replace the planks, and a plumber, to drain the tank so that the carpenter could reach the platform.

The plan was for the plumber to come on Saturday morning and for the carpenter to come on Saturday afternoon. The plumber did not arrive on Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon brought a carpenter but no plumber. The carpenter cut the wood and hung around while the plumber was contacted, said he would come and failed to do so, and eventually went home after being told that we would contact him when the plumber had arrived. Late on Sunday, by which time it was too late to contact the carpenter, the plumber arrived and did....something. We're not entirely sure what because when the carpenter arrived this morning he found that the tank had not been drained. He was understandably quite angry about this and demanded that we contact the plumber. Surprisingly he came only an hour later, at which point I showed him round to the watertank and discovered that the carpenter had already erected the platform. I was a little surprised and asked how he had done this, hadn't he needed the plumber after all? It turned out that the carpenter had, rather enterprisingly I suppose, sawn through one of the water pipes to drain the tank himself so it was lucky that we now had a plumber to fix this.

So we now had a completed platform, which in the UK would have been the end of it. The carpenter wanted paying, which shouldn't have been a problem as I had the money and it looked to me as though he'd done a pretty good job, apart from his little bit of improvisation with a saw. Unfortunately, as the repair would be paid for with MCR funds I needed a receipt to account for them and this was where the trouble started. The carpenter wanted the money but did not want to give me a receipt. I tried to explain that I was quite happy to give him the money but I needed a receipt. I didn't raise my voice, was reasonable but firm. The carpenter got angrier and angrier. The guards joined in to harangue me "This man does not make receipts. He has done the job, why will you not give him the money?". Sirra the Mission cleaner joined in, as far as I could tell on my side (sisterhood ftw). The carpenter said he did not have a receipt book, so I gave him a sheet from my notebook and told him to write me a receipt on that. And then, horribly, it emerged that the man couldn't write and I'd just shamed him in front of the substantial audience that had built up. So I paid him and wrote the receipt myself and one of the guards signed it.

And that still wasn't the end of it. The carpenter had bought and planed eight timbers for the job but had used only seven of them. Technically we had paid for the extra timber, but I couldn't see MRC using it whereas a carpenter probably could so I told him he could keep it, trying to make a bit of a peace offering after the receipt business. Unfortunately this was taken as a signal to launch into a speech on how hard it was to be a carpenter in The Gambia when materials were so expensive, could I provide him with more materials? No. Why not? You are a toubab and you have so much money. I am a student and I don't have much money actually, and there are a lot of people in The Gambia who need help and I can't help everyone. But when you have studied you will have a good job and you will be able to help me. No, just no, I'm so very, very sorry but I get this from every single person I meet and I can't help you. Also I need to check my fly traps. Sorry, goodbye.

Just to complicate matters while all this was going on I was also trying to arrange for the MRC mechanic, (who shares a name with a member of the Adams family and damn it's appropriate) to fix the generator which broke yesterday, having to contend with dodgy reception and his complete unwillingness to spend any of his credit calling me, and of course to carry out all my experiments which aren't working so well at the moment. Luckily the students went to Senegal on Sunday to watch the world cup and have returned with what in Britain would be a very nasty bottle of rosé, but which will I have no doubt taste like the nectar of the gods out here so I plan to accompany tonight's instant mash and packet curry with a glass of that.

And a quick update on Mission – I think I spotted him once in the distance, loping along with a scrawny brindled creature, but yesterday whilst spending a brief peaceful moment sulking or skulking in my room I heard the unmistakeable flapflapflapflapflap that any dog owner will recognise as a long-eared head being shaken. I went out to investigate and there under my window was Mission. I've been trying to convince myself that he can't really remember me, that the encounter in the street was just a coincidence, but that belief is becoming increasingly untenable. For a start he had chosen my window over all others to sleep under, possibly because he could smell me (and believe me you don't have to be a dog to smell me out here, I hum) but rather more conclusively as soon as he saw me his tail started thwacking the ground and he rushed up to me, squirming with pleasure.

So at this point I decided to say sod sensible and went and found a pair of latex examination gloves so I could touch him and the antibiotic skin powder one of the students had bought and started trying to treat the sores on his ears, which was made rather more complicated by the fact that all this little dog wanted to do was roll on his back sneezing in ecstasy while the nice toubab tickled his ears. And actually after the initial shock I realised he didn't look quite as bad as he had first appeared – under all the scars and scrapes and sores he isn't nearly as thin as some Gambian dogs I've seen. I'm still not going to put up a picture of him because I think some of you might find it too upsetting, but if his ears heal up maybe I will.

So I'm going to try and fix the worst of the sores with the antibiotic powder, and maybe if I come back to Farafenni look at getting him castrated and vaccinated, but I think all in all Mission is probably happiest here- he's obviously getting enough food and has a little friend to run around with. I must admit that after my first encounter with him I did have a moment of weakness and start googling the procedure for bringing Gambian dogs into the UK. This only served to convince me of how thoroughly impractical the whole enterprise would be, but did turn up this rather interesting charity - http://www.gambicats.org.uk/ - a group of vet volunteers who come to The Gambia to neuter and vaccinate stray cats and dogs.

If I can't do much for Mission I can help dogs like him and I will be making a donation to Gambicats – while it may seem selfish to care about animal welfare in a country where children are going hungry, it really isn't any more selfish than to care about animal welfare in the UK while children are going hungry on the same planet. If you want a justification in terms of human welfare, castrating strays to reduce their numbers in a humane way will reduce transmission of worms and vaccinating strays will reduce transmission of rabies. I can even justify it in terms of my project – dog faeces breed Musca sorbens and cat faeces certainly seem to attract them, so fewer strays should lead to less breeding material in the environment. But to be honest I care about the animals here – Mission and the cats Claire and Vassie and Vassie's kittens, provisionally named Smoky and Midnight – for my own selfish reasons. When you and everything around you is filthy and dusty and your clothes stick to your body and there's grit in your bed it's so nice to have something soft and silky twining around your ankles, chirping prettily, and in a country where it can so often seem that people are only interested in you for your estimated bank balance and perceived power to secure a visa, to have Mission genuinely pleased to see me just because I once showed him a little kindness really makes a difference. I have given gifts and donations to people here and to be honest donating to Gambicats feels a lot less morally ambiguous – I don't need to worry whether I'm encouraging dependency and the patronage system or only giving to those who are already advantaged enough to be able to explain their needs to me. In short, I'm doing this because it makes me happy and I don't think I need to justify myself beyond that.

I do, however, need that rosé.

11/7/10 - Consent

2010-07-13T13:07:00.003-07:00

There's a bit of a perception among the general public* that scientists are a pretty immoral bunch, merrily stuffing haddock genes into turnips, feeding nail polish to kittens, cloning dead dictators and recklessly creating Earth-engulfing black holes for a laugh when there's nothing on telly. Obviously nothing could be further from the truth and I am definitely not breeding an army of mutant super flies with which to take over the world cough. But in all seriousness there's at least one area where medical science is ethically in advance of society in general, and that's the principle of consent.

For a scientific study to be approved by an ethics committee, anyone participating in the study in a way that carries any conceivable risk or inconvenience to them must give consent, which at its simplest means they must sign a form to say that they are willingly participating. But there's far more to it than that. The consent must be informed – people must understand the purpose of the study, how their samples or information will be used and the possible risks to them in participating, and it must be freely given – people must not be coerced into participating by an authority figure or for fear of loss of some benefits, and while they can be compensated for any inconvenience participation may cause them (for example having the cost of their transport to a hospital where samples can be taken paid for) they cannot be paid or given gifts for participating. Not paying participants is probably the most important, because it ensures that the study doesn't exploit those in the greatest financial need who might be tempted to take part in the study for the rewards rather than making a free choice to do so having weighed up the risks to themselves against the benefits to science.

I do wonder whether we'd be better off if the principles of consent could be applied to society at large, if people should not be offered money to submit to any procedure that carries a risk to them. Project Prevention, a deeply disturbing scheme being piloted in Glasgow in which drug addicts are offered money in exchange for getting sterilised, would certainly not be permitted if strict principles of consent were applied. And some interesting issues would arise if it were applied more widely – not permitting money to be given to someone in exchange for doing something which carries a risk to them would put an interesting spin on the perennial feminist debate on prostitution, and the practice of offering soldiers free university education in exchange for risking their lives and health in war would start to look extremely dubious.

So that's how consent should work in theory. The reality here on the ground in The Gambia is inevitably slightly different, as I discovered today when all five of the children in the compound where I usually collect human faeces to bait my fly traps with had diarrhoea. We had done the consent procedure in this compound by the book, with my fieldworker reading out a translation of the information sheet to the heads of the household, and while it is of course impossible for me to tell how accurate the translation into Mandinka is, both fieldworkers I've used are very reliable, and I've worked with this family for quite a while now and from the questions they've asked me they seem to have a fairly good idea of what I'm doing and why. Unfortunately with no, umm, material of a suitable quality available it was necessary to find an alternative compound within the next two hours, before it was time to replace the traps. "Do not worry!" proclaimed D my fieldworker. "God is great, we will prevail!" which I found a rather encouraging attitude towards the whole enterprise.

I had had an agonising choice of two possible fieldworkers, both equally qualified and equally desperate for work. Emotionally the balance lay rather in M's favour, as D had a job already but was eager for one that paid better than a government salary (I carefully explained that this work was temporary) whereas M was unemployed and was the nephew of a senior fieldworker so was probably the better political choice, but eventually I decided on D whose English was fractionally better. The choice has really paid off – in such a highly connected society personal relationships are so important and I was extremely lucky to discover that D used to live in Farafenni. D led me to the compound of a man he used to work with.

"But now he has been..." he paused "what do you call it when they sack someone when they get too old?"

I considered. "Discrimination?"

"No, the other thing."

I tried thinking laterally "Umm, retirement?"

"Exactly, exactly".

Sacked or not, D's former colleague seemed to have done rather well for himself and was apparently the landlord for the entire block of compounds, probably the equivalent of the village Alkalo or head man. D greeted him warmly and explained why we were here, then when his friend ducked into the house explained to me that all of the children in the compound had already been to the toilet except for one small girl who was still asleep. As he told me this the landlord reappeared carrying the girl in his arms, still blinking and fuzzy from sleep. He deposited her in front of me and whispered something to her, presumably explaining that this big scary white woman has come all the way from the UK and wants you to do a poo for her. The little girl did what any rational person would have done on being woken to be confronted with this information, and burst into tears. We waited a while in the compound, D catching up with his friend and me sitting in the one chair being eyeballed nervously by the little girl who had had the worst awakening ever, but with the deadline approaching and no poo forthcoming we decided to try another compound.

At this point things got a little complicated. The landlord was either so impressed by our study or so pleased to see D again that he decided to come with us, encouraging people to help out. How freely consent can be given when your landlord is encouraging you to participate is something I'm not sure about, but at this stage the issue was fairly academic as all of the children had already been to the toilet and, impressively, it had been hygienically disposed of in the latrines. At this point we had acquired quite a horde of hangers on: the landlord, a crowd of laughing women grateful for some respite from the monotony of daily chores, another long lost friend of D's who chatted delightedly to him before rushing off and of course the ubiquitous gaggle of Gambian children who appear spontaneously around any toubab who might possibly give them sweets or do something amusing like falling over (there is nothing a Gambian child finds funnier than a toubab falling on her great white arse). But with collection time fast approaching poo was, it seemed, scarcer than bacon in this country.

With just 20 minutes to collection time our saviour ran towards us up the road, D's long lost friend with a plastic bag of child's shit. Reverently we scraped it into the pot on the scales, but disaster! Only 27 of the necessary 50 grams! The clock ticking, the landlord summoned two of the small boys following our party and handed them each 5 dalasi. I had completely lost control of the situation, money was changing hands, I didn't know if their parents had been informed but as I was trying to work out my next move they pulled down their trousers and squatted in the street whilst all around them their friends laughed and clapped, cheering them on. As the first deposit hit the ground D let out a triumphant cry of "Praise God! God is great!" and all the adults started congratulating one another heartily as the children whooped. So all in all I'm really not sure if I did anything properly or right but it worked out and everyone seemed to come away happy, and I'm increasingly coming to realise that out here that's probably the best possible outcome. I gratefully accepted the sample – it would have been churlish not to as it was, after all, a gift from God.

*And by "general public" I mean "my Mum", but I know she loves me really.

7/7/10 – Hopeless Mission

2010-07-13T13:07:00.001-07:00

If you get upset by animal suffering then you probably shouldn't read this post.

The last time I was here at the Roman Catholic Mission the guards had a little puppy unimaginatively named Mission, who they planned to train as a guard dog. Unfortunately this training was done in the traditional Gambian way, with kicks and beatings with a stick. I did my best to ignore him and keep my distance, Gambian dogs being vectors of all sorts of horrible things, and though it was tricky because he was quite frankly adorable and because I could hear him yelping whenever he was "disciplined" I managed to keep this up for the first three weeks. Then one night I found myself sat outside the mission, waiting for my fieldworker to bring me some crucial item (the identity of which I've now forgotten) and trying desperately to tune out the sounds of a particularly savage beating which eventually stopped after what seemed like a decade. A few minutes later Mission staggered out of the shadows, limping and shivering in spite of temperatures in the high twenties. He came straight towards me and in his pitiful state I couldn't bring myself to practice good vector avoidance and shoo him away. I don't know how but he must somehow have sensed that this was one person who wouldn't hurt him, and he came up to me and just rested his hanging head against my leg. Gently I rumpled the loose skin on his neck, telling him he was a good dog, and slowly he stopped quivering and even began, hesitantly at first, to wag his tail. After that we became friends, vector avoidance be damned. We played with sticks and, though I found him to be entirely untrainable (after learning that punishment meant a beating, any verbal reprimand was just met with a cocked head and a look that said "I know you're just fooling") I did manage to partially cure him of his habit of snapping at shoe laces by soaking mine in Listerine. This is what Mission looked like as a puppy:

Fast forward six months and, while I was in the UK, the mission guards were fired after some food and computer equipment got stolen from the mission. They left Mission behind, like some piece of obsolete rubbish, and he became just another Gambian stray. "He's not nearly as cute as he used to be" warned Emma, and I vowed, this time to be sensible and steer well clear, which should after all be easier now he was no longer a cute puppy and no longer actually in the mission grounds, right? He probably wouldn't remember me anyway. I knew he'd be in a bad way, but i was sure I was prepared for that.

It didn't quite work out like that. Opening the mission gates this morning I saw a filthy dog lying in the road. He had patches of fur missing and was covered in scabs and sores with a particularly nasty one on each ear. "Mission?" I gasped, not wanting to believe it, and any hopes that I had that he'd have forgotten me were dashed when he lumbered up to me and rested his head against my leg, exactly as he had done that night six months ago. Gingerly I stroked the back of his head, the only clean part of his body, and he wagged his tail. And I burst into tears, right in the middle of the street, and a passing boy rushed at him shouting and scared him away.

"Give me ten dalasi!" Demanded the boy, clearly seeing himself as my rescuer.

"No!"

"Give me five dalasi!"

"No!"

"Give me one dalasi!"

"No!"

"Give me your watch!"

"NO!!!!!"

And it took all of my self control not to scream "You horrible child, I didn't want you to scare him away!"

But now I've had a chance to think about it rationally I think the boy probably did do me a favour, there's really nothing I can do for Mission, and seeing him can only upset me. Even if we were in the position to have a dog at the moment, which we're definitely not, and even if I had the money it would take to bring him to the UK, which I don't (and if I did I could benefit a lot more dogs by just giving it to a UK dog charity), he's a Gambian outdoor dog and would be miserable in quarantine and miserable in a house in the UK and utterly impossible to train. I've already had my heart broken here by a little girl with a crippled hand and a little boy with HIV, in this country of broken children to lose my heart to a dog would just be decadent.

The obligatory navel-gazing post about where this blog is going

2010-06-19T14:23:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted here for a while for a variety of reasons both academic (I had my upgrading which, for those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, means that I'm now registered for a full PhD rather than for an MPhil, not that I now have night vision and laser tits) and personal (a move, illness, some family stuff). A rather more cheerful reason for my extended absence from the interwebz is that I've actually started to get some results, and the problem for bloggers hoping to publish is that as soon as you have something interesting to say you can't say it. Now that things are starting to look up I do hope to start blogging again on a semi-regular basis, but I think the posts will be more focussed on Africa, development, cool insects, vectors and life, the universe and everything in general, rather than on my own research. I may even dip a tentative toe into the skeptosphere, because the internet obviously needs another ranty post about homeopathy just as much as it needs another amusingly captioned picture of a cat.

I'll be going back to The Gambia on the 2^nd of July for a month and will be getting a mobile dongle (and will probably single-handedly double The Gambia's GDP by paying the price I'm paying for it) so providing that my laptop doesn't blow up again and the phone mast doesn't blow down again I should have rather better internet access this time. I'll try and write a few blog posts while I'm out there when I'm not too busy wrangling manure-filled traps or getting climbed on by small children, because Mary asked me to and she could probably break me in half if she wanted to. Or at least cover me in very sticky plant material.

I don't have a picture of my navel to post so instead here is a picture of my friend's navel. Mine is similar but with fewer geckos. And possibly more fluff.

Lovesong for a lonely maggot

2010-01-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

A poem that I really like by my friend Lorrie Hartshorn:

Oh lonely maggot,
Don’t fret
Come rest your weary,
wigglesome body
Come and claim
Your steak

My giddy ant
They are cruel,
Dearest maggot
But wiggle this way,
With your beetling brows
There is room at the bin for you.

May be that the other maggots are rotters,
Living together in pears
While you’re in
The dump.

But,
lonely maggot,
Wiggle this way
And I shall cherish you
Until the day
You fly.

Did you miss me?

2009-12-19T11:13:00.000-08:00

I've just got back from my second stint in The Gambia. No internet this time, and as Twitter decided not to cooperate with my Gambian mobile I actually had to do some work instead. Fortunately this paid off with excellent fly catches, a small colony of extremely confused Musca sorbens who snuggled down into their pupariae in Farafenni and woke up in Harpenden and possibly an entirely new species of entomopathogenic nematode. Unfortunately in the excitement of smuggling all of the above through customs I managed to leave my handbag on the plane, where it appears to have been swiftly appropriated by cleaners or my fellow passengers. I lost among other things Jeff's camera, my Oyster card, my housekeys and all the receipts I was going to use to claim back my field expenses. This means that all my plans for extravagent celebrations to mark my return have had to be scaled back to treating myself to some new housekeys and a tub of werewolf-strength leg wax, but it could be worse, I could be discovering the sound of one hand clapping.

Anyway until enough of my brain starts functioning to write something vaguely coherent* here are some photos I took in The Gambia and transferred to my laptop before losing the camera.

*July 2011

Lolbachia

2009-09-11T02:47:00.000-07:00

This picture made me laugh out loud, which probably means someone should shoot me and put me out of my misery now. Seriously though this picture was lifted from a very interesting post on everyone's favourite radical feminist bacterium.

Pestival!

2009-08-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

Pestival is an exhibition of insects in science and art, held at the Royal Festival Hall from the 3rd to the 6th of September. I'll be there on the Saturday and Sunday, helping to explain work some people in my department have done on why some people get eaten alive by mosquitoes and others don't, if anyone fancies coming along to laugh at me in a natty mosquito-emblazoned t-shirt. And if for some reason mosquito olfaction doesn't float your boat, there's a lot of other cool stuff going on including maggot painting, a giant termite mound and book-eating insects.

The best laid plans

2009-08-23T08:16:00.000-07:00

Things rarely work out the way you expect do they? I’d hoped to have a few days off after I came back from The Gambia to relax, catch up with Jeff and with friends, organise my life, maybe make a leisurely start on my writeup, then head back to Rothamsted refreshed and raring to go.Instead I caught piggy flu and spent the best part of two weeks getting reacquainted with my bed and necking paracetamol and Menthol Strepsils like there was no tomorrow, or rather like there was a tomorrow and it was going to be full of pain and mucus.I was even more annoyed that after having the opportunity to catch all sorts of exciting exotic things that would have entitled me to sympathy and possibly handsome young doctors poking my liver, I ended up laid low by something that prompts people to hand you a mug of Lemsip and tell you to get on with it. Still, such is life.

I have a very large number of photographs to organise, half of which are already up on Facebook, and six more blog posts to type up from the final month when I didn’t have access to a computer, if anyone’s still interested now you know how it ends. I think blogging will be put on hold for the immediate future though as I have rather a lot of non-blog related writing to do. If you’re stuck for an excuse not to work in the meantime might I recommend the following blogs, which really have nothing in common except for the fact that I wouldn’t mind sharing a drink with the author (indeed I’ve often shared rather too many drinks with one of the authors):

The wind is in from Africa

2009-08-09T05:03:00.001-07:00

The wind is in from Africa
Last night I couldn't sleep
You know Carey it's gonna be hard to leave here but it's really not my home
My fingernails are filthy
I've got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne

- Joni Mitchell, Carey

That just about sums up how I feel right now. I fly back to Britain
tonight and I don't think my fingernails will ever be clean again.
I've probably got something worse than beach tar on my feet and my
sheets at home aren't linen, aren't white and if I'm completely honest
sometimes aren't clean but they're my sheets, on my bed, in my flat
and I have a burning desire to sleep on them for a very, very long
time. I'm sorry about the lack of blog posts for the last month or
so, but my laptop cable kersploded during a power surge. I do have a
few posts written on paper which I may type up when I get home, if you
were wondering how it all ends.

I must admit that I've found my time out here very hard, particularly
the last few weeks, and there were times when I've felt about this
fieldwork rather the way I felt about reading 1984: it was very
rewarding, I'm glad I did it but I'm not sure if I'd want to do it
again. And some things were very tough: the heat and the filth and
the exhaustion and the heat, the village with conjuntivitis, the
little girl with the broken arm and the man whose arm I may have
broken in self defense (spoilers, spoilers) and the dog that our
convoy ran over on the way down to Fajara. But some parts have been
amazing - I've seen the sun rise over a glittering river, watched a
bird of prey take an enormous snake and fly off with it, seen a
termite mound so vast it engulfed the lower branches of a bloated,
bubble-barked baobab. I've shared attaya with people, attended a
naming ceremony, sat in Sainie's compound handing her friend locks of
nylon hair as she wove them onto her head, played the best scrabble
game of my life under African stars. I may even have managed to get
some useful data.

I've learned a lot too, how to gut a fish and that Duck Tape is more
useful than all the equipment sold in Blacks put together, gained a
limited and very specialist knowledge of Mandinka (mostly the names of
foodstuffs and insects) and discovered that just because your
supervisor is an internationally renowned researcher published in the
highest impact journals it doesn't mean he knows anything about
restaurant etiquette. I've learned that although I crave the comforts
of home they are luxuries, not the necesities I believed them to be. I
can live without a shower if I have a bucket, without tv if I have a
book and a radio, without chocolate if I have mangos and without
alcohol if I have attaya. The one thing though that I've learned I
can't live without is the people I care about, I've miseed you guys
terribly and am really looking forward to seeing you all again soon.

I'm going to pack up my samples now, then have a pressing appointment
with a bath and a bed. Thanks for reading.

Naming ceremony

2009-07-27T07:07:00.001-07:00

So we drove back up to Walikunda, pausing briefly in Farafenni for
Jeff to buy a boiled egg "tapa-lapa" sandwich and visit a public
toilet that I think has given him PTSD. I spent most of the journey
seething with envy - unlike me Jeff is able to sleep in landrovers,
even bouncing down roads that make your head bob about like a nodding
dog's.

Distressingly underprovisioned in the clean water and air conditioning
departments as Walikunda may be, one thing it doesn't lack is fresh
fish from the river. Siaka, the machete-wielding nightwatchman, has
taken it upon himself to be my gourmet personal shopper bringing me
plump, juicy kossou and delicious but spiney joto and once but never
again the revoltingly muddy, soapy tilapia. These I was taught to fin,
scale and gut by Sainey, Walikunda's inscrutable, baby-backed cleaner.
Throughout the lesson she looked at me with much the same expression
as I would have reserved for someone asking me how to open a can of
tuna.

With Jeff here to feed too Siaka excelled himself, knocking on the lab
door one day with a cement tub from which he decanted a little brown
tortoise. He explained how to prepare it - apparently you hold the
back end over a fire (or as he rather more evocatively expressed it
"You put a flame to his anus"), then when the tortoise sticks its head
out you chop it off (he demonstrated the motion with the machete).
After that you just treat it like a particularly crunchy Cornish
Pastie. He left me standing on the lab step, watching the little
creature stumble ponderously towards the wall where it put its head
and forelegs into a hole in a mud brick and rested, apparently
concluding that it was now invisible. Call me sentimental but it
seemed rather unsporting to eat an animal whose idea of hiding left
half of its body exposed, particularly as this was the half to which a
flame would be put. I am therefore pleased to report that the
tortoise "got away", possibly at a rather higher velocity than it was
accustomed to.

Following Samuel L's reassignment I have been given a new fieldworker.
I had just about gotten used to the local concept of GMT (Gambian
Maybe Time) and was by now used to asking people to turn up half an
hour before I actually needed them. This new chap rather threw me
though by turning up early as often as he arrived late. I established
the limits of the variability of this phenomenon to be eighty minutes
either way, so for the purposes of this blog will christen him +/-80.
I'm still not entirely sure how to deal with this, but suppose it
ensures that I'm always up and ready to go early in the morning.

Jeff has been rather a hit with the local staff, one of whom invited
us to his nephew's naming ceremony. This prompted a wardrobe crisis -
I had been slopping round The Gambia in my baggy trousers and
workshirts and didn't have anything smarter, but wasn't sure if this
would really cut it when surrounded by relatives decked out in African
finery. Would wheat i was wearing, I asked hesitantly, be acceptable?

"You must wear African dress" he said.
"But I don't have any!"
"No problem, my daughter will lend you some".

So the next morning we drove to his compound where his teenage
daughter (who I'm going to call Cher for reasons that may become
apparent) was waiting to help me into one of her outfits and make me
presentable. She had just come back from the coast, where she was
staying with relatives to attend what is apparently the best school in
the Gambia, and I got the distinct impression she wasn't very happy to
loan one of her outfits. She brightened on discovering that I was
English though. Did I know Daniel Radcliffe? she wanted to know, and
I disappointed by not only not knowing him and not knowing who he was
but by having seen only two of the Harry Potter films. She helped me
into a wrap skirt, surprisingly complicated to tie, then looked on
with interest as I removed my headscarf to don the shirt. Did I
always wear my hair this short? she asked. I explained that I didn't,
but that it was easier to have it that way when I was working. "Ah,
you are very simple!" she exclaimed, which I chose to take as a
compliment.

I was then ushered into the living room where Jeff was being presented
to at least a hundred relatives. Very few of them spoke English, and
Jeff spoke now Gambian languages, but they still seemed to be managing
to sustain quite a lively conversation. We were offered guava juice,
little sweet fritters and a greenish, watery porridge. I declined the
last two items, unsure of their gluten status, and Jeff declined the
porridge because frankly it looked like primordial ooze. I have
trouble explaining my coeliac disease here, not because people don't
understand the word allergy but because they don't understand the
concept; I guess the diet is so restricted here that people who can't
tolerate a common foodstuff just starve. But I never seem to be able
to explain that it's not that I don't want or don't like their food,
it's that I simply can't eat it. I did worry that we were coming
across as very rude and fussy, and felt particularly bad when Cher was
dispatched to the kitchen to prepare some "European food" and returned
with a large bowl of chips. They were excellent chips though, and we
certainly didn't have to feign appreciation eating them.

After eating we went for a walk around the compound and our host
showed us the new house he was building fr his children. We wandered
back to the central courtyard where people sat chatting, brewing tea,
feeding babies; the scene reminded me of the stage at British weddings
between ceremony and food when no one quite knows what to do with
themselves. I assumed the role of official photographer, snapping
guests, the kids who mobbed us to get into the photo and Cher who
rather enjoyed having her picture taken.

We eventually sat down next to a Griot. These traditional musicians
are the custodians of a tow's oral history, and over the melody he
plucked out on his 21-stringed kora he sang the names of passers by
and recounted their family history. Noticing our rapt attention he
asked our names and proceeded to sing a song for us. The music was
beautiful but hampered by his lack of knowledge of our stories his
lyrics were rather surreal; "Julie and Jeff, MRC Walikunda" repeated
over and over.

It was at this point that we met the guest of honour, a lively,
grinning baby boy, as yet nameless. He was apparently a little older
than was usual at a naming ceremony, but the celebrations had had to
be postponed following a death in the family. His motor skills were
therefore rather better developed than they should have been, which
made passing him amongst the guests rather more entertaining than it
would otherwise have been. I think mine was the first white nose he
had ever seen, and he made a very thorough investigation of how firmly
this strange object was attached. He also managed to poke Jeff
directly in the eye, which is probably an honour or something.

Then it was time for more food, which I once again declined. Jeff on
the other hand gamely munched his was through approximately two tonnes
of highly seasoned rice and most of the leg of the luckless sheep that
had started the morning tethered in the compound, doubtless wondering
what all the fuss was about. As he was eating traditional drummers
struck up a beat in the courtyard. We hurried out to see everyone
clustered around them but no dancing as yet. Suddenly one of the
sinewy elderly women who seem to form the backbone of the labour force
here stepped into the circle to dance and seemed to be encouraging her
cowardly younger relatives to join in. As any shocked outsider who
has attended a family wedding will tell you, my folks aren't exactly
shy on the dancefloor, and it didn't seem right to leave her to
shoulder the responsibility of starting the dancing alone. So I
hopped into the circle and joined in, trying to copy what she was
doing.

I think particularly the kids found the toubab and the grandma the
most entertaining thing they'd seen for days. We danced until the
drummers stopped, she acknowledged my efforts with a nod and a smile
and I realised I had to get back to set up my overnight experiments.
as we were leaving a donkey cart pulled up carrying speakers the size
of a refrigerator. I have no idea how they planned to power them,
maybe a treadmill for the donkey? By this stage of the evening we
were both exhausted and one of us was at least 50% sheep by weight,
but we both felt very privileged to have had an experience I doubt
you'd get visiting a country as a tourist.

Yup, do a PhD, travel the world, meet interesting people and dance
with their grannies.

Sacred gators - 27/6/09

2009-07-27T06:05:00.001-07:00

So it's been a while, thanks in part to the arrival of my bloke and in
part to what happens to my laptop in two posts time, but here we go:

The drive down to Fajara had been hard, and I'd been looking forward
to a shower and a decent night's sleep. On all of my previous visits
to Fajara I had been put up in the accommodation reserved for visiting
scientists, and very nice it had been too, but on this occasion it
looked as though someone had finally worked out my true status - I had
been assigned to the student accommodation.

My heart sank as I stepped through the door. There was no mosquito
net, and the air was so thick with permethrin it made me cough. The
penultimate straw was either the lack of air conditioning, which has
been the only thing that lets me get a decent night's sleep here, or
the shower which yielded a grudging trickle of brown water than ran
dry a few seconds later. The final straw though was that after all
the effort I'd gone to to tell everyone that Jeff was my husband we'd
been given a single bed. Don't get me wrong, I've had some of the
best nights of my life in single beds but in this climate you do not
want to be sleeping in close proximity to a source of radiant heat, no
matter how much you may adore said source of radiant heat. I checked
the envelope the keys had come in - surely some mistake - but no, this
was indeed the room intended for "Judy Bristol and Joseph Jeffries".
So I flounced out, like a diva who'd been left white roses in her
dressing room instead of ivory, and booked us into a hotel.

A quick note about Jeff; I did consider giving him a nickname to give
the poor lad a bit of privacy, but decided not to bother as just about
everyone reading this blog will already know my bloke's name (except
Bug Girl, hi if you're still reading!). He would in fact have had a
ready-made nickname - in Wolof the word Jeff means "reward" but if I
started referring to him as "My Reward" you'd all be vomiting on your
keyboards by the end of the sentence and I wouldn't want to be liable
for the repair bill.

Anyway I waited in the cafe at Banjul airport for his delayed flight,
committing further crimes against dentistry with the aid of the Coca
Cola Corporation, then steered him through the bewildering throng of
people who wanted to carry his bag and summon him a taxi and be his
friend and all for whatever gift he wanted to give them, after which
experience the hotel room felt like a sanctuary. He had brought me
presents; new books and movies, toiletries and clothes and wonderfully
soothing AfterBite. This last I applied liberally and frequently
until I realised it was 3% ammonia and was making me smell like the
alley behind The Tyneside on a Sunday morning.

I realised how much I'd missed him, and not just for the presents and
conversation and the reasons I won't go into because I suspect my Dad
and his Mum may be reading. Somehow just having him here, even when
we were napping or reading in separate rooms or even bickering made
all the thousand tiny frustrations every day working in Africa brings
that much easier to bear. It was nice too to have someone else to
share all of Fajara's attractions with - we negotiated the filthy
gutters of Bakau market to buy fragrant incense from a Senegalese
herbalist, swung in hammocks at Leybato's beach bar as the sun set
over the Atlantic and, umm, bought baked beans and mayonnaise from
Kairaba Avenue's luxury European supermarket. Well I wanted to give
him the unedited Gambian experience didn't I?

We also visited the Katichikali Sacred Crocodile Pool, which would be
well worth a trip even without the crocodiles. There's a fascinating
little museum of Gambian culture and our guide was the first Gambian
I'd met with a wonderful dry sense of humour, solemnly informing us
that the crocodiles' diet was 80% fish and 20% tourist (at least I
assume it was a joke!). The pool is located in a beautiful garden,
like a lush rainforest with well-tended paths. the place was clearly
ancient, the vast trees testifying to the fact. I took a photograph
of Jeff standing between the buttresses of a majestic silk-cotton tree
to show the scale, but unfortunately realised when reviewing the
pictures that the way it was cropped made it look as though he was
standing in an enormous wooden vagina.

The pool at the heart of the garden is almost perfectly circular, with
a bloom of vivid green algae on the surface worthy of a St Patrick's
Day display. Crumbling stone steps lead down to the stagnant water;
women bathe here to cure fertility problems and I could well believe
that these waters could promote the growth of at least some form of
new life. But I'd imagine that of far more concern to pilgrims than
the foetid water would be the crocodiles themselves, several dozen of
which lurked beneath the water's surface with only their nostrils
breaking the algal bloom or sunned themselves on the steps and path.

As sacred crocodiles these creatures are stuffed so full of fish that
they apparently have no desire to attack humans. Indeed the ones we
saw seemed to have no desire to move at all, but it was still some
time before I could be persuaded to touch one. It felt surprisingly
soft, I don't know what I was expecting but it was probably rock-hard
muscle and pure, compacted, primordial evil. Jeff of course knew no
fear, stroking them and shaking their hands and pretty much doing
everything short of picking them up by the forelegs and dancing a
tango with them. Amazingly we made it out with all appendages
attached. Maybe we were just too profane to be eaten by sacred
crocodiles, or maybe human marinaded in Afterbite held no appeal next
to a fish supper.

A live blog post for once!

2009-06-26T08:02:00.001-07:00

I'm back on the coast and have managed to snatch a few minutes of
ludicrously slow internet access to upload the previous three blog
posts (I also have one for Feminazery which is annoyingly still on my
laptop, I'll see if I can bring it over later) for you to enjoy from
the comfort of your cool, clean living rooms. I've survived my first
two weeks in Walikunda, though it's been tough and rather frustrating
as nothing has really worked properly yet, making me wonder what
exactly I'm up there getting hot and uncomfortable for. But I'm
hoping things'll start coming together next week when I go back.

The biggest blow has been that I've lost my fieldworker, Samuel L, who
has been recalled to another project. Not only has he been invaluable
for identification work he's also been my interpretor, general fixer
and resolver of staff issues and I'm not entirely sure how well I'll
manage without him - he is without question the most diligent,
reliable member of local staff that I've encountered out here. I have
been assigned another fieldworker who I'll meet on Monday, if he's a
third as good I'd be satisfied

The drive down yesterday was pretty hard, with long delays crossing
the river and difficult driving across flooded roads. I've given my
driver the wekend off to recover, and I think I think I need a weekend
to recover myself. Fortunately my beloved arrives later this
afternoon, so I've booked us into a posh hotel (Fajara Golf
Apartments) and hang the expense (although I did feel bad spending the
money after spending most of the drive explaining to one of the other
fieldworkers that I couldn't afford to pay for his flight to the UK).
To be honest I have mixed feelings about bringing him over here - I
miss him like crazy and am so desperately keen to see him, but feel
bad that I'm dragging him up for two weeks in a humid, spider-infested
(not his favourite creature) mudhut. Still, we'll have fun being
tourists this weekend - I'm hoping to take him to see the sacred
crocodile pools, and plan to spend a lot of time at beach bars and,
frankly, in air conditioned rooms with no clothes on.

Off to the airport to get him now. Bye! :)

Tailors and tall tales

2009-06-26T07:44:00.003-07:00

I can't upload pictures and even if I could you'd probably be more
interested in seeing a shot of me climbing the wall to escape a giant
millipede I've mistaken for a snake than a photo of a mesh fly cage,
so take my word for it that these cages can be converted into fly
traps by a skilled tailor, or even by a moderately competent one.

One of the lab workers here, lets call him Bud, assured me on Monday
that he knew of such a tailor who had made these things before so that
evening we took eight cages round to Bud's house for him to take for
modification. Unfortunately on Tuesday Bud remembered that he didn't
have a car and so couldn't take the cages to the tailor after all, and
as Lamin was at that point halfway across the country driving The
Runner to a conference there wasn't a lot I could do about this. By
the time Lamin returned on Wednesday Bud had disappeared.

On Thursday Samuel L took charge, wheedling the name of the tailor out
of Bud. We drove to Bud's house to pick up the cages from his rather
startled wife then took them to the tailor's shop in Brikama Ba where
Bud had told him this man worked. There we were told that he'd moved
to another tailor's shop – turn right at the mosque and drive to the
next village. We drove for quite some time, found a tailor's shop
that had never heard of him, drove a bit further and found another
shop that had never heard of our man, let's call him Mohammed Mbye.
They had, however, heard of a tailor called Mohammed Njie and directed
us to a fourth tailor's shop (it should have been left at the mosque)
where we found the man himself, dozing on the porch.

We explained that he had been recommended by Bud and he beamed. "Yes,
yes, that man is my brother!" he said, surprising me as Bud had been
rather uncertain not only about where he worked but about his name.
He said that he could do the work overnight, but asked for extra money
as he had a lot of other jobs to do which he would postpone especially
for us. Samuel L seemed to think that paying this was a good idea so
I did. I felt rather guilty if his other clients wouldn't be getting
their clothes on time, but given the lack of activity he had been
displaying when we arrived I couldn't help suspecting that this was
the standard patter that all of his customers got. "Thank you, thank
you, I shall start work straight away and I shall work through the
night!" Satisfied we returned to Walikunda for lunch.

Twenty minutes after we had sat down the tailor, rather startlingly,
roared into the site on his motorbike and pulled up a few feet from
the picnic table. He had just remembered that he wouldn't be able to
complete the job without sellotape, and had no money to buy sellotape.
I still don't quite understand why sellotape was necessary for the
job but handed over the money anyway. After this transaction the
tailor decided that his workload was not in fact so excessive that it
would prevent him from having a drink with us and trying to hit on
Shivonne for fifteen minutes until she eventually went indoors.

We decided that after this rather frustrating morning we deserved an
afternoon being tourists, and so took the car ferry to the confusingly
named Janjanbureh/Georgetown/MacCarthy island. Local folklore tells
that when the British first arrived they asked two palmwine tappers
the name of the island and they, having possibly sampled too much of
their own product, gave their names – Janjan and Bureh. Why they
bothered asking I'm not sure as the British promptly renamed the place
Georgetown, and after independence the island was renamed MacCarthy,
but the three names are now used interchangeably. The island was used
by the British colonial administrators as a slave trading post as the
crocodile-infested waters around it discouraged escape attempts. They
still serve the same purpose – someone with either a keen sense of
irony or an acute lack of historical sensitivity has situated a hard
labour camp for maximum security prisoners on the island.

The town itself feels shabby and neglected. Driving in we passed its
most prominent building; the slave house, or rather its remaining
three walls. What remained was two storeys high and effectively
windowless, strongly reminiscent of the industrial barns factory
chickens are bred in. The roof was long gone but when intact it must
have been horrific, a dark, airless prison. And this was where the
more cooperative slaves were kept.

Worse was to come though. We paid a local guide a quite frankly
extortionate price to take us into the underground cellar where the
most rebellious slaves were kept, which we reached via a low, dark
tunnel that must truly have felt like the mouthway of hell itself to
those who were led down here in chains. Inside the ceiling had fallen
in, making it less claustrophobic than it would have been when in use,
but the supporting beams remained. I cracked my head on these several
times; they couldn't have been more than five foot off the ground, and
this was where the tallest, strongest men, the ones judged most
dangerous, would have been kept stooping in the darkness. The cellar
was built below the water table and in the rainy season water would
have come up to their knees, mingling with their own waste and the
scraps of food thrown down through four tiny chutes at the top of the
walls. By the time we were shown the tiny cells where the most
rebellious slaves were chained up to starve within earshot of those
who may have been considering following their example, I was feeling
rather unimpressed with humanity in general.

While obviously to a rather lesser extent, I was also feeling rather
disenchanted with our guide, who had asked for a perfectly reasonable
100D for the upkeep of the place but then demanded nearly four times
that sum for himself. He wasn't worth it – Samuel L had already
filled us in on the most important points and the buildings spoke for
themselves, but we learned from our guide that when the Europeans
first came the Gambians had been living in tin-roofed houses, and that
the slaves were transported to Brixton in the UK. He then discovered
that Shivonne was a doctor, and tried to convince her to sponsor his
brother to go to medical school.

He also told us that the buildings had been in his family's care for
generations, but I couldn't help feeling that they could have made a
slightly better job of it. Granted restoring the crumbling structures
would probably take more investment than a poverty-stricken West
African state could muster, but I felt that they could at least have
done something to prevent the graffiti. While some of it was at least
a heartfelt condemnation of slavery, most was the usual scrawled
stream of conciousness – names, mobile numbers, football teams.

Our guide then took us out into the yard where slaves had been weighed
and sold. The gravity of the place was rather spoiled by the presence
of a pair of heavily soiled underpants next to the spot where we were
standing, and by the fact that our guide proceeded to give exactly the
same talk as he had given underground, punctuated by aggressive
demands to know whether we understood whenever out attention seemed to
wander. Behind the yard, now walled into a separate compound, stood
the Freedom Tree. The original was long dead but a replacement had
been planted by Peace Corps volunteers. Any slave able to run the
twenty or so metres from the cellar door to the tree was granted his
or her freedom, which sounds like a sporting chance until you realise
that the British considered it great sport to shoot at them as they
passed. Needless to say very few made it.

At this point our guide left us so we headed for the famous Wooden
House, built by the first freed slaves to return to the island after
abolition. I knew this because it said so on a sign next to the
house, and this was confirmed by Samuel L. I would not, however, have
known this if I had listened to the young man who sidled up to us
offering a breathless commentary on how the first British people to
come to the island had built this house to keep a vicious dog which
they set on Black people. What made this fabrication so bizarre was
the fact that he was standing next to the explanatory sign when he
told it.

Our new self-appointed guide proved impossible to shake off, which was
particularly annoying when we returned to the barn-like slave house
where I would have appreciated a little space for quiet reflection and
found his incessant patter about slaves being fed to crocodiles rather
distracting (for all I know this may well have been true, but it was
hard to know what to take seriously when everyone just seemed to be
trying to find the story that would shock the most money out of you).

I know that it's monumentally arrogant and insensitive of me to be
disappointed by the way this place seems to be preserved with only the
minimum amount of care necessary to ensure that it continues to
function as a cash cow. As a white British woman I have no claim on
the ruins here, they should belong to the people who were taken, the
people who were left behind and the people who returned and if they
choose to let them crumble and tell fairytales about the remains then
who am I to have an opinion? But then a part of me says no, this is
part of my heritage too – the university I went to, many of my
employers, the wealth of my country that has allowed me to enjoy a far
more comfortable life than Samuel L could dream of – all of this was
built on the profits of slavery. Britain has benefited from slavery,
and I have benefited, and that debt should not be forgotten. Nor
should the suffering of those wrenched from their loved ones and
transplanted to an alien land be forgotten; out here I feel I could
empathise with the homesickness and dislocation but can't even begin
to imagine how people could have coped with a displacement that was
not of their own choice and from which there would be no return. Mine
should not be the last generation to see this; monuments to their
suffering should not be allowed to slide into the silt or be obscured
by the names of today's petty idols – Beyonce, Paul Gascoigne.

Lost in thought I bought a warm, sticky Fanta and we headed back. We
reached the dock to discover that the ferry had broken down, and for
once I was glad of traditional Gambian gender roles as Shivonne and I
sat in the Landrover while Lamin and Samuel L joined the other men at
the ferry railing, pulling on a heavy steel rope to haul us across.
At the other bank I asked Lamin whether we still had to pay full price
for the ferry crossing. "Of course!" he laughed "This is The Gambia!"

The next day we returned to discover that the tailor had made a
complete pig's ear of the fly traps (these were unlikely to trap
anything smaller than a gerbil, and even then only if it wanted to be
caught). Samuel L was furious, I was actually unsurprised and had to
leave the shop at one point in case the fit of the giggles I felt
coming on undermined what he was saying. The tailor was once again
shown what it was that we needed, and promised to have it done for the
next day, when we returned to find he'd cocked it up in a slightly
different way. I gave up at this point (if we'd given him back the
traps he'd probably have turned them into a wedding dress or
something), paid reluctantly and took them back to sew myself, which
at least I could do sitting by the river.

One of the senior entomologists on site saw what I was doing and asked
why I was making them myself. I explained the whole sorry saga. "I'm
not surprised" he said "there are no tailors good enough up here, we
get ours done in Farafenni."
"But Bud said this was the man you always went to!" I protested.
"Of course, that man is his brother" he said then seeing my
expression (PMT + prickly heat + access to machetes) and surmising
Bud's likely fate added with a sympathetic shrug "these things happen
here".
And I had to laugh.

Here comes the rain again

2009-06-26T07:44:00.001-07:00

The first night was horrible – I've never been so hot in my life. I
could hardly breathe let alone sleep and was finally forced to abandon
my hut and spend the night sitting at the picnic table while Mansonia
(a mosquito roughly the size of a 747) treated my back as an alfresco
buffet. I was a little worried about being eaten by crocodiles, but
reasoned that they were at least cold blooded so maybe I'd be cooler
in there. I spent most of Sunday drifting around the lower values of
the Glasgow coma scale.

On Sunday night the storm broke. In theory this meant that it was
cool enough to sleep, in practice the torrent of rain water (and for
all I know dissolved rat and gecko droppings) cascading through the
thatch onto my right shoulder made sleep impossible. I tried to drag
the bed out of the way, quickly discovering that Gambian furniture is
incredibly heavy, made from solid wood and apparently depleted
uranium. Gambian flooring on the other hand is incredibly flimsy;
what I'd taken for linoleum was in fact sticky back plastic ("Today on
Blue Peter, Yvette will show you how to build your very own
entomological research station") and I realised to my horror that in
dragging the monstrous bed I'd managed to tear two massive holes in
it. As icing on the cake I'd also managed to trap my thumb between
bed and table and was now sweating as much as I had on the previous
night. As if on cue the rain stopped, the cascade shrank to a trickle
and I collapsed onto the bed, cursing and praying for sleep, a
blizzard or a teleporter.

The next day was beautiful, as close as this place gets to cool and
with the heaviness washed from the air by the storm. We breakfasted
watching the river while a fairy-like swarm of winged ants issued from
the roots of a nearby tree. "They call them flood-flies in Belize"
said Shivonne, who has visited more countries than I've had hot
nights. A lovely name for lovely creatures. Later that day discarded
wings littered the compound like confetti. Large vermilion red mites
have emerged from their hiding places too, "the sons of the rain" they
call them locally. They stride purposefully across the earth, going
about whatever urgent business it is that brings them to the surface.
And a graceful, slender potter wasp is building a nest beneath the
toilet cistern, skilfully navigating the narrow crack between door and
frame with her burden again and again.

The lizards and geckos must think it's Christmas. I watched one
station herself next to the mouth of an ants' nest, busy tongue
flicking in and out to catch the little fairies as they emerged as
though from a snack dispenser. The feast has made the ubiquitous blue
and yellow lizards randy – the males circle each other, do pressups to
intimidate their rivals then begin a bout of tail-flick jousting that
usually culminates in a high speed chase across the compound.

The nightshift is something else though. Bats swoop low around the
research centre chasing the myriad flying things brought out by the
rains, each one a sinister little potential rabies vector. And we had
been warned about the scorpions and poisonous snakes that come out to
feast on this bounty after the lean dry season.

Shivonne and I were both very keen not to be stung or bitten by either
scorpions or snakes, and for once Michelle shared our caution.
Instead of eating out at the picnic table as usual (this would have
been impractical in any case because of the kamikaze ants dive-bombing the
candles) we decided to dine in the mess room – hot and stifling but,
we hoped, scorpion free.

Michelle stepped through the door first, carrying three plates of the
surprisingly palatable Indian MREs. I followed bearing assorted mugs,
cutlery and condiments. As Michelle headed for the table something
large, brown and extremely well endowed in the articulated legs
department scuttled out from under the sofa and stopped between her
feet. Hardened fieldworker that I am (hah!) I screamed, then gasped
"Michelle. Do. Not. Move". Amazingly not only did she follow
instructions she managed not to drop any of the food she was carrying.
Whatever-it-was then scurried on its merry way under the bookshelf.
"What's happening?" asked Shivonne, materialising behind me with a
large bottle of water and a puzzled expression. I waited until
everyone was safely out of the mess room before telling them what I'd
seen (Michelle looked rather ill), then went to find a night watchman
to hunt it down with extreme prejudice.

We decided to finish eating in my hut, which I was fairly certain
hadn't contained a scorpion half an hour ago at any rate. Halfway
through a rather nervous meal something came under the door and made a
high speed dash under the bed. At this point I invited one of the
nightwatchmen into my room (apparently as a woman you are really not
supposed to do this as the man will assume you want to sleep with him,
but I think he got the message from our terrified expressions and the
discarded food on the bed that this was not what we were looking for.
He flushed out something of approximately the dimensions and
colouration of an Alien face-hugger and trod on it. It burst quite
dramatically.

"Just a spider! Not dangerous!" he said, laughing. We leaned forward
to inspect the mangled mess of legs, mandibles and ichor. "Of course
it's a spider, it's got eight legs and no sting!" exclaimed Shivonne,
accusingly. ("I'd like to see you differentiate a patient with
pancreatitis and one with a burst appendix if they were moving past
you at 60 miles an hour" I thought of responding, two hours too late.)

Afterwards as we finished our meals we became quite blasé about the
facehuggers. I killed the next one myself with a surgical strike from
a sandal, not quite trusting it not to bite. Shivonne took photos of
its twitching corpse so that people would believe her about its size –
at least three people reading this will be very grateful that I can't
upload them. When the fourth and fifth came in we ignored them and
hoped they would eat the mosquitoes. We toasted snakes and scorpions
with ice-cold water and decided that Wali Kunda wasn't as dangerous as
we'd been told.

The next morning Michelle saw a real scorpion in the bathroom, which
the watchmen had to kill, and was very relieved to head back to the
coast. That evening the watchmen killed another scorpion and two
snakes. I'm wearing my jungle boots after dark now, and getting some
practice in with the sandal.

MRC Walikunda

2009-06-26T07:43:00.001-07:00

On Saturday we drove up to Wali Kunda, bouncing along the corrugated
road behind buses and jalopies overburdened with rice sacks,
cloth-covered bundles and the occasional live sheep (looking entirely
unperturbed by this novel vantage point. I have a new driver, a
smiling, affable bloke named Lamin (MRC has two drivers called Lamin
and three called Omar. Lamin is the traditional name for first-born
sons here. Presumably all subsequent sons get Omar). Samuel L had
ridden on ahead on his motorbike, a form of transport that makes his
resemblance to Samuel L Jackson even more pronounced.

I was accompanied by The Runner, Shivonne, and Michelle, who is coming
with us because she has no project to work on and she has always
dreamed of seeing hippos. Personally I have always dreamed of living
long enough to have a horde of grandchildren, a rose garden in which
to potter and licence to say whatever the hell I like to anyone under
the pretence of dementia, and had therefore planned to stay as far
away from the hippos as possible, but each to their own. Incidentally
the mystery of Michelle's project, or lack of one, has been solved;
the NGO didn't change its mind about working with her, turns out that
her contact at the Gambian University who said he'd arranged
everything hadn't actually bothered to get in touch with them before
she arrived. She spent three days waiting for a meeting with him that
never materialised then gave it up as a lost cause and decided to come
hippo-hunting.

We stopped off for lunch at a small restaurant in Soma, a town as
sleepy as it sounds. As I has teh coeliac, as usual there was nothing
I could eat on the menu so I settled for my usual plain boiled rice.
The Runner, unused to the rather spartan meals I'd been having here,
asked if this would be enough. I explained that I had some
gluten-free bread and a tin of sardines in my bag to eat later.
"Have the sardines with the rice" he suggested.
"Will they mind if I eat my own food in here?"
"Not at all, this is The Gambia. They may charge you corkage
though." The Runner quipped.

All went well until the time came to leave and I idly wandered out
with the sardine tin in my hand. Realising this I asked if anyone had
a rubbish bag as I still can't get used to the Gambian car-window
method of waste disposal. "Just leave it in the restaurant, they'll
probably use it as an ashtray" said The Runner. Somewhat
apologetically I returned to the restaurant and deposited my greasy
burden on the nearest table. There was an indignant outcry from the
staff (who outnumbered the customers about four to one) and I was
forced to exit at a rather higher velocity than I'd entered. Diving
gratefully into the safety of the Landrover I realised I'd learned an
important lesson; your supervisor isn't always right.

We reached MRC Wali Kunda in the early afternoon and, after being
introduced to the hundred or so ground staff, brothers of ground staff
and cousins of sisters in law of ground staff, had a few moments to
explore. The compound is truly beautiful – the labs and living
quarters are in traditionally thatched mudbrick huts and the site
slopes down to the bank of the River Gambia in all its palm-fringed,
languid glory. Some thoughtful soul has placed a shaded picnic table
next to the river, where you can sit with a coffee and watch the
kingfishers hover and the fishing canoes glide by.

This beauty comes at a price though, Wali Kunda is certainly the most
uncomfortable place I've stayed to date. All the water for washing,
bodies, clothes and dishes, comes from the river and is most likely
teeming with Lord-knows-what. There is a filter for drinking water
but it's broken – I've had a shot at fixing it and will try again
later, but feel more comfortable buying the dusty, overpriced crates
of mineral water from a shopkeeper in the nearby Brikama Ba who can't
believe his luck.

My lab is a windowless mudhut with a distinct odour of rat. There is
no electric light, but as electricity is only available from the
generator for a few hours a day this isn't such a concern. Most
difficult of all to deal with though is the heat – if you've ever
woken up in a tent-turned greenhouse with a hangover, imagine that
feeling 24 hours a day. Trying to keep clean here is impossible,
shower and fifteen minutes later you're drenched in sweat again. I
smell of...myself actually, very strongly of myself. Strange how
humans must be the only animal that can't stand their own odour.

This place is a health and safety officer's nightmare. The kitchen
freezer functions as a fridge due to intermittent electricity and
sports a stern sign warning "NO ethidium bromide! NO unlabelled blood
samples! (Labelled blood samples are presumably acceptable) NO
dangerous hazard in the freezer!" Fortunately when I arrived it just
contained some chillis, which are only a dangerous hazard if you get
really creative. The wiring looks like it was done by a suicidal
gibbon on acid – sockets dangle off wall, empty light fittings dangle
off ceilings and French plugs are jammed into English sockets and
secured with matchsticks. The food hygiene isn't much better, with
dying fish deposited on every available surface and cups and cutlery
used then replaced unwashed – it's just like living with Johny again.

But back to our first afternoon, The Runner was delighted to discover
that the canoe he'd left behind was still there and decided to take
Michelle (praying to see hippos) and me (praying not to see hippos)
across the river to celebrate. A lot of squelching an one pair of
trousers that'll never be the same again later, we were safely on
board. We headed for the gap between islands (I say we but The Runner
provided most of the motive force and all of the navigation, I just
dipped my paddle in from time to time to feel useful). Halfway across
he instructed us to stop paddling and just listen for a minute. The
only sound was the local avian orchestra and, as the research station
was now obscured by trees there was no trace of any human presence
anywhere around us – quite an amazing sensation.

We reached the other bank and clambered out of the canoe, muddying the
places that had until now remained unmuddied. As I struggled to
extract my foot from the human equivalent of a yellow sticky trap my
trusty TEVAs finally expired, with the straps on the left foot tearing
away from the sole. Almost simultaneously Michelle managed to turn
her ankle. I had rather expected, given her hobbled state and my
uni-shoedness that The Runner would simply plant his foot on a nearby
rock, say something along the lines of "I claim this land for her
royal majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Huzzah!" and then we could
all row back for a nice cup of tea. Instead he established that we
were both capable of at least some form of locomotion, instructed us
to remember that the canoe was tied up under a big tree and strode off
into the distance. We stumbled after him as best we could, over a
drought-fissured landscape that suddenly, dramatically gave way to
lush rice paddies, then beyond into the forest at the foot of a rocky
escarpment.

I had been eyeing said rocky escarpment rather dubiously for some time
now, remembering how keen The Professor had been to climb the hill
back in Nianija. Perhaps this determination to climb things says
something about the kind of person who becomes a professor – as soon
as they see something high they want to be at the top of it. Sure
enough, as soon as we got to the base he smiled brightly and said
"Let's climb up!". My heart sank.

Then something magical happened. As we surveyed the summit, The
Runner doubtless imagining the view from the top, Michelle and myself
considering feigning malaria, a silhouette passed across the skyline.
Then another, then another, then another with a youngster on its back.
"Baboons!" I gasped and Michelle started counting breathlessly
"sixteen...seventeen...eighteen". She soon lost count. We stood
mesmerised until the last of the shapes passed behind the trees and
the evening was still once more. "Let's not disturb them" said The
Runner to heartfelt agreement and we headed back to the canoe,
discovering on the way that there were quite a number of large trees
on the river bank.

Rowing back as the sun set over the river I felt a sense of great
peace descend around me. Life will be tough here, but there will be
compensations.

Easy living

2009-06-12T16:07:00.001-07:00

I'm back on the coast, where the air con is on, the shower is wet and
life is sweet. Shivonne and I have a week of comfort while we extract
the samples we took before going back up to Wali Kunda to broil in
the forty degree heat and eighty five percent humidity. This gives me
a liitle breathing space to catch up on tasks I'd been neglecting,
like taking a pair of tweezers to a moustache almost worthy of Gomez
Adams and darning the huge rents in the back of one of my shirts - the
daily laundry service is indeed a pleasure, but sadly they don't seem
to be too gentle with the clothes.

In the accommodation block (like Mildert with mosquitoes) I ran into
the woman from Iowa who was supposed to be working on FGM. I'm going
to call her Michelle, because that's her name and I'm too tired to
keep thinking up nicknames for people. I was surprised first by the
state of her legs (I thought I'd been eaten alive by mosquitoes but
she seemed to have more bite than skin) but mostly by the fact that
she was still there - I had expected her to be upcountry by now. She
explained a little more about her project; she had been hoping to take
a harm reduction approach to FGM, accepting that it was not likely to
be eradicated soon and providing clean instruments to use to at least
reduce the assosciated infections and complications. The NGO she had
been hoping to work with had apparently been happy to support this
study before she left, but now she was in The Gambia had suddenly
decided it didn't want to be associated with anything that could be
seen to be condoning FGM. I can see both sides, I do think Michelle's
harm reduction approach is probably more likely to suceed than a bunch
of outsiders turning up and telling people to stop doing something
that they consider part of their heritage, but on the other hand
cultural relitivism is all very well but some practices are genuinely
abhorrent however you look at them and I could see that the NGO
wouldn't want to support something it felt might dilute this message.
It seemed a bit harsh of them to change their position once she was
actually in the country though - she's here for another ten weeks and
has so far played a lot of frisbee, done a lot of shopping and gotten
rather frustrated. I felt very lucky that my project was so
uncontroversial - no one is going to object to the eradication of
trachoma apart from the flies, and they don't get a say. I hope she
finds some way around this soon.

My work on the other hand is going very well. Shivonne and I have
tested all the DNA samples we took for the presence of C. trachomatis,
and seven of the 42 children have come back positive - not quite as
high as I'd hoped, but not too shabby. I'm extracting the eye sponges
as we speak, and hope that the volatile profiles I get back in the UK
will tie up with infection status and maybe with the number of flies
caught from children's faces. I'm not very confident that the fly
catch data will yield anything significant as our fly catch totals
were much lower than those recorded in a previous study though. This
is in part due to weather conditions but it may also be due to two
very welcome changes in the five years since the previous study - an
expansion of latrine provision may well have led to lower fly number,
and the last study sampled the children in the mornings when flies
were in theory most active but we had to get them whenever we could
because many of the children were now in school (in practice there
seemed to be little difference between fly catches in the mornings and
afternoons though).

This is the point of a pilot study though, to find out these things so
you know what can be done better next time (probably a larger sample
size). Actually the biggest headache I've had has not been due to the
method itself but to the labelling of the samples. I'm using
Cryobabies labels (I love scientific humour) which are meant to be
freezer safe, but mine started peeling off. I think they're probably
not designed to be applied in dusty field conditions, and are meant to
be kept in a high specification freezer which doesn't regularly
defrost due to power outages, rather than the old meat freezer that
dripped so much I actually had to pick some of my tubes out of a
microglacier. I only lost the labels for two entirely, and that may
actually be quite a good thing as one is the volatile collection from
an unifected child and one the volatile collection from an infected
child - if I am actually able to distinguish between the two using
volatiles this will be an interesting test. But next time I'll
definitely label my tubes before getting into the field, then fix them
on with Parafilm. And maybe some superglue and a nail gun.

It hasn't all been extraction though, I've also had some time to
sample the local nightlife, though everywhere seems a little desolate
as the tourist season winds down. The Professor left on Tuesday, and
later that day my other supervisor arrived. He is also a professor,
but for the avoidance of confusion I'm going to call him The Runner
because running is his passion outside science, and because he has a
manic energy that is great fun in the UK but is perhaps a little
exhausting here. To celebrate we went to Leybato's beach bar, a very
pleasant place with shaded tables and gently swinging hammocks amongst
lush palm trees. All this was rather wasted on me however as ten
minutes after sitting down my stomach lurched, my mouth filled with
saliva and I realised I was going to be sick. I stumbled out onto the
sand and found a palm tree to hide under, disturbed only by an
extremely persistent elderly hawker who was determined that what
someone hunched in the foetal position groaning gently to themselves
really, realy needed was to buy some roasted cashew nuts. In spite of
her attentions I eventually started to feel better, and retreated back
to the bar when a huddle or attractive, half naked young men formed
around me clearly deciding amongst themselves who got first dibs on
comforting me.

Strangely it passed as quickly as it had come on, and later that
evening I was able to make it to the Alliance Francaise, the French
cultural centre, to watch a really excellent jazz concert featuring
Sandy Patton and the husband of one of the lab workers. She was
wonderful, not only thoroughly professional when faced with crackling
speakers, a brief power cut and a row of the audience who wandered in
halfway through and didn't seem to realise they weren't supposed to
carry on their conversations at full volume, but she also seemed to be
genuinely enjoying herself which was wonderful to watch. The venue
was quite magical too, an open air amphitheatre under a starry sky.
And the toilets had no paper, no lock on the door and no light for
that authentic French cultural experience.

Adopting the headscarf isn't the only thing I'm doing here that I'd
never dream of doing at home. I'm wearing the bumbag that my parents
gave me as a moneybelt every day, which I realise isn't exactly the
height of fashion particularly in combination with the creases that
have been ironed into all my trousers. I had planned to buy a nice
bag when I got out here, something smaller than my thirty litre
rucksack, but the only bags on offer seem to be the kind of garish PVC
designer knock-offs I could pick up from a dozen stalls in Woolwich
market, and I have no more desire to buy them out here than I did in
London. So for the moment the bumbag will have to do.

I'm also keeping my knickers in the freezer, behaviour that would
probably get me sectioned in the UK. This is not for the pleasure of
frosty-fresh kecks in this heat, enjoyable though it is, but as an
extra line of defence against the tumbu fly - the launderers are
assiduous in ironing outer clothes, but seem less so with underwear.
I'd actually be quite interested, from a scientific perspective, to
get a tumbu fly on my arms or legs, but nowhere my knickers cover.

My tastes in reading matter have also changed dramatically. There is
a bookshelf in the student accommodation where visitors can exchange
books they've brought from the UK, and it's interesting to note how
many worthy books it contains; Dubliners, Bury my heart at wounded
knee, various incarnations of the Great American Novel. I'm guessing
that a lot of people brought out the books they'd always been meaning
to read. I wonder how many of them, like me, discovered that in this
heat they only had the attention span for trash. I've been entirely
incapable of making any headway with anything intelligent so was
delighted to find "Plague of the Dead - A Zombie Novel by Z A Recht"
tucked away in the corner. It features measured endorsements from
esteemed sources; "... a zombiefied Out of the Ashes, a blend of 28
Days Later zombies and Romero zombies, with a climax so intense it
literally had me shaking. A FANTASTIC book!" - Travis Adkins, author
of Twilight of the Dead, "A truly epic novel that deserves your
immediate attention!" - pain@allthingszombie.com, "An understated
masterpiece." - TLS (or maybe not). It has some extremely dodgy
science (a virus described as a cross between malaria and ebola) and
dialogue that sounds like it was written by a fourteen year old - I
laughed out loud when a sixty year old army general stated that the
desert blows chunks. In short, it's awful, wonderfully, wonderfully
awful, and just what I needed. I could feel myself going down several
notches in Shivonne's estimation when she spotted it on my desk.

Internet access is still hard to come by, as MRC has blocked access to
just about all non-work related websites (a bit of a stupid move for
an organisation mostly staffed by people a long way from home, and
hardly what you'd expect from a humanitarian body). I am therefore
typing this in La Parisienne, a cafe on Kairaba Avenue. ALthough it
has ice, coffee and milk the waiters are apparently not authorised to
combine these substances to make me an iced coffee, and the advertised
orange juice turns out to be Fanta, but though it may disappoint in
the beverage stakes it more than makes up for it by offering free
wireless internet access for which a large number of MRC staff decamp
there every day.

030609 - Who watches the watchmen?

2009-06-09T04:19:00.003-07:00

Last night, in the stifling heat, I had a lovely dream about cool
waterfalls then woke up to find I could still hear water. Still half
dazed I assumed that someone had left the tap on, and that Jeff would
go and turn it off in a minute, and it was quite some time before I
was alert enough to realise that not only was there no Jeff here,
there shouldn't be any water either. My room is one down from the
shared bathroom (making me convenience food for the mosquitoes
breeding in the toilet there) and this seemed to be the source of the
noise, so I found my torch and went to investigate, Nancy Drew style.

Sure enough I was shocked to see that one of the taps had been left
turned on and water was cascading into the basin (my first impulse, I
must admit, was to stick my head under it). Those blessed with UK
plumbing will no doubt be wondering why seeing water coming out of a
tap was so startling, but here at the Mission although in theory we're
meant to have 24 hour water from the storage tanks, in practice the
guards empty them whenever they fancy a brew and I knew for a fact
that the tanks had been empty when we'd come back from the field the
previous day. The only was for them to have been refilled would have
been for the guards to have turned the pump on again in the middle of
the night, something they certainly shouldn't be doing as turning it
on more than twice a day doesn't give the well long enough to refill,
causing the pump to suck up sand which damages it.

Hell hath no fury like Julie needlessly deprived of a shower, so I
stormed up to the guard station to demand an explanation. There
should always be at least two guards on duty but only Elderly
Nightwatchman was present. He at first categorically denied that the
pump had been switched on, but changed his story after I escorted him
to the pump (which was on) and switched it off. Apparently Young
Nightwatchman had turned it on to have a shower, and now he had gone
to the village. When would he be back? "Soon, soon." I decided this
was more than I could handle alone and knocked on Emma's door, but she
was too soundly asleep to notice so I decided she deserved her rest
and sat down to wait.

At this point the righteous indignation fizzled out and I began to
have some doubts about my course of action. I had just caught Young
Nightwatchman out deserting his post, turning on the pump when he
wasn't supposed to, wasting electricity and wasting water, and Elderly
Nightwatchman covering for him. I began to wonder if he'd left the
tap running on purpose to empty the tank again and cover his tracks.
There were two of them and one of me, and while Elderly Nightwatchman
would probably fall over if I poked him with my little finger Young
Nightwatchman was a rather more formidable presence. Just as I was
considering bolting back to my room and locking the door Young
Nightwatchman returned.

In the event I needn't have worried. When asked where he'd been Young
Nightwatchman intially, rather ingeniously, claimed that he had gone
to turn the pump off. When I explained that this was impossible as I
had turned it off myself they both just started laughing and said "No
problem! No problem" when I tried to explain why they shouldn't turn
the pump on more than twice. Eventually I gave up in disgust and went
back to bed, vowing to call down the wrath of Emma upon them the next
day.

Two hours later I was woken again by a roaring noise. My first
thought was that the generator had broken, and I rushed to the window
expecting to find the compound on fire but saw only backness. To my
horror I then noticed water cascading down the veranda - the guards
must have broken the pump after all, and now they couldn't switch it
off and the tank had burst! It was only when I remembered that the
water tank was on the other side of my room that I realised what it
was pounding on the flimsy tin roof of the mission.

The rains have come early this year.

020609 - I've had better days

2009-06-09T04:19:00.001-07:00

There is a species of wasp (I've forgotten the name but I'm sure
someone reading this will be able to provide it in the comments) which
buries a cockroach in its burrows for its developing larvae to feed
on. It's a small wasp though , and a cockroach is a large insect, so
dragging a dead cockroach into the burrow would be impossible.
Instead of killing it then, the wasp stings the cockroach and injects
a very special toxin which doesn't paralyse it but destroys the part
of its brain that gives it volition (if that word can be applied to a
cockroach). The cockroach loses any desire to move of its own accord,
but if the wasp seizes it by the antennae and gently leads it towards
its burrow it will walk, unresisting, to its doom. There it will
remain alive as the young larvae feed on it, devoid of any desire to
escape.

In this heat I feel like that cockroach, capable of completing tasks
if led to them but not really in any fit state to plan a study. The
rains aren't due for another fortnight or so, but yesterday I saw
clouds in the sky for the first time and last night the heat felt like
a solid thing, heavy and smothering in the darkness. Sitting in the
village to catch flies I could feel the sweat pouring down my legs,
and when I got home I discovered a livid sweat rash between my tits
(in a way this is quite gratifying, as I didn't think my tits were big
enough to sweat between). To replace the water I'm drinking about
four litres of water a day, with a couple of sachets of dioralyte.
Fortunately knowing Lou has prepared me for that fact that for doctors
no bodily function is an unsuitable subject for polite conversation,
but I was still a little unsettled when Shivonne asked me how many
times a day I was going to the toilet. I was even more unsettled
when, after a brief stop to irrigate a nearby palm field (no ants this
time) Shivonne gave me an encouraging little smile and said "You're
not doing too badly for hydration!".

In spite of the heat we got some good flycatch data in the morning,
but things started to go wrong after lunch when we returned to a
village we'd screened last week and found to have a high incidence of
trachomatous infection. I could tell that something wasn't right as
soon we pulled in to the village - usually we are greeted with smiles
and shouts of welcome, but here the people looked sullen and were
reluctant to talk to Smauel L. It turned out that the day after we
had inspected the childrens' eyes there had been an outbreak of vernal
conjunctivitis (an eye infection different from trachoma) in the
village, for which the villagers were blaming. It's not impossible
that we caused this, but it seems very unlikely - when screening
Samuel L and the Professor followed the standard hygienic procedures
between eyes, this hadn't happened in any of the other villages we'd
screened and outbreaks of vernal conjunctivitis amongst children are
not uncommon that time of year in the normal course of events. What
mattered in this situation though was not what had caused the outbreak
but that the villagers believed that we had.

We gave out tubes of chloramphenicol to the mothers of the infected
children, and as a PR excercise gave sweets to the Alkalo for all the
village children, but they didn't want us to take samples. Suddenly a
furious mother confronted us with a sobbing girl with blood red
corneas and swollen eyelids coated in a white powder. It turned out
that she had conjunctivitis and that her mother had attempted to treat
this by crushing a packet of paracetamol tablets and pouring it into
her eyes. There's a bit of an attitude here that if a medicine treats
one thing it'll treat anything, and the more the better, but I think
even Shivonne was shocked by this. She washed her eyes out and gave
her some ointment for the infection, but there was nothing she could
do for the irritation.

If that wasn't enough, just as we were preparing to leave a shout went
up and a man came running up to the bantaba with a small girl in his
arms, blood pouring down her face. Once Shivonne had cleaned it up it
turned out to be a very small cut that had just been bleeding
profusely, but as she had done it on a rusty iron sheet Shivonne was
worried about tetanus. The child had no clinic card and noone knew
whether she was up to date with her vaccinations, so Shivonne told the
parents to take her to the nearby hospital for a vaccination - of
course as a trachoma screening team we had no vaccinations to give
out, but the villagers had a hard time believing this.

Driving home, Samuel L was uncharacteristically quiet. He eventually
explained that we would be going back to our own countries but these
were his people, whose language he spoke, and he had friends in nearby
villages - could we be absolutely certain that he hadn't given those
children conjunctivitis? We tried to reassure him, but "correlation
doesn't imply causation" is a nice pat phrase beloved of sceptical
bloggers but doesn't provide much comfort in these situations.

We stopped off at the Kaur weather station to ask for temperature,
humidity and wind speed data for the region over the sampling period.
All was going well until the station operator explained that providing
this information was complicated and that many people made a small
payment to help cover expenses. As he was paid a salary to collect
the data anyway I couldn't see that the expenses involved in providing
it would be much more than the cost of a pencil and paper, but by that
stage I would have given both kidneys to get the data and get home to
a cold bucket bath so I agreed to give him a "small present". I did
feel bad afterwards, knowing that by giving in I'd made things that
bit harder for the next researcher to come by, but screw it, I think
I'm accruing enough good karma just by being here and washing out of a
blue plastic rubbish bin every day to balance it out.

We stopped again to buy cold soft drinks and I was briefly amused by
my can of inaccurately named "Real Orange" (the only plant-derived
ingredients being sugar and, bizarrely, esterified wood-resin). My
mood was still sufficiently dark though that when Shivonne pointed out
a huddle of children around a well by the road I said the first thing
that came into my head, which was "One of them has probably fallen
in". She looked slightly shocked and said she thought they were
probably telling stories.

The thing about fieldwork though is there's no time or headroom to be
miserable, you just have to try to get some sleep and go out and do it
all again the next day. I hope tomorrow will be better, Inshallah.

010609 - No flies on us

2009-06-09T04:18:00.001-07:00

One of my non-science related goals for this trip was to see some of
the famous Senegambian stone circles which dot the countryside between
the River Gambia and Senegal's river Saloum. They consist of between
ten and twenty four squat laterite cylinders enclosing a burial area.
Their original architects are a mystery, vanishing from the region
over a thousand years ago before the area's current inhabitants
migrated in, although the decorative tooth notches shared by today's
Jola tribe and the skeletons unearthed within the circles suggest some
continuity of culture. I find it fascinating how so many ancient
civilisations across the world all independently arrived at the idea
of building these monuments. There's obviously something very
deep-seated in the human psyche that has driven wildy disparate
cultures to impose some sort of order on the world around them by
arranging stones into complex geometric patterns. Either that or a
deeply ingrained urge to say "Look at me, I can afford to have bigger
stones dragged about than that bastard in the next village can".

I hadn't expected to see any of the circles until I reached Wali
Kunda, but as we drove out to screen on Monday morning we spotted a
ring of red pillars out of the landrover window. We pleaded with the
driver to stop and take photographs, but he grinned and said just
wait. We pulled into our first screening village, Sinchu Demba, and
as Samuel L requested permission to screen from the Alkalo Shivonne
and I went to have a look at a curious building we'd seen on the way
in - brightly painted, tin-roofed and situated in a large wire-fenced
compound with its own water tank and mobile phone mast, seeming quite
out of character with the rest of the village.

Although none of the villages we'd visited seemed especially affluent,
Sinchu Demba looked like a village that had fallen on hard times.
Most villages are aranged around a bantaba, a wooden platform shaded
by a large tree or thatched roof, upon which the men lie during the
hottest part of the day to snooze, talk politics and brew tea (the
women, needless to say, keep pounding grain whatever the temperature).
Although the shade tree was still standing in Sinchu Demba, and we
could see the struts that had once supported the bantaba, the platform
had long rotted away. There seemed to be fewer animals here than in
the other villages; no sheep or goats, just a tired donkey and a few
mite-ridden chickens, and the childrens' hair was fluffy and
unbraided. The Alkalo was a quiet, dignified man, but unsteady on his
feet and with a hacking cough. The only other men in the village
seemed to be the thinnest elderly man I'd ever seen and a youth of
nineteen who fancied himself as a bit of a ganster with his
much-darned JaRule T-shirt, patched adidas trousers and fake Ray Bans.

But right next to it was something that in any other country should
have been bringing prosperity to the village. The Alkalo explained
that a toubab had come from London and built the compound, but when he
had finished it the government had taken it over and were now using it
as a regional administrative post. He said the administrators weren't
there at the moment and offered to take us in through a gap in the
fence. From his description it sounded like the toubab had been
building a house here, and it was only when we got closer that we
realised what it really was; a museum of Gambian culture, with the
Kerr Batch stone circles in the grounds. The government had moved
into the offices, the museum itself was abandoned, the keys still in
the swinging door.

The whole place made me very sad; sad for the mysterious toubab, who
had obviously put a lot of love into designing the museum, choosing
and explaining the exhibits and commissioning paintings and dioramas,
only to have it taken from him and left open to the wild dogs and
dust, but also sad for the villagers who seemed to feel so little
connection to this place, this museum an outsider had built to their
culture, and who had derived so little benfit from it. The stones were
smaller than I had expected, though still majestic in the early
morning stillness, but these too seemed removed from the villagers,
fenced off as they were in the grounds of this museum to a museum.
Suddenly I noticed that one of the stones had a number of smaller
stones precariously balanced on top of it, certainly not looking as if
they had stood there as long as the stone pillars themselves. For some
reason this made me shiver - maybe the stones weren't as removed from
the villagers as I'd thought.

The Alkalo led us to one of the circles, explaining through Samuel L
that if you prayed here you would get whatever you wished for. I
looked at the Alkalo, wondering if that sad, noble man had received
everything he had wished for here, and it seemed only right to kneel
in the dirt and pray too. I prayed for successful fieldwork and for
my grandmother, then felt slightly guilty that I'd done it in that
order.

Finally the Alkalo showed us a slightly raised mound with a slab on
top, warning us not to smoke on the mound and not to tread on the
slab. He said that there was something here, a shape that you could
see when you were far away, but it vanished when you got close to it.
The morning was clammy and grey and I was developing a major case of
the creeps, so I was glad to get back to village and get involved in
the usual pandemonium that ensued when trying to sample a horde of
squealing children. Particularly memorable was the tiny girl with the
cheeky smile who giggled every time Shivonne tried to take a nasal
swab.

So please, if anyone finds this blog post whilst googling to plan a
trip to The Gambia, visit the stone circles at Kerr Batch. Stop off
in Sinchu Demba, give the Alkalo some kola nuts and see if you can
find someone to make you attaya for ten dalasi (2009). The wannabe
gansta speaks a little French, if the government officials aren't
there ask him to take you to the museum and give the Alkalo a few
dalasi. If the officials are there, buy more attaya in the village
and look at the stones through the fence. These people are sitting on
a fantastic heritage that should be bringing them prosperity but seems
to be only bringing them trouble. Maybe that's Africa all over.

After that we moved on to fly-catching experiments. I'm trying to
correlate the presence of certain chemicals in nasal and occular
discharge with the number of flies attracted to children's faces, and
to do this have to sit the children down on a stool somewhere shady
while Samuel L catches the flies that touch their faces with a
handnet. Fortunately he's extremely good at it. I tend to catch ears
and noses instead. We do this for fifteen minutes, which would be an
impossible amount of time to expect a Western child to sit still for
but attention spans seem to be rather longer here in the absence of
TV's and Xboxes. It's hilarious to watch - the child inintently
watching Samuel L, him intently watching their faces for flies and all
the other kids clustered round watching something a bit out of the
ordinary happening. My favourite fly-catching village was Sare Janko
- the first little boy kept falling asleep, which was adorable, and
the Alkalo spoke English and wanted to know "everything about England
and her agriculture" which was a little challenging but quite fun.
Somehow I got talking about the Eurostar, which amazed him - a tunnel
under the sea that trains go through? I suddenly realised that this
was actually quite amazing, and not for the first time on this trip
felt like a spoilt, complacent twat.

When we got back there was no water. There was also no electricity -
our credit with the power company had run out in a third of the time
it was supposed to. Either someone had been using way too much
electricity without anyone else noticing or the power company was
scamming us. Emma, the woman in charge of the mission, ordered a car
to the power station to sort it out forthwith.

Emma is incredible. She runs the North Bank trachoma survey, runs the
mission, supervises the fueling of the landrovers and luckily has no
ambitions to run an army because if she did half the planet would be
conquered by Tuesday. After a day in the field I just want to wash as
best I can, grab a bite to eat and pass out but Emma spends her
evenings with the fieldworkers checking through the questionnaire data
they have collected, then deals with the administration of the mission
and still has the energy to pay close attention to my work and pull me
up on any points she thinks I may be being sloppy over. Somewhere in
all of this she is also finding time to do a PhD. I haven't given her
a nickname because I'd be scared to. (The same goes for Shivonne
incidentally, whilst planning this fieldwork I was told I'd be
accompanied by a paediatric nurse to take my swabs, so when I met
Shivonne I assumed that she was the nurse. She is actually a fully
qualified doctor, which she lost no time in explaining to me. This
and the fact that she is one of the most incredibly competent people
I've ever met have left me a little in awe of her too.)

In fact, there are quite a lot of things and people out here that are
pretty awe-inspiring.

Lumo

2009-06-01T13:02:00.003-07:00

Before coming out here I had to complete an exhaustive fieldwork risk
assessment detailing every activity I planned to undertake and how to
minimise the risks that it entailed. When it comes to transport I am
supposed to travel only in well maintained MRC cars driven by a
reputable driver. Travelling by mule cart would not, I expect, have
been an alternative acceptable to Rothamsted's health and safety
adviser.

Shivonne and I had Sunday off and decided to visit the local lumo or
Sunday market. As this is held in a field some distance out of town,
and as our drivers also had Sunday off we went the local way, on a
two-wheeled metal frame to which a few wooden slats had been attached
which doesn't really deserve to be dignified with the name "cart". We
tried to pick one pulled by the healthiest looking mule we could find
- most of the horses, donkeys and mules here are in shocking
condition, emaciated and with open sores on their sides. It seems a
bit silly to care about the condition of the animals here when the
people are living in poverty, but the people look happy and the draft
animals certainly don't.

We hopped up onto the cart and set off, picking up more passengers on
the way. I tried to take a photo of the driver but as I did so he
whipped his mule. The poor beast put on a sudden burst of speed and
the cart lurched, almost making me drop the camera. I decided to
concentrate on holding tight from that point on. After a
bone-rattling ride we reached the lumo and clambered unsteadily down.
I went forward to pay the driver and the cart promptly ran over my
foot. Thank you Roxana, Imogen, David et al., without those army
boots I'm sure I would have broken it but as it was I just felt a bit
sore and like a total tit. Note to parents: I will not do this again.

The lumo seemed packed and chaotic, and it was often hard to tell who
was the customer and who was the vendor. Sacking and tarpaulins were
strung overhead for shade, often a few inches below headheight, so I
spent much of the time stooping.We quickly discovered that there was
an underlying order though, clothes here, homeware there, car parts at
the back, vegetables at the front and next to them the dried fish
section which we steered well clear of because of the smell. I
bought a cooking pot (there was only one in the kitchen), some
homemade local soap which looked nice but turned out to be incredibly
harsh, some veg and a pretty headscarf (I could really get used to
this fake Muslim thing) before finding another cart to rattle us home.
This time we didn't have such a choice of horses and the poor beast
we picked was in very bad shape and farted all the way back, not great
for the passengers downwind.

At least I assume it was the horse, I suppose it could have been the driver.

Setsetal

2009-06-01T13:02:00.001-07:00

One of the things a naive European visitor to The Gambia (such as
myself) finds most shocking is the rubbish strewn by the roadsides -
plastic bags, tin cans and other unidentifiable detritus mingle with
animal filth and the occasional rotting cow or horse carcase,
contorted and bloating in the sun. It's enough to make a naive young
entomologist realise that fly control may be more of a challenge here
than she had thought.

The drivers simply fling their used bottles and wrappers from the car
windows. One of the workers here has instituted a rubbish bags in
cars policy, but it does seem a bit pointless as as far as I can tell
there's no rubbish collection here - the cleaners would just take the
bags out to the bush anyway.

The President is apparently also not a fan of litter, but instead of
providing rubbish collection and recycling facilities he has
designated the last Saturday of every month as a Setsetal or clean up
day. Everyone in the country is meant to stop whatever they're doing,
indeed you can be arrested for driving between the hours of nine and
twelve, and clear up litter. I'm not sure what you're then supposed
to do with it, but I saw a lot of smoke and smelled burning plastic on
Saturday.

There is actually a form of recycling in operation here; the children
will pick up anything they can possibly make toys out of. I've seen
broken glasses frames, machine parts, a tin can lid fastened to a
stick with a rusty nail - anything sharp or broken or dirty that would
give a British mother nightmares the kids'll pick up and probably put
in their mouthes. I actually snatched a rusty wire coat hangar away
from a small boy because he was trying to stick the end in his ear,
then gave it back because he'd probably only have gone and started
playing with a razor blade instead or something. This recycling
actually worked in our favour once, when the landrover broke down in a
village. My knowledge of cars doesn't go much further than the fact
that you push the pedals and magic pixies under the bonnet make it go,
but apparently a wire had snapped. OUr driver asked one of the
village elders for help and explained what he needed, the elder
whipped a wire out of the mouth of a passing child and bingo, the
magic pixies started working again.

The problem is I think that Gambians are used to using materials that
do break down when they're discarded; houses are built from bricks cut
from the earth in pits outside the villages, and roofed with reed
thatch or palm leaves. The spiny, grey-purple stems of the same palm
make a goat-proof fence, neatly tied with bark ropes. Halved gourds
are used to serve food alongside the new enamel dishes on woven grass
mats. Gambians are accustomed to using things taht will return to the
earth if left outside for long enough, and simply have not yet adapted
to the fact that plastics will not do the same, but then again it's
not like we've got used to this fact either. When something is built
or made in the west no thought is given to how it can eventually be
disposed of, the only difference is that it goes somewhere we can't
see and don't have to think about. So of course a far more sensible
solution than leaving rubbish lying around the countryside where it
won't biodegrade is to dig a big hole somewhere out of sight and drop
it in there where it won't biodegrade. Because our system is
obviously far more sustainable.

Sprogs and swabs

2009-06-01T13:01:00.001-07:00

On Thursday I finally got to start the work I'd come here to do -
taking samples from the eyes of kids with and without trachoma. The
first step was to actually find some kids with an active trachoma
infection, and to this end Shivonne (the doctor volunteering with the
project, who is the one actually poking the kids in the eye), The
Professor and I drove out to screen some local villages. On the way we
picked up our fieldworker, who is the spitting image of Samuel L
Jackson and so that's what I'm going to call him from now on. This
bloke is incredible; he's been working on the trachoma project for
some time and is able to identify Muscids in the dark and identify the
signs of trachoma from 500 metres. I exaggerate slightly but
certainly he should be the one getting the PhD, not me.

The children were summoned, lined up and the Samuel L turned the upper
eyelid inside out and checked for visible signs of infection. This
isn't painful but it is quite an unpleasant sensation and although the
kids didn't enjoy having it done to them very much they thought
watching it happen to others was brilliant entertainment. Some of the
older boys, unbidden, took it upon themselves to capture their
screaming peers and drag their sacrificial victims to the examining
stool. Some kids fought all the way, some looked resigned, some seemed
to enjoy the attention, some bawled as soon as they looked at us and
one little girls stamped up to the stool, crossed her arms and scowled
at Samuel L through the whole procedure before stomping off again with
a "hmmmph!".

Some of the kids struggled so much they had to be held down, which
made me feel rather uncomfortable. There's a rather different
attitude to discipline here - in Britain a crying child undergoing a
procedure like this would be comforted, here they were physically
restrained and often thumped or hit with switches if they cried, which
apart from being unpleasant to watch was rather counterproductive as
it just made them squirm and fight more. Usually it was the mothers
who held the children down, but in one village the Alkalo or headman
took on the task and performed it with a gentleness that I found very
moving, soothing instead of chiding and gently stroking the children's
eyelids closed with his thumb once they were done.

When not being sampled the kids were great fun, scared at first of the
white people but quickly gaining courage. One little girl in
particular stands out in my memory; four or five, shy at first, when I
smiled at her she came up to me and held out her hand. I shook it
gravely and she beamed, then started dragging other children forward
to shake my hand. As we left she shouted what sounded like "Send me
email!", and as neither Samuel L or our driver knew of anything in a
local language that sounded like that I can only assume it's what she
said. I doubt she could read or write, there was no electricity let
alone a computer in her village and as I have discovered internet
cafes are incredibly scarce here, but someone muct have taught her
that phrase and she wanted to stay in touch.

As we pulled out of the last village I saw two boys playing at doctors
trying to turn each others' eyelids inside out.

Having identified suitable clusters of trachoma, we returned the next
day to actually take the tear samples and the swabs that would tell us
whether the children had an active trachoma infection. (The symptoms
of trachoma can ake a while to develop and so can lag behind the
presence of the bacterium, and may persist once the infection has
cleared, so what you see on the childrens' eyelids may not correspond
to what you see with a PCR test for the presence of C.trachomatis
DNA). Shivonne took swabs by rubbing a cotton bud on the inside of
the eyelid and stciking another cotton bud up the children's nostrils
- I was amused to note that some of the dirty little perverts seemed
to rather enjoy this step. After the procedure was completed the
children got a "mintie", a boiled sweet, and it was amazing to see how
a child who had been crying inconsolably a second earlier suddenly
quietened down when a twist of luridly coloured cellophane was
deposited in their mitt.

Next to one village The Professor spotted a rocky outcrop rising a
good thirty metres into the air, unusual in a country that's mostly as
flat as me in a bikini. He asked the local villagers about it with
rather unsatisfying results ("What do you call that?" "A hill.") and
was informed that some missionaries had once climbed it, in a way that
suggested that this was only one of the crazy things missionaries did.
Not wishing to be beaten by missionaries he immediately decided that
we should do the same.

By this point in the day I had a thumping headache (usually we found a
place to sit in the shade for sampling, but something had gone wrong
in thelast village and we'd spent the afternoon sitting in full sun)
and couldn't think of anything less appealing than scrambling thirty
metres up baking rocks, but The Professor is a very singleminded man
and I don't think anything less than a stampede of hippos would have
stopped him. I reached the top feeling pretty awful and had to sit
for a few minutes with my head between my knees. Then I looked up and
the climb was suddenly worth it - the view was amazing with lush
swampland to the south soaking into the river Gambia and stately palms
rising above the dusty plains to the north, and the the thatched roofs
of villages we had visited dotted all around is.

Coming back down I snagged the back of my shirt on a rock and Samuel L
had to free me. He then decided it would be helpful to hold the back
of my shirt up and out of the way all the way down, so we came of the
hill like a slightly surreal bridal procession.

We set out again the next day and repeated the sampling operation.
More villages, more children, more screaming and smiles, resistance
and resignation. In the last village we met the Gambia's answer to
Richmond's pushy mothers. In Britain this woman would have been the
first to fake Christianity, move in with her sister to get into the
catchment area, anything to get her son into the right school. Here
she was determined that he should be included in our study. She dug
out his clinic card and kept trying to give it to me, and even went as
far as lifting poor little MOhammed onto the sampling bench ahead of
the other children we'd picked - Samuel L would then argue with her
until she took him away to make space for our sampling subject, then
she'd try it again when we changed child. Pushiness works -
eventually we included Mohammed in the control group just to give
Samuel L a quiet life. I took a picture of Mohammed, which I'll
upload when I get somewhere with a good enough connection. I'm
surprised she didn't ask me to print it out and frame it.

Coming back The Professor treated us to lunch at a small shack
restaurant next to the Kerouan bus garage, or rather treated everyone
else as I had no idea how coeliac-compatible the rich, spicy-smelling
stews were and declined. It was pleasant sitting in the shade under a
tree by the garage, even if the diesel fumes were occasionally a
little overpowering, and though the food smelled wonderful I was
really too hot to feel hungry and so didn't feel I was missing out.
In fact as I watched a pair of grubby small boys washing their hands
in the uncovered water bowl used for cooking I was suddenly glad I
hadn't eaten anything.

We have a few more vilages to sample, and then start the fly work on Monday.

The Missionary Position

2009-06-01T13:00:00.001-07:00

After a variety of sickly soft drinks containing enough tartrazine to
send a whole class of eight year olds hyperactive, the most popular
drink in The Gambia is attaya, a very sweet, frothy green tea. There
are rituals around the making of it, involving pouring it from glass
to glass to make it foam, and around the drinking of it; the first,
weak cup is for the children, the second for the women and the third,
after it has stewed for some time, for the men. It's not unpleasant,
once you get used to the fact that it's brewed in what is basically a
saturated sucrose solution, and it gives you a welcome caffeine kick
in the soporific, scorching afternoons. The trouble with attaya is
that it's the reason I can never get a bloody shower.

I am staying at the Catholic Mission in Farafenni, as the missionaries
have all left now and are renting it out to the MRC. The compound
gets water twice a day, in the morning and evening, and this is pumped
into two storage tanks held high above us on scaffolding towers. In
theory this should mean that there's running water on tap, as the
water in the tanks should last until the next time it's available to
pump. In practice however the compound guard station is situated just
next to the tanks, and when they fancy making attaya they open the
storage tank drain tap to fill their kettles rather than walking the
extra ten metres or so to the water tap. As they usually forget to
close it again the water drains away, and then we have no water until
the next pumping period. Apparently there is nothing that can be done
about this, as every other firm of security guards in Farafenni is
crooked whereas ours are just incompetent, but coming back from a
dusty drive to find there is no water is enough to make me wonder how
bad the others could really be.

The guards' other job, apart from failing to open the gate when we try
to get back into the compound, is to switch between generators. We
have 24 hour power here to keep the sample freezers running, but it is
only provided by the grid for a few hours a day. Because of the
timings the guards have to switch on the backup generator at three
ever morning, but they will not do this unless someone wakes up at
three to tell them to, no matter how many alarm clocks they're
provided with.

Staying here is a strange mixture of hardship and luxury. Water is
scarce and the fan in my room doesn't work, so I'm typing this in the
coolest place I can find, the senior kitchen (or rather the "senior
chicken" as it says on the key fob). On the other hand we eat off
fine china and silver tray; the visiting Bishops, coming to check on
how the conversion of the heathens was progressing, apparently liked
their home comforts. I have a fridge in my room, although it's
currently full of dirty dishes that I haven't been able to wash up
without water (it's the only way to stop them smelling). We also have
the amazing Sarah, who comes in to clean our rooms and somehow manages
to leave everything spotless with barely any water, no mean feat given
the thick red dust that settles on everything. She will also take
away your filthy clothes every morning and return then, immaculate,
ironed (no Tumbu flies for me!) and neatly folded, in the early
afternoon. She even managed to get the Deet stains out. I think I
could get used to this.

Driving up to Farafenni I needed a bush, the African equivalent of a
Starbucks, and had no sooner started performing my official business
when I felt a sharp pain in my left buttock. My first thought was
that I'd been bitten by a snake and that I was just going to have to
die from it as the alternative was asking my driver or the Professor
to suck the poison out. Fortunately, or perhaps not, it turned out
that I had simply flooded a red ants' nest and they were now biting me
in all sorts of amusing places and indeed everywhere else. It took a
great deal of thrashing and a fair bit of nudity (luckily it was a
very secluded bush) to dislodge the majority them, and I was still
finding them in my hair several hours later.

The wildlife at the mission is rather friendlier. Jewel-bright yellow
and blue lizards bask on the trees and scuttle across the verandas and
the ground is pitted with ant lion traps. There are three potter wasp
nests on the bathroom doorframe too, but they seem to be abandoned at
the moment. The mission also has two semi-feral cats, Clair (mostly
white with black bits) and Vas (Mostly black with white bits), named
after two previous researchers here. Claire is the friendlier of the
two and keeps trying to get into my room, but I have a policy here of
not getting too friendly with anything that could give me rabies or
fleas and have learnt to open the door very quickly and make a dash
for it before she goes between my ankles. This mode of exiting my
room does of course look ridiculous when there's no cat outside, but I
just have to live with that.

The strange thing about Claire and Vas is that half-starved, scrawny
creatures that they are they're just as fussy about food as a pampered
pussycat back in the UK. The first time Claire ambushed me she did
get into my room and under the bed, and proved impossible to
extricate. I was finally forced to make up some dried milk in a tin
to tempt her out, and although she followed it outside she took one
lick of it then turned her nose up and walked away. She also refused
to eat a perfectly good dead yellow and blue lizard. I know that it
was a perfectly good dead lizard because it was a perfectly good live
lizard until I didn't look where I was going and put my fat hoof on
it.

Anyway, shower time, let's see if there's water today.

Shaken and stirred

2009-06-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

It's something of a cliche to say that travel in developing countries
makes you appreciate things you had previously taken for granted, but
it's said so often becaus eit happens to be true. Clean water.
Internet access. Roads with more flat surface than pothole. The road
to Dakar had so many potholes in that leaving it altogether and
driving cross country would probably have been a smoother.

I went to Dakar in search of solvents - another thing that I have come
to appreciate is things turning up when people say they're going to
turn up, as the six litres of hexane I had ordered a month before
coming had somehow failed to materialise at MRC Fajara. Such things
aren't available in The Gambia so I got to see two west African
countries for the price of one and head to the Senegalese capital
Dakar, where The Professor remembered a shop selling lab supplies and
reagents. I found this quite remarkably as I don't think there's
anywhere in London where you could just walk in off the street and buy
a couple of litres of analar grade solvent.

I'm still accompanied by one of the world's leading experts on
trachoma, over whom I fortunately failed to vomit on the flight. I'd
met him in the UK before and found him rather shy and awkward, but the
transformation here is amazing - he seems far more at home in The
Gambia than he did in London. Everyone here calls him Professor. At
first I assumed that they called all white people that, but I have
since realised that he does actually know every single person in The
Gambia personally. So I'm calling him The Professor in this blog too,
mostly so he never finds out that I called him shy and awkward.

Dakar appears to be one huge traffic jam with a city wrapped around
it. The locals see this as a business opportunity rather than an
inconvenience though, attempting to flog sim cards and cheap watches
to the vehicles' captive occupants. We arrived at twelve to discover
that Fermon, the lab supplies shop, didn't open until three, so went
for some lunch. We got chatting to the restaurant owner, who asked
where I was from. She was very surprised when I said I was from
Britain, and said she'd never have known I was English from my accent.
I felt very flattered that my French was so good until she added "I
thought you were German".

Dakar is a curious blend of French elegance, vibrant African
streetlife and abject squalor. We visited an air conditioned, marble
tiled patisserie that wouldn't have looked out of place in Paris and
were served by elegant women in crisp uniforms, then stepped out on to
a street lined with beggars, most of whom seemed to be missing at
least one appendage. My headscarf, which had worked like a charm in
The Gambia, suddenly meant I got the worst of it.

I've been wearing a headscarf since I got here, not only because it's
a Muslim country but because it keeps the sun off my ears and neck. I
put it on at the airport and it was like flicking a switch,
immediately stopping men from hassling me. It's also gone down very
well with the local staff, who The Professor says are very impressed -
certainly everyone's gone out of their way to help me. There are
downsides though, I'm tying my scarf the Arabic way rather than the
West African way just because that's the only way I know how to do it
but I've discovered that here wearing it this way apparently means
that I've been to Mecca. The Professor finds this hilarious and tells
anyone who asks that I have indeed been - I'm dreading the day when I
meet someone who speaks enough English to ask what it was like. There
are also certain things that the local people would forgive a "toubab"
for, but expect a "Muslim" to know better - I got a filthy look off a
woman for handing her the hat she had dropped with my left hand. And
in Dakar the beggars expected more charity from a "Muslim" than from
the others, following me down the street tugging at my headscarf and
shouting at me to remember my obligations.

We returned to Fermon at three, and over cold Fantas purchased a
bottle of solvent for the equivalent of seventy pounds, more than
twice what we would have paid in the UK. I hugged it on my lap like a
baby all through the bone-rattling ride home.

MRC Fajara

2009-06-01T12:57:00.001-07:00

I'm accustomed to waking to the Hounslow dawn chorus; the scrape of
metal on metal of the next door shop's ventilation fans, punctuated by
the sporadic roar of planes overhead and with a baseline provided by
the rumble of traffic. So it was a pleasure this morning to wake up
to the hoots and shrieks of Fajara's exotic birdlife. Some of the
calls didn't even sound like birds; it took quite an effort to
persuade myself that there are no monkeys here, but I'm certain that
there are no squeaky wheels or wobble boards in the mango trees
outside my window, however insistantly my ears may tell me otherwise.

Today is a public holiday in The Gambia, giving me a chance to settle
in before starting work in earnest. (Tomorrow may also be a public
holiday but this hasn't been decided yet - presumably it depends on
how hard the people who make these decisions party today.) My main
task for the day was therefore to change some money and to this end
one of the MRC drivers, Omar, picked me up at ten in the MRC jeep.

The journey into town was picturesque to say the least, past scenes
that I'd only seen in National Geographic magazine. Donkey carts
shared the road with trucks seeming to defy the laws of gravity with
impossible amounts of baggage pled on topof them, and with people
dressed in vibrant waxcloth hefting equally improbable loads on their
heads. The buildings appeared to be in the process of either
construction or disintigration and sometimes both simultaneously, but
gaily flapping laundry hanging from balconies showed them to be
inhabited. Splashes of green were rare in that dusty red landscape
but insted sprays of red or purple hibiscus flowers hung over the
whitewashed walls. The smells too were incredible; sunbaked earth,
roasted meat, unwashed bodies, dung, diesel fumes and underneath it
all the tang of the sea. This cocktail should have been unpleasant
but I actually found it triggered pleasant memories, of festivals and
childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight (I'll let you guess which
smells were which).

Sadly I seem destined to be an observer rather than someone who has
much interaction with the local people for some time yet. My
relationship with Omar feels rather awkward - I forgot about the
formalised greetings (a scripted exchange of "How are you?" "Well"
"How is your family?" "Well, praise Allah!" "How is the day?" "Good")
when we first met which must have come across as incredibly aloof and
rude. My subsequent attempts to make small talk foundered against a
wall of either disinterest or incomprehension ("Why is there so much
building work here? Is the city growing?" "A lot of people are
building houses") and I was a little startled by the scope of the role
of a driver; I had assumed that he would simply take me from A to B
but instead he took my money and bartered for the best exchange rate
then changed it for me, and then when we got to the supermarket
insisted on pushing my trolley, packing it for me and taking the
shopping to the car. I felt that the effort he had put in to changing
my money for me went a long way beyond the call of duty - I could
certainly never have got such a favourable rate on my own, so
afterwards I offered him the equivalent of £15, which seemed
reasonable as I had changed several hundred. The reaction was not
what I had hoped for. He seemed shocked, then slightly insulted,
before finally taking the money with a mumbled "God bless you" that
was hard to read. I'm going to be spending quite a lot of time in his
company, so I'm going to have to find out pretty quickly from someone
how to deal with someone who seems more like a manservant than a
driver.

Returning to the compound I met some of the other people sharing my
accomodation block,including the luckiest placement student alive who
was sent out here to work on hepatitis for his undergraduate project,
and two women from the university of Iowa who I recognised from my
flight. I got chating to one of them, who was working with a group
trying to reduce the incidence of female genital mutilation in The
Gambia. This sounded amazing, and I raved about how worthwile her
work sounded before turning to her friend and asking whether she
worked on FGM too. "No, I'm a statistician." she replied. Oops.

Anyway, off to enjoy the comfort of my air conditioned room and
ensuite shower while I have them - I won't get this sort of thing
upcountry. Night all.

Long blog post is looooong

2009-06-01T12:56:00.001-07:00

I've only just got internet access, so am going to upload the blog
posts I've been saving individually rather than as a whole novel at
once. Enjoy.

Just passing through

2009-05-23T13:02:00.001-07:00

I'm spending the night in Brussels after travelling in by Eurostar, before getting a flight to Banjul tomorrow. I wouldn't really recommend a trip through Brussels to anyone with 46kg of luggage; to be honest I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend a trip through Brussels to anyone. There are no lifts Brussels Midi station, nor are there baggage carts. I found this difficult to believe, so asked a passerby for confirmation and was rewarded with a Gallic shrug and a tirade about how it was une scandale. I concurred that it was indeed une scandale and proceeded to lug my bags up two flights of steps to the platform, only to discover that the airport express, which you would have imagined would have been designed with the needs of people with luggage in mind, actually has three steps up from the platform to the carriage.

Whilst trying to negotiate these with my bags I tripped (note to parents: at no point was I actually in danger of falling on the track) and the carriage's only other passenger, a young Arab-looking bloke, leapt up to grab my arm. At this point the guard in the carriage, who it should be noted had made no effort to help me up to this point, leapt out and asked the bloke if the bags were his. I said they were mine and he promptly asked for the bloke's ticket (but didn't ask me for mine) and it turned out he didn't have one, forcing him to leg it off the train. The guard them proceeded to harangue me in Flemish, then in English when I was finally able to get a word in edgeways to say that I didn't understand him, saying that I should be more careful and the guy had been trying to steal my luggage. Now the guy was trying to travel without a ticket and for all I know he might have been about to steal my luggage, I suppose the airport express would be the place for baggage thieves to try it, but the whole incident left a rather nasty taste especially when I later overheard the same guard talking to a colleague in French about how he's just known by looking at him that the bloke didn't have a ticket. The guard then told me I couldn't put my bags on the seat next to me because other passengers would need it (as I was the only passenger in the carriage with two minutes until departure this seemed a little unnecessary) and insisted that I put it in the vestibule and sat in a particular seat so that I could watch it in case the guy came back. To be honest I'm inclined to think that anyone who could run off with a 23 kilogram bag probably deserves it. Incidentally two more passengers did get into the carriage. They put their bags beside them.

There was more fun once I got to the airport – Rothamsted has booked me into what its website suggested was going to be a posh airport hotel, with a free shuttle bus to the airport, wireless internet access in the rooms and . I had visions of reclining in a tub of luxuriant bubbles, sipping champagne from the minibar and possibly in my wilder imaginings munching on complimentary gluten-free Belgian chocolates. Sadly it was not to be. I waited an hour for the shuttle bus and then decided I had a travel expense budget for a reason and got a taxi. This turned out to be a good move, as once I got to the hotel I discovered that the shuttle bus only runs during the week – I could have been waiting a very long time. The wireless internet is only free if you pay the 25 Euro business upgrade, which also entitles you to all the pay-per-view movies you can wank over and a complimentary drink from the bar which isn't open at weekends. I declined and am paying for this by the minute. And although in theory it's available in all the rooms, in practice it only works in the lobby, where I am typing this in fear that someone will look over my shoulder and see the word "wank". And someone's eaten my complimentary biscuit and left the wrapper on the tray (I know that I wasn't going to eat the biscuit myself, but it's the principle of the thing).

Even more annoying was the fact that the restaurant is only open during the week, and as the hotel is situated in the middle of a deserted business park there was a good half hour when I though I wasn't going to get any dinner as I wandered past empty office after empty office, desperately seeking an alternative to cracking open my emergency Gambia Lara bars and protein shake. Fortunately I eventually found another hotel with a restaurant and disgusted the waiter by ordering rose with my steak. So now I'm back, contemplating an evening of repacking my Bugdorms and watching Martha Stewart, who seems to have an entire channel devoted to her over here.

The fun starts tomorrow folks.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

2009-05-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

I leave tomorrow at ten thirty so I should really be getting ready, but instead I'm going to write a blog post about my hair. It's called displacement activity, folk.

Back in the mists of time when we were freshers at Durham, with little money and less sense, my friend Johny blew his loan on surf wax and economy Christmas pudding and asked me to cut his hair to save the cost of a barber's visit. Why he picked me I don't know, although on reflection there weren't many people on that corridor I'd have trusted with a blade around my face. There followed an (in retrospect) amusing misunderstanding, possibly due to Johny's somewhat unique accent; he asked me to chop two centimetres off, I thought he wanted me to cut it to a length of two centimetres, and of course made a complete pig's ear of it so he had to get his head shaved to a grade one. I don't think he minded too much, because then he got a lot of girls stroking his head and saying "Poor Johny!", but I felt very guilty.

Well this week Johny got his revenge. I have wild, wiry Welsh hair (there's definitely a sheep back in my genepool somewhere) which takes a huge amount of water, shampoo and conditioner to keep clean and behaving itself, and as all of these substances are likely to be in short supply out there it had to go. I had originally planned to walk into a hairdresser brandishing a picture of Julie Bindel, thus becoming the first person in human history to do so, but time and money were pressing so I ended up doing a Britney with Jeff's shears.

My favourite comment so far has come from Ben, one of the other PhD students, who said "There aren't many women who can carry off really short hair". I waited in vain for him to add "And you're one of them".

My Dad would approve

2009-05-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

I've only met one of the other people I'll be going out there with, and was a little nervous about what they'd be like. But I've just had an email from one of them, describing Walikunda as "a site for sore eyes".

I think we're going to get on pretty well.

Weight watching

2009-05-16T15:59:00.000-07:00

Just about everything I need to survive two months in The Gambia. I have 46kg of baggage allowance to play with, which sounds like a lot but at least 20kg of that will be taken up with equipment. I had a minor panic attack when I weighed all this lot and thought it came to 28kg, then realised the scales were reading in lbs.

The next problem, of course, is carting it around, given that 46kg is 73% of my own bodyweight - for the first time in my life I wish I was an ant.

The essential difference

2009-05-10T12:05:00.001-07:00

My beloved will be coming out to visit me for a few weeks and so is currently choosing his antimalarials, leading to this conversation:

'im: "What are you taking doxycycline for? Why aren't you taking Larium"

moi: "Well I looked at the side effects for both of them, and decided that the ones for doxycycline didn't seem as bad."

'im: "But you have to take them every day! You only need to take Larium once a week!"

moi: "So?"

'im: "Well you'll forget to take it if you have to take it every day, won't you?"

I look around to reassure myself that no, we don't in fact have some children I hadn't noticed and then gently point out that as a woman I have some experience in taking a little pill every day to make sure bad things don't happen. He remains unconvinced that it is possible for a human being to remember to take a daily pill. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the male contraceptive pill is doomed.

Baggy Trousers

2009-05-03T10:40:00.001-07:00

I've just stumbled back from some penultimate minute shopping (the last minute shopping will take place at the airport in a blind panic) and am now the proud owner of two pairs of antibacterial trousers, a phrase I never expected to find myself typing. They are also UV proof and quick drying, and quite frankly for the price I paid for them I'd hope they could stop a small dirty bomb and bullets at twenty yards.

Up to this point I'd managed to be quite frugal in my preparations; I managed to pick up a second hand rucksack, bought a lot of long sleeved men's shirts from Oxfam and got four desert scarves off eBay for £4 from a bloke who realised that the only people who should wear desert scarves are emo kids or people venturing too far from civilisation to be mocked for it, and presumably also realised that he didn't fall into either of these categories. I also picked up a pair of jungle boots for a very reasonable price from a surprisingly urbane survivalist in an army surplus shop at Waterloo, and in any case the lovely people at Kew paid for them. But sometimes you do have to pay for quality and these trousers didn't just blow the budget, they performed a variety of sexual acts, some illegal, with it.

I wouldn't have minded so much if I could have envisaged myself wearing them at any other time but The Gambia is a Muslim country and quite conservative up river, so they can't be too close fitting. I did try on a pair that was two sizes too large, but as these fell straight off when I did them up I didn't think they were fit for purpose. The ones I bought were a mere one size too large, and the crotch is half way to my knees which isn't a good look on anyone. I felt like a member of All Saints. After I'd spent the best part of £40 a pair on some extremely unflattering trousers, the part of my brain that complains at wanton profligacy promptly overloaded and shorted out and in a daze I then bought a couple of karabiners, an LED lamp and a new water bottle. I then staggered out of Blacks to have a bit of a sit down, came to the depressing realisation that the amount I'd save on travel cards whilst in The Gambia would be more than outweighed by the amount I'd spent on kit and vowed to economise over the coming month by using email instead of text messages and eating Jeff.

At least I will now not have to wander around The Gambia in just my pants, which up to this point had been a source of some concern to me, particularly in dreams. Unfortunately the rest of my shopping trip was less successful. For the record, I think that this is the only intelligent thing I've seen in the media about swine flu – yes there is a lot of hype in the media, no that doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about, using alcohol gel after taking public transport is probably a good idea anyway because an extremely unscientific survey I once carried out in a public toilet convinced me that one woman in three doesn't wash her hands and sorry to be sexist but the figure is almost certainly higher among men. If however you do not already possess alcohol gel then tough, you can't get any for love nor money on the high street because in the panic at the impending aporkalypse the shelves have been picked bare. This is quite annoying if, say, you are going to a country with minimal hygiene infrastructure (at least upriver) and want to avoid picking up something a darn sight more common than the hamdemic. I have so far resisted the temptation to buy "travel wash", which is three times the price and comes in an attractive green bottle but is otherwise the same stuff (shhhh, don't tell everyone).

There will now follow a short paragraph featuring my ladybits. I can only offer my apologies to any of my male readers who may be unsettled by this, but really chaps, you should have accepted that we have them by this stage. Not to beat around the bush (sorry), in a hot, humid climate I'm fairly likely to develop either thrush or cystitis, either of which have more potential to make my trip miserable than a herd of rampaging hippopotami. The best preventative measure is loose-fitting, pure cotton underwear, but being either a saucy little minx or too cheap to buy many pairs of pants I don't seem to have much of this. I did however recall that my Gran used to have some knickers that would have been ideal; large enough to propel a reasonably sized schooner and if memory serves made out of something resembling flannel. That sort of thing would have been ideal, so I headed to Marks and Spencers and was shocked to discover that they no longer stocked anything of the kind. Maybe Myleene Klass refused to wear them or something. I left disappointed, and rather curious as to where today's respectable women of mature years purchased their sensible unmentionables.

Even knickerless, I am now rather more prepared than I was, although I don't know if I'll ever feel prepared enough. Here's hoping that parmageddon doesn't ground all the flights and leave me sitting at home with my two pairs of antimicrobial trousers. Still, I suppose if that does happen I could cut them up and flog them off as facemasks.

Insects, drugs, and rock and roll

2009-04-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

Fellow entomology geeks, the Guardian's looking for songs about insects!

Funny paper titles #2

2009-04-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

Just found this gem:

Microbiological studies on mammary glands of one humped she-camels in Egypt

It's in the JOURNAL OF CAMEL PRACTICE AND RESEARCH, which sounds like a guest publication from "Have I got news for you"

Now resuming normal service

2009-04-23T04:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry about that folks, every blog needs one morosely self-indulgent post and that was mine. I'm going to leave it up though, firstly because writing it made me feel better and secondly because there aren't enough pictures of weebles on the internet. Anyway, I have an excuse; according to the Oxford Handbook of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine, which has been my bedtime reading of late, I'm depressed. Apparently the symptoms are low mood and energy in the mornings, which I don't think anyone who has every encountered me in my blundering zombie-like pre-caffeine state could deny that I suffer from. Of course according to this definition I've been depressed for the past 27 years without noticing it. I had to stop reading the book before I diagnosed myself with sixteen tropical diseases I'd never been exposed to and prostate cancer, which made me wonder why doctors don't collapse into a quivering heap of hypochondria on their second day. Oh wait, yes they do. I've met Lou.

Thanks for your concern everyone, I was just feeling quite exhausted after a particularly difficult week and my second cholera vaccine, which really knocks the stuffing out of you. Umm, quite literally actually. I made a couple of really stupid mistakes but am now able to appreciate the funny side; the sample I contaminated the machine with was actually my own snot which I'd forgotten to filter. So now everyone is running around telling each other not to touch the machine because it's got my bogeys in, because scientists are grown up like that.

I am feeling nervous about my ability to get as many useful results as I want in The Gambia, but am looking forward to the trip and certain that I'll come away with at least something useful. I am also reassured by the number of people who've said that no one ever feels completely prepared for fieldwork, and in any case the best way to feel more confident is to do more preparatory work, which'd probably be a more productive use of my time than blogging about my jitters. So I'd probably better go and do that now then...

A wobble

2009-04-16T14:24:00.001-07:00

I have in my possession airline tickets from Brussels to Banjul and an email confirming my gluten-free lunches, guaranteeing that I'll be able to get at least two meals out there. I fly out on the 24^th of May in the company of one of the world's leading trachoma experts (which I'm not especially happy about as if we hit turbulence there's a very real possibility that I'll be sick all over him) and return on the 26^th of July. All my life I've wanted the opportunity to go to Africa and actually do something useful rather than just gawping, six months of preparation and anticipation have gone into this trip and I feel, well, terrified to be honest.

I'm worried about the fact that I'll be taking nearly £5,000 worth of scientific equipment to a third world country. Not so much out of fear of theft, as it's all pretty specialist stuff and I wouldn't have thought a tangle of PTFE tubing and carbon filters would look particularly enticing to the average thief who would in any case probably only be able to fence it to us. It's more to do with the likely result of combining harsh terrain and high humidity with my notorious propensity to break anything that can't take evasive action quickly enough. It's all been field tested and is pretty robust, but I've been known to snap taps and cut my own earlobe on my headphones so I'm not feeling too confident.

It'll also be the longest time I've been away from my bloke in five years. Last year he went to Trinidad for three weeks, which was ample time for our cooking styles to diverge to the extent that on his return he couldn't stomach my bland British stodge and was cooking meals apparently designed to provide our entire five veg a day with chillies. If our tastes could change (or perhaps revert to type) so dramatically in three weeks, what could happen in nine? He will of course be coming out to visit me, but I'm worried about my ability to keep him entertained as two weeks watching your girlfriend tweezering dead flies out of traps is likely to bore any man.

Then there's the guilt I'm feeling about how much anxiety this trip is causing my Mum. We've had a long talk about it and straightened a few things out, but I still feel very bad for putting her through this when her health isn't great. In my defence I never expected her to react so badly, but looking back I've been surprised by my Mum's reaction to quite a few things I've done, which makes me realise I probably didn't understand her as well as a considerate daughter perhaps should have.

I'm also starting to question my ability to carry this out as a scientist. Since Christmas I haven't made as much progress in the lab as I would have liked for various reasons, and I'm worried that I'll get out there and not be able to make anything work, frightening as I only get one shot at this preliminary fieldwork. It's been a bad week, which is especially depressing considering that I'm only on the third day of it, in which I made two extremely stupid mistakes. One of wasted a lot of reagent and destroyed one of my samples, but worse one contaminated a machine (embarrassingly, with a sample of nasal mucous) and ruined somebody else's sample, and I am acutely aware that he's working to a very tight deadline so the time taken to clean the machine and rerun the sample would really not have been welcome. He, and indeed everyone else, was extremely nice about it and said I was still learning, but in truth I knew exactly how these operations should have been done and for some reason just forgot to carry out a crucial step in the process in one case and even more inexcusably just forgot to switch something off over night in the other (doubly shameful for an avowed treehugger).

What I think has really thrown me was a technical writing course I did a couple of weeks ago. I'm no Victor Hugo, but I don't think I write badly and I seemed to know more about where apostrophe's shouldn't go (there) than anyone else on that course. The rest of the class seemed genuinely shocked when, having been asked about our writing experience, I said that I wrote for pleasure and the whole focus seemed to be that writing was, for scientists, an unpleasant chore that it was vital to master for career advancement. I suddenly realised that a lot of my success in science wasn't down to Earth-shattering insights or innovation in the lab, but simply down to the fact that I was able to present what I had done better than most. Writing is an extremely important "soft skill" in science, but in the end it's the "hard skills" that'll get you ahead and although I'm not a complete incompetent in the lab I realised that I'm not Nobel Prize material and no amount of "soft skills" will compensate for that.

I'm a little saddened by the way I always seem to manage to turn things I love doing into a chore. I genuinely love my PhD, find the areas I'm researching fascinating and feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to do something that I believe can make a difference to peoples' lives. And I've dreamed of going to Africa ever since devouring the WilSlard Price books (if it gets 'em reading, don't knock it) as a kid. Somehow though in the past month I've managed to turn it into something I'm stressed about. I think I may just be a bit tired out from long hours, long commutes, lack of time for exercise and a hefty dose of cholera toxin.

Maybe I'll go and eat some jam. Jam makes everything better.

Bug Girl's Blog

2009-04-09T02:29:00.000-07:00

If anyone is reading this blog because you're actually interested in insects, rather than just to find out when you'll finally get rid of me (soon, I promise), you might like this blog. It's what mine would be like, if it was a lot better.

Happy Easter!

Attenborough’s Eye Worm

2009-04-07T01:55:00.000-07:00

In a recent interview for the Radio times, the great David Attenborough discussed his opposition to creationism and was asked why he didn't give "credit" to God for the design of living things. He replied:

"They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

I'm not putting that quote up to get drawn into a discussion of what that implies for the existence or otherwise of a benevolent creator (if pressed I'd say there's been a lot of arrogance and intransience on both sides of the debate and I'd like to leave it at that*) but because, quite understandably, a lot of people have now heard of this blinding disease spread by flies and think it's what I'm working on, when in fact I'm working on an entirely different blinding disease spread by completely different flies. Confused yet?

The disease David Attenborough is referring to is Onchocerciasis or River Blindness, caused by parasitic worms spread by blackfly of the family Simuliidae. These blackflies are found close to running water as the larvae feed by anchoring themselves to stream beds and then straining food out of the passing currents with little fans. The female flies feed on human blood and are able to pierce human skin to get it. In doing so they are able to pick up baby worms (microfilariae) living under the skin. The worms then penetrate the gut wall and migrate to the flight muscles where they mature into juveniles, then travel to the poor fly's proboscis (they don't do the fly much good either incidentally) where they mature again into infectious juveniles and are able to enter the human body in saliva the next time the fly takes a meal. They then set up home in the subcutaneous tissue where they become adults and start churning out more microfilariae. This may all sound a bit complicated but the take-home message is that both humans and flies are needed for the worm to complete its lifecycle. It is the microfilariae that cause all the problems, provoking strong immune reactions especially when they die. In the skin this can produce irritating or painful dermatitis, but if the worms migrate into the cornea they can cause blindness.

As you should all know by now, because I've been banging on about in incessantly for the past six months, the disease I'm working on is called Trachoma. It's spread by Musca sorbens, which nasty as it is is not actually able to pierce skin to drink blood but instead laps secretions off the skin, most commonly tears. Unlike River Blindness which is most prevalent near the running water its blackfly vectors need (the clue is in the name!) Trachoma is most prevalent in dry, dusty places where people don't have water to spare to wash their faces. The disease is caused by a bacterium not a worm, and it infects the inside of the eyelid not the cornea – the damage to the cornea is caused indirectly by scratching from the inturned eyelashes. And unlike the worm that caused River Blindness, the bacterium that causes Trachoma doesn't need the fly to complete its lifecycle; whilst flies are a very efficient menas of dispering the bacterium, it could equally well be transmitted by dirty fingers or towels. The worm couldn't, as few towels have either flight muscles or probosces.

Hope that's cleared things up. Here are some nice pictures of nasty things from the Carter Centre:

*If pressed really hard, with pointy things, I'd say that there may or may not be a God but it'd be more productive if we all stopped bickering about it and got on with doing what God wants us to do/doing what we have to do because there is no loving guiding force, which is making the world a better place. And that really is the end of what I have to say on the matter.

Tweetness and light

2009-03-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed, a box has appeared at the top of my blog featuring a choice selection of my slightly dafter witterings. This is because I've signed up to Twitter, and while I realise that signing myself up to yet another social networking site and expecting myself to anything productive is roughly the equivalent of chucking Super Hans a big bag of crack and telling him to exercise self control there is actually a very good reason for this. It turns out that there is mobile reception in Walikunda (a rather charming article in a local paper which I've unfortunately lost boasts that it is no longer necessary to climb trees to make calls) and as I'll be getting a local phone but won't be able to afford to send too many texts Twitter looks like quite a good way of reassuring a lot of people at once of my continued possession of both a phone and a pulse. I realise that it is a slightly risky strategy to rely on third world communications infrastructure and a social networking site that apparently doesn't have any way of making money to stay in touch, but at the moment it's the best idea I've got.

Walikunda

2009-03-26T03:00:00.000-07:00

So just to keep everyone (and frankly by this stage myself) updated on where I'm actually going now, I'm going to start off by travelling round some upriver villages with a team from the London School of hygiene and Tropical Medicine for the first three weeks, collecting eyeswabs from any unlucky kids I manage to catch. I'll then go to the MRC's entomological research station at Wali Kunda to collect flies and do some behavioural studies.

Wali Kunda is primarily used for malaria research, and has a number of experimental huts set up to measure how many mosquitoes attack sleepers. There's some more information on what they do there here, which I'd really recommend having a look at because it is quite fascinating. Yes she did see a snake please don't tell my Mum. Just to make you all jealous, and to remind myself that it's not all snakes, this is the view from the station:

If you want to know exactly where I'll be suffering from acute tea deprivation, here it is:

View Larger Map

The nearest town of any size (pop. 4343) is Brikama Ba. Rather hearteningly, the first things that came up when I googled it were this article, which cheered my inner Feminazi, and this video:

Holy Sh*t, it's actually real now!

2009-03-26T02:44:00.000-07:00

I've just been given a date for my flight - the 24th of May. This is now several months later than originally planned, which is unfortunately what happens if you try and coordinate with other people, but at least the delay means I'll be able to catch the new ster trek film. It's all suddenly become much more concrete for me - I really am going to spend three months in a place without internet access, jam and toilet paper.

Eeeeeep.

Fabiola Gianotti

2009-03-24T06:32:00.001-07:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when thousands of bloggers all over the world will publish a post on a woman in technology to highlight the contribution women are making what has traditionally been a male field.

Just to be perverse I've chosen a woman working in subnuclear physics, which is about as far as you can get from an applied science. But Fabiola Gianotti is in charge of one of the most impressive pieces of technology ever built – the ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The size of a five storey building yet able to detect particle trajectories with micrometre precision, it required over 2,000 scientists and engineers to assemble its hundreds of millions of components. Rather than searching for a particular particle of a particular energy, ATLAS is designed to detect the unexpected, integrating 100 million different electronic signals in order to detect any of the myriad particles that may be created in high energy collisions in the LHC.

Fabiola Gianotti had originally planned a career in music, and trained as a pianist at the Milan Conservatory, before deciding that a career in physics could better address her fascination with the big questions of how the universe worked. She did a PhD in experimental sub-nuclear physics at the University of Milan and joined CERN, a remarkable collaboration between physicists of 37 different countries, in 1987. On the first of March this year she was elected head of ATLAS at CERN.

She is disappointed that physics is seen as a male subject and is quoted as saying: "Women have obstacles in the field for merely social reasons. Research does not allow you to make life plans. And the difficulties for women with a family are many. Something should be done, for instance, to develop more structures that would enable women with children to go through a physics career without too many obstacles, starting with nursery schools."

See other bloggers' posts for Ada Lovelace day at:

[adalovelaceday09]a>

My fragile sanity

2009-03-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes whilst perusing the literature (read having an excuse to hide in the office with a cup of tea rather than wandering around the lab acusing random people of nicking my petri dishes out of the drying oven) I come across a paper title that I find quite amusing. I then wonder if it would actually be funny to the average person or whether I've just gone a bit strange in the head after reading four papers on the effect of bovine serum albumen on ovarian development, after which just about anything would seem entertaining. Perhaps you dear reader can help me judge?

Behaviour of house fly, Musca domestica L., in relation to the use of transparent plastic bags containing water.
Some papers just make you think "Why?"

The effects of the aroma of jasmine on bowling score.
Again, why? Apparently it improves score by 26.5%, but the study didn't look particularly rigourous so I wouldn't start snorting flowers before breaking out Wii Sports just yet

A new model of the trap giving a cheap and ecofriendly way of reducing common house flies, Musca domestica Linn. (Diptera: Muscidae) from the homes of poor people.
A study title that could really benefit from the advice of the PC Brigade

Seven years of parasite coprology in a hospital environment in Lyon
Sounds like a lesser known novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A device for preventing houseflies from copulating
Hmm, kinky

So it turns out I’m not Ray Mears

2009-03-14T03:25:00.001-07:00

Although I realised quite early on in this endeavour that a trip to The Gambia was not exactly going to be travels through the White Geek's Grave (not only are there Peace Corps cocktail parties to attend, but within two messages of being introduced to a friend of a friend working in The Gambia he'd invited me to a pool party) I am aware that there may be a little more risk involved than in, say, a trip to Tescos to buy some teabags. For this reason I spent last weekend on a Wilderness Medical Training course organised by the Royal Geographic Society. This is the very course that Bruce Parry (on-screen taker of psychotropic drugs and chunderer extraordinaire) attended, and now he gets paid to travel round the world meeting interesting people and lives in a mansion on Ibiza for the rest of the year. Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but I can live in hope.

The preliminary reading certainly looked interesting if a little alarming, with its warnings to put a knotted rope down pit latrines as an emergency exit if the boards shattered. It also advised that human bites were the most likely to become infected, a useful hint in the event of zombie attack, and concluded with a stern admonishment that rectal thermometers should always be clearly labelled as such. Even a mild hangover couldn't take the edge off my excitement on Saturday morning.

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting the other people on the course to be like, but I think muscles on top of muscles covered with facial hair and Goretex featured quite prominently in my mental image so it was a relief to discover how normal everyone looked. This lulled me into a false sense of security but I was swiftly disabused of any notion I might be as tough as the rest by the first lecture on wounds. Our lecturer warned us that some of the slides coming up would be pretty horrific and that there was no shame in leaving the room, but that it was better to find out now if we couldn't deal with it than to find out in the field. "Pish!" thought I "not only do most of my favourite movies feature eyelid eating zombies but two of my best friends are a nurse and a doctor! Why, whenever they get together the conversation inevitably turns to suppurating abdominal wounds, usually around the time the food is served! Bring it on!"

This turned out to be rather foolish. I could cope with the cut thumb. The cut hand was less pleasant but tolerable. At the slit wrist I had to look down and concentrate very hard on taking extremely thorough notes, and I'm ashamed to say that the split ankle with exposed tendons proved too much for me and I fainted clean away. Fortunately as an undergraduate I did most of my sleeping during lectures so have some experience of regaining consciousness in lecture theatres surreptitiously and with minimal flailing, but it was pretty embarrassing. Luckily when I came to the slideshow had moved on to eviscerations, and I was able to cope quite well with pictures of protruding intestines by imagining them to be Cumberland Rings.

We had a practical session in the afternoon, in which we learnt the best ways to carry an injured casualty. We then split into groups to practice making rope stretchers. I proved rather good at this, impressing an ex-army Amazon in my group enough for her to say "Wow, you really know your knots!". I thanked her, neglecting to mention that this proficiency had been acquired mostly through knitting and crochet. I skipped the after course mingling session in the bar (from experience I know that such things usually end with me having to be peeled off the floor at an embarrassingly early hour) and ran home to my bloke, who spent the evening asking me if I felt faint and generally taking the mick which I thought was a little rich coming from a man who can't even watch House while he's eating.

Sunday brought a talk on common tropical ailments, enlivened by the occasional photograph of explosive diarrhoea, and then a discussion session to teach us group decision making. We were given a scenario; with nightfall fast approaching 3,000 metres up Kilimanjaro, one of your team of twelve exhausted people starts exhibiting disturbing signs of a broken brain. What do you do? What I did was recognise that nothing in my 27 years of life experience qualified me to make that sort of decision, so I sat back on the surprisingly comfortable sofa and let the helicopter search-and-rescue pilot and the woman whose friend once ditched in the sea off the coast of Chile argue it out. They quickly decided to carry her down, which just goes to show that you can't always defer to the experts as we were than told it was most important to consider the safety of the group as a whole.

The instructor asked if anyone had ever had to stretcher an injured person out of an emergency situation. A few people had, and universally confirmed that even with a group of twenty fit people even a hundred metres was gruelling. At this point I remembered that I did in fact have some experience in a similar situation, but thought it best not to mention it as the casualty in question hadn't succumbed to harsh terrain or a tropical infection but had rendered herself incapacitated at the bottom of a cliff on Herm Island through the consumption of several bottles of cheap and nasty white wine. (Are you reading this Kat? I still haven't forgotten honey). As she retained enough mobility to render the two blokes who tried to carry her back up infertile, we decided to bundle her in a blanket and carry her up. The strange thing was that we six not especially fit seventeen year olds (half of us took computer sciences A-level for goodness sake) were able to carry her up a steep fifty-odd metre cliff path and then a further two hundred metres to the campsite, all at a brisk jog because we could feel the blanket ripping, and I certainly don't remember it being particularly arduous, yet a larger group of tough outdoorsy types testified to a similar feat being exhausting. I can only attribute the difference to the amount of cheap white wine we too had consumed, and hence suggest it might be a good idea if rescue teams get completely hammered before attempting a stretcher carry off.

The course concluded with some practical CPR training, in which we were given the depressing news that the only scenario in which CPR alone can revive someone is on Baywatch – in real life it can only keep them going until paramedics arrive. In a survival situation with no prospect of help arriving CPR is pretty pointless, and we were advised to set a limit of twenty minutes just to feel that we'd made an effort then give up. At this point I stuck my hand up and asked about situations like the one I'd be in in The Gambia, where a hospital was six hours drive away but still reachable – was there any chance of saving someone in these circumstances?

The instructor seemed rather unimpressed by the question, saying that by putting ourselves in these situations we had accepted that there would be a risk of death, and that if that wasn't the case then most people in the room wouldn't want to go. I think this may have been intended as a putdown but it actually reassured me. I may not be as tough as most of the people on that course, but I realised then that I was probably a little saner than some. I'm not doing this to push the limits of human endurance or to prove something to myself. I don't relish the prospect of ending up in a situation where I may need to amputate my own toes using only three paperclips, an underwired bra and a kiwi fruit. While obviously I'm delighted to have the opportunity to go somewhere so different from anything I've experienced before, in the end I'm going to The Gambia to get as much data on Musca sorbens as possible at the least possible personal risk. Not only was the weekend good fun and the factual information I learnt very useful (although I sincerely hope I never have to use most of it), but I do feel that this course was very helpful in clarifying my motives for this fieldtrip. I may not be explorer material, but at least I now feel a little more prepared for the rigours ahead.

Bring on the pool party.

Bugsitting

2009-03-03T07:25:00.000-08:00

Emma, owner of the best eyes in Rothamsted, is running off to do a month's fieldwork in Argentina and has left me in charge of the colony of bed bugs she is studying. This was probably not a wise move given my previous form, but I'm doing my best to ensure they remain well fed,
watered and contented specimens of bedbuggery.

Bed bugs are often confused with dust mites, but are completely different creatures; dust mites are microscopic, whereas bed bugs (I apologise for the obnoxiously middle class comparison but it was the best I could come up with) are about the size of a grain of quinoa. Dust mites feed on shed dead skin - dust - whereas bed bugs actually pierce skin and suck blood, causing an itchy rash. You'd know if you had bed bugs, but everyone's probably got dust mites in their bed (and if that freaks you out, you've probably got follicle mites too).

Emma's bugs are fed on sheep's blood, heated to body temperature, which they suck up through a Parafilm membrane. This is obviously a rather unnatural situation as in the wild they would be extremely unlikely to encounter a sheep in a bed (at least outside of a certain rainy corner
of the British Isles from whence my grandparents hail) but the bugs don't seem to mind. The most difficult aspect of this setup is that I have to get sheep's blood, which is red, into the feeder, which after it's been used once is red, under a red light (which the bugs can't see, so they think it's night time when they feed). Putting in too little means hungry bugs, too much means a scene from a Hammer Horror movie which at least I can't see properly because everything's red. Apparently the room looks quite horrific if the light is ever turned on.

This might sound strange coming from someone who does, after all, work on shit-eating maggots that turn into blinding, snot-sucking flies, but I don't find bed bugs endearing in the slightest. Although unlike old sorbens they're not known to transmit any human disease, they have some
decidedly unpleasant habits (I know, again the words "pot" and "kettle" spring to mind).

They mate by a proccess called traumatic insemination - as the female gorges herself on blood her adbomen swell, exposing a vulnerable groove on her side into which the male stabs his spiked penis and injects sperm directly into her body cavity which isn't exactly good for her health - mating dramatically reduces the female's lifespan. This just goes to show how evolution is undirected by any concept of fairness - if there was an intelligence in charge of it all it should by rights have equipped the female with a few spikes of her own at the very least, and probably a tiny homopteran-sized taser. Instead the female has adapted by developing a pouch with a high concentration of immune cells directly under the insemination site, to at least help deal with some of the bacteria that hitch a ride.

(Interestingly the balance of power between the sexes lies is slightly different with my flies - if a male mounts a female and she decides she's not interested she'll kick him off, often shredding his wings with the spikes on her hindlegs. As a cohort of flies ages it gets easier for me to tell the males and females apart - the males are the wingless ones walking around on the floor of the cage, and presumably wondering if she was worth it.)

Bed bugs also have some rather unsavoury habits when it comes to hygiene - after feeding on blood they waddle off to a nearby refuge, a dark, damp crack in the bedframe or the wall. Hoards of them hide there to digest their meals, and the refuge quickly becomes filthy with their excreta and crawling with bacteria and fungi, the reason a female needs such a high concentration of immune cells to deal with the traumatic insemination. Given how unsanitary their refuges are it's remarkable that they don't transmit any human diseases, but as I say no evidence of this has ever been found. It's really the poor old sheep who have most to fear from
bed bugs.

Importing live insects into the UK; the saga continues

2009-02-24T03:38:00.000-08:00

I still need to get some Musca autumnalis sent over from the States, now also want some Musca vetustissima from Australia and will soon have to start thinking about how I'll get my little Sorbens over from The Gambia, and I still haven't managed to find a shipping company that'll take them. So apologies for the very boring post, but I thought I'd put up a list of shipping companies that will NOT import live insects into the UK, just to save anyone else who might be googling for an import company a lot of time, phonecalls and frustration.

The following companies do not transport insects:

JAS International Freight

GAC Logistics

James Cargo

Norman Global Logistics

I'm not quite surre where to go from here - I even tried calling the people who make toffee scorpions to ask who shipped their scorpions, but rather amusingly they wouldn't tell me in case I was a competitor!

Strangely, so far my best leads have come from animal rights campaigning websites posting lists of companies to campaign against because they ship laboratory animals. Umm, thanks guys.

*Update* Ok, I managed to find a pet import comapany that would take them, but they quoted $5,000 for the service which is slightly beyond my budget! If I had that sort of money I'd fly over first class and pick them up myself, possibly smuggling them home in my tousers. I've run out of ideas now, and am trying the Bad Science Forum as a last resort. Suggestions? Anyone? Please?????

Hating my own people

2009-02-22T11:48:00.001-08:00

t's been a while, sorry about that. In my defence I have been very busy, attending a conference, eating icecream, getting told by Lucy Mangan that I don't have to do aerobics with Lou, learning how to make fruitflies bisexual* and acquiring third degree burns whilst trying to make ampoules. But much of the past week has been spent in various libraries in search of literature on M.sorbens.

I've been to the Natural History museum library to see the first description of the little blighter, written in 1830 by a slightly odd German obstetrician called Weidemann who also liked flies and had his friends in the colonies send him things that they found drowning in their drinks. Entomologists in those days were a weird bunch (arguable still are) but he wasn't as odd as this dude. Unfortunately the description is written in German, and in Gothic script to boot, but by a bizarre coincidence my Dad studied Old High German for his Masters. If I was feeling uncharitable I'd suggest that this was the first time this has come in useful for him.

I've also been spending a lot of time in the British Library. I do love going there – it's very rare that I end up in that part of London and it gives me the opportunity to have a sandwich, buy tickets to the London cinematic event of the century and watch the bats swoop down to catch insects off the Barbican pond at dusk. I also love the library itself, full of lovely helpful people who seem utterly delighted to be asked to help find some information on an obscure little fly written a hundred years ago in another language. Having worked in information myself I know this is impossible to fake. However this whole experience has convinced me that what I certainly don't love is the Belgians.

I am ¼ Belgian, spent some of my childhood in Belgium and have always been slightly resentful of the fact – if you say you grew up in France everyone assumes you're elegant, sophisticated and effortlessly chic, but say you grew up Belgium and if people assume anything at all it's that you spent your childhood eating chips and mayonnaise and lived in a city whose emblem is a little boy taking a slash (all of this is of course accurate). But this simmering resentment has been brought to the boil by the recent experience of trying to find a reference to M. sorbens in a report of an expedition to the Belgian Congo, as it then was. Now no colonial nation exactly covered themselves in glory in Africa but the Belgians were probably the biggest bastards of the lot of them. This is a genuine scan of what happened when everyone's favourite boy reporter of uncertain sexuality went to The Congo:

And that sort of attitude applied to the people as well as the animals. It has been estimated that under the 23 year rule of Belgium's King Léopold as many as 10 million of The Congo's original inhabitants were killed, half the population. But now in a spectacular example of poor taste and misplaced priorities I'm going to say that if that wasn't enough to make you angry at the colonial Belgians they were also terrible at organising information.

Between 1933 and 1965 a number of zoological expeditions went into the Albert National Park, caught and squashed anything they thought looked interesting and published a number of reports on what they found. These reports could be written in English, French, Flemish or German, and some are written in all four. They are numbered, but the numbering doesn't correspond to date, taxonomy or any logical sequence I can fathom. There are over 100 of them. No one ever thought to produce an index. And in the fifties for no apparent reason they suddenly decided to start writing about volcanoes instead before switching back to insects. In one of these reports there is a crucial reference to M. sorbens, and the most efficient way I can think of to find it is to read through them all one by one.

Still, at least it looks like I'll be eating a lot of sandwiches in the near future.

Sorbens itself - what all the fuss is about

*genetically engineer them to lack a sense of smell so they can't tell the difference between males and females.

A fun way to waste time

2009-02-06T16:22:00.000-08:00

If you have a blog or a website with an RSS feed, you can put the URL into Wordle and it'll generate a fun little word cloud based on how frequently words appear in the last three posts. This is what I got for my blog posts (I was rather pleased that it came out looking like an old style text book cover, and that the largest word was "science", rather than poo or something):

And this is what I got for comments on my blog, possibly a more accurate reflection of my priorities:

Ada Lovelace day

2009-02-04T04:00:00.000-08:00

Born in 1815, Ada Lovelace was the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous Lord Byron, her mother attempted to quash any poetic tendencies the young Ada may have had by ensuring that, unusually for a girl, she received a thorough education in mathematics. From the age of 17 she corresponded frequently with the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage on matters of logic and algebra, and he eventually employed her to translate the works of Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the subject of the Analytical Engine. This she did, adding a volume of notes in which she first recognised the potential of a general purpose computer. Although the Analytical Engine was never built, she wrote a number of programs for it. Not bad for a woman with pretty severe hypothermia by the looks of it.

Women in IT are still frequently overlooked or suffer discrimination, and so in an attempt to draw attention to their contribution the 24th of March has been designated Ada Lovelace day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. So far 1,279 people have signed a pledge to publish a blog post on the 24th about a woman in technology they admire.

I have a blog, and am also of the Feminazical persuasion, so the idea obviously appealed to me and I plan to publish a post on the 24th of March. Like many of my less sensible ideas I decided to do this when drunk having misread the description as being about women in science and technology, and have now realised in the cold light of day that it's just about women in technology. This is annoying as I could have written about a woman in science in my sleep but will now have to do *gasp!* some research.

If anyone else with a blog wants to join in, there's a Facebook event too.

Blurring the boundaries

2009-02-02T07:47:00.001-08:00

As you’ve probably noticed by now, depending on your perspective London is either experiencing an Arctic blizzard (born south of Wolverhampton) or a bit of a nip in the air (born north of Wolverhampton). As a kid when I woke up to discover it was snowing I used to think “Wow, sledging, snowballs and a day off school”!As an adult I woke up thinking, “Bugger, I’m bloody freezing and it’ll be a nightmare getting into Rothamsted, and did I mention that I’m bloody freezing?”.

It isn’t just the way snow covers all the ugliness, the litter, dog mess and broken pavements, but the way it blurs boundaries and not just those between the pavement and the road (the lack of a visible curb has sent me sprawling once today already, and I doubt it’ll be the last time).The public transport meltdown has allowed the weekend to weekend to bleed into the week,but more importantly the snow has broken down some of the boundaries between people; everyone’s off work and everyone’s on foot, and willing to share a smile, a “Good morning” or even an impulsive snowball fight with a stranger.I can’t help feeling that Britain is a warmer place in the snow.

Sprog gets it

2009-02-01T03:27:00.000-08:00

Why is science important? is an interesting blog that publishes essays by everyone from leading scientists to science students on the theme of why science matters. While one or two of them do make you realise where some of the stereotypes about scientists come from that vast majority are very inspiring. This essay was written by 12 year old Maya Hawes and published on that site.

Some People think that science is not important, that it is only about blowing up things and making potions. Yes that is some of it, but ask yourselves why do they do that? Is it for fun, for excitement or is it for knowledge? Thousands of explanations for thousands of new discoveries. And they are all to improve the human race which keeps on growing and changing with the more things we discover.
One of the main reasons why people study science is to cure people. They research the illnesses and find cures for them. Such as Cancer, some cancer medicines have been found but lots haven’t. When someone gets, for example, lung cancer, we don’t have a cure. We have to experiment on them while they are dying. There is not much else we can do. Someone I know died of lung cancer. They tried to give her a lung transplant, but she died during the operation. Lots of people think science isn’t important. But lots of scientists have saved thousands of lives. Lots of cures haven’t been found but most have.
We also do science to find out about the world around us. Not just the earth’s nature but the universe’s. Scientists have asked questions which we are desperate to find out. Are we alone in the universe? We don’t know unless we find out. That is one of the other reasons why we do science. Because we want to answer unanswered questions. A scientist might not just do science for work. They might do it because they enjoy it. They enjoy seeing people’s lives saved. They enjoy finding out about the universe. Think of all the technology that we have today. iPods, phones, computers, TVs . We wouldn’t have them without science. That is one of the wonders of science. Not many people realise that one small device in their hands could be the technology that someone has been working on for years. Think properly, would you be able to make something so genius? How can they fit so much technology inside something as big as your finger?!
All animals on the earth have evolved from something, including us. Have you ever wondered what we evolved from? We could have been the biggest dinosaur or the smallest plankton. Science can be related to history. The history of the universe, the big bang, how the earth began. Where you are, listening to all of what I’m saying, one million years ago could have been in the middle of a rainforest with dinosaurs surrounding you. So I suppose that this is the end of all I have told you. And I want you to know that science is important. Maybe one of the most important things in the world.
Scientists will always be finding things out, every second. Not just scientists, you will too. And because of that, the human race will always be changing, for better or for worse. I hope you have enjoyed this piece of writing and that you will always remember how science is so important.

What I like so much about this essay is that she doesn't just talk about science as a means to an end, although as she says cures for diseases and new technologies are important, but also realises that awe at the wonder of it all can be a reason to study science in itself.

Good one Maya. Please don't grow up to be an HR manager.

Good riddance

2009-01-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

And on the subject of American presidents, I've been trying to find a good picture of an eye with tears through Google images and instead I found this:

Completely useless for my project of course, but it made me laugh.

Americans - good at presidents, lousy at bureaucracy

2009-01-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

There's about a three hour lag every morning between the time when my body wakes up and the time when my brain comes on line, so in order to function during this period I rely on simple rules rather than actual thought to function, such as "Positioning self behind stationary person in newsagent will eventually permit a transaction to take place, the result of which will be the acquisition of a Guardian". This was how I managed to spend ten minutes standing in Smiths on Friday behind a bloke perusing either the headlines or Lucy's tits rather than actually queueing up to pay. He eventually noticed me hovering behind him awaiting my next thought, turned and said "Gee sorry, I was so not in the line" in a broad Southern accent.

I almost hugged him and said "Don't worry about it, there's at least a 50% chance you voted for Obama". I didn't hug him, as this may have been taken the wrong way which would have delayed my purchase of a paper even longer, but the events of last week have left my with a warm and fuzzy sense of goodwill towards all Americans. This feeling is, however, in serious danger of dissipating following my dealings with the US Fish and Wildlife service.

I need to get hold of some Musca autumnalis, a fly that is very closely related to Musca sorbens and does pretty much what sorbens does in humans but in cattle. The University of Kansas has a colony, and rather naively I assumed it would be a simple matter for them to send me some. They offered me some free of charge as long as I promised to take care of the paperwork, which I thought was awfully decent until I found out what the paperwork entails.

To get insects out of USA you need an to fill in the form and pay the fee to get an export licence, then for every shipment you need to fill in a form and pay a fee to get an export permit. The form is very long and covers all animals, living or dead, up to and including pianos with ivory keys. It doesn't stop there either, the insects have to go out through a designated port and have a welfare inspection on the way out, all of which costs money. (Yes, a welfare inspection for a pest insect species that US universities have spent a lot of time working out how best to kill).I had got as far as trying to fill in the export license form and emailed to try and find out how much I needed to pay and how, and finally got a response saying that the University of Kansas, as a scientific research institution, was exempt and did not need a license after all.

After spending quarter of an hour attempting to bash my own brains out with my monitor, I sent a very polite email off asking what I should put on the application in the wee box that asked for export licence number, if the university of Kansas didn't need one. I have just had an email back saying that the University of Kansas should be filling in the form, not me, and am now giving serious consideration to a plan to hurl myself repeatedly against the insectary fly-killing grid and hope for electrocution.

Moral dilemma

2009-01-20T08:11:00.000-08:00

Imagine a purely hypothetical PhD student, who for illustrative purposes only we shall call Judy. Judy ordered an expensive piece of scientific equipment that needs a specific power pack ordered with it separately. When it arrived Judy discovered that the equipment, which we shall say purely for the sake of this example costs ten times as much as the power pack does, worked perfectly but that there was a problem with the power pack. Judy phoned up the very helpful scientific equipment supplier who offered her a replacement power pack.

This morning a parcel was delivered to the lab where we're going to pretend she's based, containing another piece of the very expensive equipment, rather than its power pack. Judy now has two options, phone the supplier to ask for a replacement power pack and send the piece of equipment back, or just buy another couple of power packs.

On the one hand Judy is doing a PhD which she, perhaps rather egotistically, thinks will be of benefit to a large number of people and which will go a little faster with twice as much equipment. On the other hand Judy's Mum managed to instill a fairly powerful sense of Catholic guilt in her which has proved rather harder to shake off than the actual beliefs themselves and she's started thinking about the employees of the scientific equipment supplier sleeping on park benches with only a pile of glossy pamphlets on PCR supplies between them and the elements.

What should Judy do?

Spellcheck no substitute for brain

2009-01-15T10:33:00.000-08:00

Ok people, your pub quiz fact for today is that a fly's digestive system has three parts, imaginatively named the foregut, midgut and hindgut. Now I realise that Word's spellcheck can do some funny things when confronted with scientific terminology, but you'd have thought this wouldhave been picked up in the peer review:

From "Some Aspects of Epidemiology of Filth Flies"

The only known existing literature in different parts of Nigeria is that of Dipeolu and Ojo (Adeyeba and Okpala 2000, Dipeolu and Ojo 1975), who isolated several genera of bacteria, some of which are pathogenic to man in Nigeria. These were isolated from the dissected midgets, and appendages of M. domestica vicina and M. domestica caught from refuse dumps in various public places in Ibadan.

Of course if it turns out that Adeyeba and Okpala did in fact isolate pathogenic bacteria by cutting up very small people then I shall apologise unreservedly.

P.S. No more cockroaches spotted yet

A little too much entomology

2009-01-12T04:51:00.000-08:00

Unlike every other Monday, when obviously I leap cheerily out of bed and skip to work whistling a jaunty tune, I have not had a good morning. I had to be in early to do something complicated with some machines, the details of which I won't bore you with (mostly because I don't quite understand it myself) and as Thameslink trains have only a 30% chance of getting you in at the time they say they will, this necessitated getting up at 5:30.

Switching on the kitchen light so early in the morning caused something to dart out from under the microwave and across the worktop. I must admit that my initial reaction was to shriek thinking it was a mouse, then think "Oh it's ok, it's only a German cockroach". It took a few seconds for my sleepy brain to realise that this was also a bad thing. I spent the next ten minutes chasing it up walls, behind the fridge and, generally, being outwitted by something with a brain the size of a pinhead, before dispatching him with extreme prejudice. I then had to give the worktops a quick clean on the offchance that Jeff would wake up and start licking them or something (admittedly unlikely, but better safe than sorry). This made me later than I would have been if I'd got up at the normal time when the cockroach would presumably have been hidden, allowing me to leave the house quickly in a state of blissful ignorance. I didn't have time to walk to the station and had to catch the bus - that roach owes me two quid.

So in all probability we have a cockroach infestation, which probably isn't something to confess to a few weeks before I'm considering having a birthday party. I will be monitoring the situation over the coming weeks (read getting up horrifically early and hitting my own fingers with frying pans).

Your pub quiz fact of the day is that cockroaches belong to the order Blattodea, so called because of the noise they make when you step on them. German cockroaches look like this:

Guide to easing yourself back into work mode gently

2009-01-05T01:45:00.000-08:00

The Saturday before you go back try to wake up at commuting o'clock. Fail.
Repeat on the Sunday before you go back. Fail. (In my case, turn off the alarm and overshoot by six hours)
Somehow manage to get out of bed on Monday. Walk into wall. Discover it's snowing. Discover the price of a season ticket has gone up. Reward yourself for surviving this far with a cup of coffee. Discover the coffee shack next to Harpenden station makes lousy coffee.
Waste half an hour deleting emails from beautiful Nataliana who wishes to do me acquaintance.
Check gmail.
Check facebook.
Mess about on Badscience for a bit. Convince yourself this counts as work.
Check facebook again.
Realise you have two days to get your fieldwork proposal into an acceptable form to submit for ethical approval.
Panic. Then go on blogger to try and ignore it.

Happy New Year all.

Clinical shiny beats green and spiky

2009-01-04T09:11:00.000-08:00

Some time ago I asked you to vote for which type of forceps looked least threatening, and nine people did. That's right folks, nine people read my blog and I don't even have any porn on here! I haven't felt this popular since my Mum picked me up from school with the dog!

But back to the forceps, it looks like the round-tipped metal ones have beaten the friendly green plastic six to three, which is good as the plastics are a complete bugger to grip. Thanks everyone who voted.

All change

2008-12-29T08:45:00.000-08:00

You know that awkward situation when you say your long goodbyes to someone you won't be seeing for a while, then see them at the bus stop ten minutes later and have to make stilted conversation until you say your long goodbyes again? That's the way I feel at the moment. I've just discovered that the LSHTM's trachoma survey won't be going out to The Gambia until April, so Jeff has had to mothball his plans for a return to batchelor life in January (the pizza menus are back in the drawer, the strippers have been hastily cancelled). Whilst the delay means I will be spending winter in Britain after all, and I had thought I could get away without buying a new pair of winter boots, it does at least give me longer to perfect my fly-rearing techniques (memo to self: animals need water) and to master all the gear.

Of course this does also mean that you'll have to put up with my wittering a little longer. While I still have your attention though, could the person I promised to lend "My name is light" by Elsa Osorio to please step forward? I've found the book now but can't remember who you were. I hope I can get away with blaming this on Aspall, and would like to assure you that your friendship means a lot to me and I greatly appreciate you as an individual. Whoever you are.

Happy Christmas/Yule/Winterval!

2008-12-25T02:10:00.000-08:00

Here's something to put you off your turkey:

Ophthalmomyiasis in Hawaii.
Author(s): Kajioka, Eric H N; Nagao, Cherie F K;
Karas, Stefan; Hardman, John M; Navin, James J Source: Hawaii Med J
Volume: 63 Issue: 3 Pages: 78-9
Published: 2004 Mar

Abstract:
Ophthalmomyiasis is the infestation of the eye by fly larvae. Commonlycaused by Oestrus ovis, a female sheep botfly will accidentally deposit her larvae into a human eye, resulting in disease. Prompt recognition and treatment of this condition will improve patient care and reduce potential complications. We report a case of ophthalmomyiasis in a young man from Molokai who was infested while unloading a Christmas tree.

PubMed ID: 15124740

Happy Christmas everyone!

Bitter Oranges

2008-12-21T01:42:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with my PhD, but I'm posting it here because it gets the highest readership of any of my blogs*. On my way home on Monday I noticed a group of people outside the Orange Tree Pub, waving banners and shouting. I do like a bit of shouting so I went to see what was going on. It turned out that the British Nazi National Party were having their Christmas party in there. I grabbed a placard and am proud to have played some small part in forcing some of them to spend their Christmas celebrations standing outside the pub in the freezing drizzle, attempting to intimidate us whilst icy water dripped on their shaven heads.

The BNP is, sadly, a legal political party so there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to hold their Christmas party in a pub. However, I doubt that I'm alone in not wanting to drink in the same pub as a bunch of racist wankers, who think that rape is no worse than force-feeding someone chocolate cake and that mixed race people should...actually, I don't have the strength to go on. I shall be writing to the manager of the Orange Tree to explain that I feel this way, and also to Youngs, the chain that owns the pub, and would encourage as many people as possible to do the same. A word of warning though, the manager of the Orange Tree is clearly a BNP sympathiser as they've met there before, so if you do write to the pub it'd be safer not to put a return address – just because we know their addresses doesn't mean they need to know ours.

If you have a receipt to show that you have drunk in a Youngs pub recently, include it with your letter to add weight to your assertion that you won't be drinking there in future. This shouldn't be too difficult for anyone who, like me, is a habitual drunkard** with a confetti of old receipts in her bag, but probably wouldn't be possible for someone like Imogen who I think alphabetises her handbag contents.

The addresses are as follows. There's also a Facebook group.

The Orange Tree:

Roger & Tracey Stearn
Orange Tree
45 Kew Road
Richmond
Surrey
TW9 2NQ

http://www.orangetreerichmond.co.uk

Young's brewery:

Young & Co.’s Brewery, P.L.C.
Riverside House
26 Osiers Road
Wandsworth
London SW18 1NH

http://www.youngs.co.uk

Normal service will resume next week peeps. I know you're missing those flies.

*Six, and my Mum who my Dad prints it out for.

**You can delete this bit before printing Dad.

Just before Predator struck...

2008-12-19T08:27:00.000-08:00

Steve suggested that in addition to the volatiles, the flies may be using heat to home in on the eyes and having done a quick Google search for thermal images of faces (most of them nicked from here) it looks like he's on to something:

And while I have no evidence that flies are attracted to coffee cups, I thought this one was rather nice too:

Schoolgirl error

2008-12-18T08:54:00.000-08:00

Until today I have been taking care of an experimental colony of houseflies, Musca domestica. I say until today because I took a couple of days off this week to see my supervisor in Durham, catch up with a few people and fail to get injected with a few more nasties. I made sure that the flies were at a life cycle stage that could be safely left, made sure they had enough food, and forgot to give them water.

Dead flies don't come back to life no matter how hard you shake the cage.

Bollocks.

At least this means I don't have to come in over Christmas to feed them, but this isn't much consolation for me and even less for the flies.

On a more positive note Imogen has written an interesting blog post which I will respond to when I have a second. I'm flattered but a bit surprised to be described as articulate, as by the time that conversation took place I'd consumed half an orchard's worth of cider and started calling Richard Richmond again.

Why is The Gambia such a funny shape?

2008-12-13T06:31:00.000-08:00

As with most oddly shaped countries in Africa, it's because of the way the Europeans went about nicking it- in this case, how the British nicked it from the French, who had in turn already nicked it from the people living there in the first place. Apparently the length of the country is the distance a British navy warship could get up the river Gambia, and the width is the distance the ship could fire a cannon. I was initially sceptical when I heard this, but Wikipedia confirms it so it must be true.

Oh shit!

2008-12-09T06:39:00.000-08:00

I've just has my first delivery of cowshit to test for attractiveness (to flies, not to me). Problem is I was expecting a kilo at most and I've got half a steaming binbag full. I've had to put it in the insectary fridge as it won't fit anywhere else, and putting it in this shared fridge is fractionally less antisocial than putting it in the kitchen fridge. Emma suggested putting it on the windowsill as it's cold outside, like we did with milk as undergraduates in halls. The only drawback is that the milk had a tendency to fall off onto peoples' heads....

Suggestions welcome!

Sticky Christmas!

2008-12-08T04:48:00.000-08:00

This email's just gone round the lab:

"Hello everybody.
Once again, due to our unrivalled ability to breed healthy insects, we have a surplus of Giant Spiny Stick Insects (Eurycantha calcarata). These are currently at the "teenager" stage, so are a perfect size to sneak into the house without frightening your partner/children/parents.
If you are lacking ideas for a Christmas present, how about a nice new pet?! :-)"

If anyone wants one let me know and I'll get it for you. Just remember folks, a stick insect is for life, not just for Christmas.

Coke is evil #2

2008-12-07T07:18:00.000-08:00

Sigh

Lost in your eyes

2008-12-04T00:00:00.000-08:00

Having seen what it’s done to Lou’s sanity I wouldn’t want to be a medic, but it’s always fun to be a tourist and I’m enjoying reading up on the eye to get some idea of what sort of volatiles I’ll be finding in tears. Until now I’d never given tears much thought, beyond them being the soggy stuff that leaks out at weddings or when someone uses a track you really like to advertise cheese strings, but the lachrymal film (to use its posh name) actually turns out to be pretty amazing.

Closest to the eye is the mucin layer, composed of jelly-like glycoproteins (protein molecules with sugar molecules stuck on, for those not in the know). This provides a nice smooth friction-free surface for the eyelids to slide over, and holds the water layer above it in place. This liquid layer is the part I’d always thought of as tears, and is what washes away any grit that gets in your eye, as well as doing something complicated to the optical properties that I’m too dense to understand. It’s apparently a mistake to think of these as two distinct layers, they shade into one another as the glycoproteins get less dense the further you go from the eyeball. So don’t.

Of greatest interest to me though is what lies above the mucino-aqueous phase (we scientists love giving things complicated names – it makes us sound intelligent and gives us an advantage at Scrabble). This is the tear lipid layer, a thin film of oils, fats and waxes that covers the mucino-aqueous layer in the same way that oil floats on vinegar when you make fancy salad dressing. Generally smelly things tend to be soluble in fats (just think of essential oils, allowing me to get in a gratuitous plug for Jeff’s sister’s company which makes very nice bath things*) so I’m guessing that whatever the flies are smelling is coming from this layer.

The tear lipid layer is itself divided into two layers (layers are so this season, darling). The inner layer is just one molecule thick but these are rather clever molecules that have one end that dissolves in water and one end that dissolves in fats. This anchors all the fats above making up the tear lipid layer (TLL to its friends) to the vertical eyeball, stopping all the oils from sliding down to the bottom of your eye and leaking out. Which would be strange.

So what’s the point of all this? The TLL reduces the rate of evaporation from the water layer, making it last ten to twenty times as long as it would otherwise. It also reduces surface tension, helping spent tears to drain better, and catches fine dust. It contains antibacterial fatty acids and its high viscosity prevents oils from your skin from getting into your eye. And as if that wasn’t enough to make you appreciate an anatomical structure you didn’t know you had ten minutes ago, it also forms a watertight seal between your eyelids when you close them, compensating for microscopic imperfections where they don’t meet perfectly and so stopping your eyes from drying out when you sleep.

The TLL is secreted by the glands of Meibomius (why is it that only people with daft names get medical discoveries named after them? Is there a duct of Smith?). These are tiny little pin-prick glands on the lip of the eyelid, invisible to the naked eye. There are more of them on the upper eyelid than on the lower, so rather more is secreted on the upper lid margin than on the lower. This is because thanks to gravity the TLL is a little thicker at the bottom than the top, so replenishing it at the top is more of a priority. The ducts of the glands run up the inside of the eyelid, so those on the upper eyelid are longer than those on the lower, helping them secrete more. This probably explains why we blink down, why our upper eyelids are longer than our lower eyelids. I always wondered about this when I was younger, but to be fair I was a bit of a weird kid.

Glands of Meibomius, from: Lozato, P. A., P. J. Pisella, et al. (2001). "Phase lipidique du film lacrymal: physiologie et pathologie." Journal Francais D Ophtalmologie 24(6): 643-658.

Blinking squeezes more of the tear lipid secretions out of the glands, and the physical action of the eyelids smoothes it evenly across the eye, so your TLL is refreshed every time you blink. Like so much else your glands of Meibomius become less efficient as you get older, so the average adult needs to blink approximately every 20 seconds to refresh their TLL but babies can go more than a minute without blinking. This probably explains why they always have such a look of bug-eyed astonishment. If you go too long without blinking the TLL will eventually break up, allowing the water layer to evaporate and so bringing the TLL down into contact with the mucins which, in scientific terminology, buggers everything up. This leads to dry, uncomfortable eyes. So blink more people.

Did I mention incidentally that oxygen can get through the whole tear film to the cells on your cornea? Oxygen can get through the whole thing to the cells on your cornea. Isn’t that cool?

Having discovered how amazing your eyes are I am now horrified that anyone wears eye makeup. Eyeliner and mascara are full of foreign fats and oils that can get incorporated into the TLL, disrupting it. Absolutely the worst thing you can do though is use eyeliner inside the lip of your eyelid, as this can block the glands of Meibomius. If this happens there’s a good chance you’d be able to clear them with massage, but if that fails there’s a procedure I read about. Actually I read the first sentence of the paragraph then squealed, jumped back and quickly turned the paper over so I couldn’t read any more. As I was on the tube at the time this resulted in a bit of extra leg room as people shuffled away from me, but I think you get the message. Down with the patriarchy ladies. Ditch the eyeliner, your tear lipid layer will thank you.

Her glands of Meibomius probably aren't very healthy.

*OK the store part of her website doesn't seem to be up yet. Link to follow

A timely kick in the ego

2008-11-30T05:53:00.000-08:00

I spent two days last week on a fieldwork training course organised by DARN, the Dreadful Acronyms Research Network. Peter and Katy kindly offered me somewhere to crash, and apart from giving me a joke bath towel that was just a little too small to cover both base and apex simultaneously and so forced me to perform a high speed streak out of the bathroom every morning, were wonderful hosts. Many thanks.

For me the most useful part of the course was the networking session, where we got to meet people working on similar projects. Up until that point I had been feeling smugly pleased with myself; after all, I was about to endure hardship (lack of hot showers, tea deprivation, probably missing the second half of the season of Battlestar Galactica) in order to Make A Difference. Then I got talking to a woman who'd done her fieldwork in the Gaza strip, collecting medical samples in streets patrolled by tanks and sending them out of country without knowing when she'd be allowed across the border herself to follow them, and a bloke who had been studying the health consequences for scavengers in Bangladesh who recycled medical waste, ("recycling medical waste" in this context means fishing around in buckets of bodily fluids and sharps to find a few bits of plastic tubing that could be sold for a pittance) a group of people looked down upon in the already marginalised scavenger community and hence so hard to find that he'd had to invent an entirely new sampling system to get to them. Suddenly what I'm doing seems pretty tame.

Varmints

2008-11-26T04:14:00.000-08:00

This email was sent round the Durham biology department a few weeks ago by Dr Shaw himself:

"We have a developing problem with squirrels trying to get into the rubbish dumpsters. Earlier today one of our postgrads, whilst opening the cardboard recycling bin adjacent to the workshop, was scratched by a squirrel, apparently trapped in the bin.

So a few words of caution :

1. When approaching any of the outside dumpsters, advance and open the lid with care, mindful that a squirrel may be trapped inside, and may leap out as soon as the lid is opened fractionally;

2. Always leave the dumpster lids properly closed to prevent any animal entry"

Why did I only post it now? I was trying to find that picture. There's a lot of research involved in a PhD.

Fearsome forceps

2008-11-20T09:32:00.001-08:00

I need your help people! I have to choose some forceps to hold the sponges for taking tear samples from Gambian children with, and need to know which type looks least threatening. I'd imagine that a small Gambian sprog would be pretty upset by a crazy white woman attempting to stick something in his eye even if the forceps used were made of kittens and candyfloss, but I'd appreciate it if you could tell me which type looks least scary.

Plastic:

Round-tipped:

Please vote with the poll thingumy on the right, in between all the other random gizmos that I seem to be accumulating.

Perversity

2008-11-18T06:56:00.000-08:00

Nothing is working, and strangely I realise I like it when things don't work first time - it gives you the opportunity to figure out what went wrong then try to design an approach that'll get around it. And it's far more satisfying when you get an answer if you've had to work at it.

I realise that feeling this way is a luxury I can afford a month into my PhD. I'm sure my opinions will be very different a month before the deadline.

The wrong kind of cold

2008-11-17T04:04:00.000-08:00

It's probably karma. After spending the last couple of weeks hoping someone in the lab would come down with a cold and start leaking experimentally useful nasal discharge, I've got ladyflu. Most annoyingly it's given me a head that feels like it's stuffed with marshmallow fluff and a cough like a Dickensian street-urchin, but my nose is stubbornly refusing to run.

Grumble.

To Crowded House, for services to science

2008-11-15T05:30:00.000-08:00

When not shopping, sunning myself or catching yellow fever some of my time in The Gambia will be spent catching flies to start up a colony in the UK, to which I can do unspeakable things. A sensible way to do this would be to catch some adults rather than trying to find eggs or maggots, but this raises the problem of what to feed them. As you are all sick to death of hearing by now, Musca sorbens adults feed on tears. Much as if you’d never tasted steak you’d be happy eating tofu all your life (or for that matter if I couldn’t remember what a baguette was supposed to taste like I’d be quite happy with Trufree sliced bath sponges), laboratory raised insects are often quite happy eating an artificial diet, but it may well be that the wild caught adults that have tasted the real thing will refuse to touch it. If that happens I’ll have to feed them on my own tears.

Empathy’s a very worthy thing, but obviously I’m not particularly keen to get trachoma myself so I’m not just going to let the flies land on my eyes, I’ll have to cry and mop the tears up. It’s actually extremely difficult to cry on demand, which is why I’m not an actress or a guest on Oprah – I spent a rather unpleasant afternoon slapping myself in the face and looking for people to give me Chinese burns finding this out. Just when all seemed lost I remembered a song that was playing when I had a very bad argument with someone I care about a great deal. This triggered some sort of Pavlovian response*, and ever since when I hear the song I start crying. This happened many years ago and I though it had worn off, but I heard the song at Glastonbury this year and had to rush off in case anyone I was with noticed. The song’s by Crowded House, but I’m not going to say which one in case everyone starts playing it at me to watch me blubbing. So strange but true, Crowded House may well play a vital role in the fight against trachoma.

*According to the great Terry Pratchett, a Pavlovian response occurs when a dog is conditioned to eat a raspberry meringue whenever it hears a bell ringing.

The strange world of the grad student

2008-11-13T01:41:00.000-08:00

I recently received this email:

"Calling all dancing scientists!
Come on you talented people out there... here is an opportunity to express yourselves! Are you the sort of scientist who taps her toes while working in the laboratory? Didn't I see you pirouette on your way to the fume hood? You look like you're crunching data over there on the computer, but you're actually browsing 1980s music videos on YouTube. In fact, doesn't your entire scientific career feel like one big dance, like Pina Bausch's Rite of Spring <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXVuVQuMvgA> , the Village People doing YMCA <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9OO0S5w2k> , or maybe Michael Jackson dancing with zombies in Thriller <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtyJbIOZjS8> , depending on your mood? If so, then your name is written all over this:The 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest Taking science to the dance and back again Submission deadline: 16 November 2008
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/322/5899/186b "

Marianne and Lou have gamely had a go, but I suspect the type of dance I'd end up doing would be better received in Soho by people of very particular tastes.

Bug shot

2008-11-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

I've finally managed to find a semi-decent picture of Musca sorbens. This is a female laying eggs:

As you can see they're rather pretty little patterned flies, even if they are evil wee blighters. As V. G. Dethier says of another fly in his or her wonderfully eccentric book The Hungry Fly:

"If we are able to overlook the fly's scatological way of life, we see a thing of beauty, a jet jewel (.....) whose diaphanous wings bear it aloft with consummate skill, the curvature of whose eyes flows in smoothest arc, whose faceted design rivals the honeycomb in hexagonal perfection, whose hairs curve in marvelously fluted columns rivaling the best in Gothic architecture. And privately within, its softer self is laced with the exquisite silver filigree of its air-filled tracheae. There is perfection in its parts and gracefulness in all its movements."

As for what she's laying eggs on, use your imaginations people.

Punctures

2008-11-04T10:32:00.000-08:00

I had my vaccinations today, and am now immune to pretty much every known disease.

From left to right I've had typhoid, hepatitis A and B, tetanus, diptheria and polio. I need to go back next week for hepatitis boosters, yellow fever, rabies and flu vaccine, the last of which made me suspect the nurse was just looking in her fridge and sticking anything she could find in me.

Ouch.

Back on the GNER

2008-11-01T01:47:00.000-07:00

Now that I've finally got the knack of operating Lou and Ting's front door key (you push it in all the way then pull it out slightly and jiggle it furiously, as the actress said to the bishop) it's time for me to head back down south where the opportunity to poke myself in the eye with a variety of sterile sampling media awaits me. Lou and Ting, thanks again for the bed, I really appreciate it and hope that not being able to wander around the house in your pants for a month wasn't too much of an ordeal, and that you didn't break too many ribs falling over my boots.

EYE SUCKERS!

2008-10-31T07:54:00.000-07:00

It's not just flies that feed on tears. Some moths like this one, Chacopsestis ludovicae, also feed on ocular secretions by inserting their probosces under the eyelids.

Happy Halloween!

Oh dear

2008-10-28T13:10:00.000-07:00

I've just put this picture in my fieldwork plan.Hmm...

You're fired!

2008-10-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

Anyone a fan of The Apprentice? You know those episodes where the contestants have to go out and find a collection of improbable items whilst spending the least money, like a cowskin with the tail still attached, a green alarm clock in the shape of a mosque and a single person who can't tell within two seconds of meeting them that they have the IQ of a button mushroom, wrapped up in an ego more commonly associated with people who sit in secure wards playing with their own poo and announcing that they're Jesus, wrapped up in an Armani suit? I feel like I'm in one of those episodes. I have to source a box of sterile cellulose ophthalmic sponge points, a small colony of Musca autumnalis and a regular supply of organic cow's manure. And I don't even get the opportunity to announce that I'll give 150% on national television.

The results are in

2008-10-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

A month ago I asked you to help me make the decision on which antimalarial to take. To my astonishment at least four people turn out to have read my blog. Admittedly one of these people thinks I'm already so crazy that taking Larium wouldn't make any difference, and the response of one seems to have been "feed Jules weird things", but to my relief two think I should take doxycycline. Which I would have done anyway.

Here comes the science part!

2008-10-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

I feel it's about time to introduce Musca sorbens, the little fly I'm planning to spend the next three years beheading, mutilating, impaling, forcing to copulate according to my whims and, frankly, doing everything to short of donning a Halloween mask and phoning it up to ask it if it likes horror movies. But it's all in the name of science, and anyway the little bugger probably deserves it.

Musca sorbens is found in Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia and Australia. It's actually reckoned to be a species complex rather than a single species - for those unfamiliar with the term, species complex basically means "They all look the bloody same to me, but different populations won't shag when we put them together in the lab and we can't afford to do the DNA work". I can't seem to find a good picture of them on Google images, but they look like a slightly smaller housefly with two stripes on the thorax and, on the evidence of the specimens I've seen so far anyway, they have large pins with type-written names through them.

I'm reluctant to put up the pictures I have found of the flies, partly because they're so small but mostly because they make me sad, always showing them on beautiful kids:
I try to keep this blog quite light and funny, but on a purely emotional level pictures like this show why this sort of work is important. I find it very hard to understand how I live in a world with Ikea and Facebook and Angel boxsets and hazelnut latte, and on the same planet there are people living like this, who can't spare any of their two litres of water a day for washing, let alone spare 7p to buy soap.

M. sorbens adults feed on the dissolved salts and proteins in tears and snot, and in doing so transmit the bacterium responsible for trachoma. If you like looking at pictures of manky eyes (and hey, who am I to judge?) google trachoma, if you're eating your tea then don't. At first the infection seems just like conjuntivitis (or pinkeye for my American friends - who says you never learn anything from Southpark?) and eventually clears up on its own, making it pretty low on peoples' list of priorities. Repeated infections though cause scarring of the inner eyelid, causing it to contract and rolling the eyelashes inward so that they scrape the cornea whenever the sufferer blinks. As well as being excruciatingly painful, this scarring and possibly infection of the cornea leads to blindness. As it may be several decades between the initial infection and the development of trichiasis, people rarely associate the two.

The tragedy of all this is that flies seem to prefer the eyes of children to those of adults. There may be something in the tears and snot of children that's especially attractive to these flies or it may just be that, as anyone who's ever tried to get a four year old to blow their nose will tell you, kids are mucky little bastards and probably have rather more of the relevant secretions lying around. This is one of the things I'm hoping to find out. It has also been suggested in the same way that many other infections entities have evolved strategies to maximise their distribution (the cold virus makes you sneeze out an aerosol of cold viruses, the Guinea worm induces its victims to cool their burning sores in water into which it can release its young, if you have a Britney Spears song stuck in your head chances are you'll end up humming it and infect someone else), the trachoma bacterium may cause children's' eyes to water, attracting more flies to spread it. I'll also be looking at whether secretions from kids with trachoma are more attractive to flies than those of kids without (and any child found to have trachoma in the course of the study will get antibiotic treatment).

And this is the really sad thing - if you can't afford soap, you can't afford the really simple antibiotics to cure the results. As I may have observed on a previous occasion, the world's pretty messed up really.

Fajara

2008-10-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Where I'm going now (last I heard anyway!)

View Larger Map

I ATE'NT DED

2008-10-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

The trouble with blogging is that, much like riding a tiger or drinking banana-onion juice, once you start you have to keep going. I am extremely flattered, and a bit embarrassed, to have had two emails and a text asking whether I'm still on this mortal coil and would like to assure you that I was certainly alive last time I checked.

Things have been a little hectic up here lately - all the fun with not having a passport meant that I missed the post grad registration day, on which I would have been offered iced beverages and canapes whilst the college secretary massaged my feet and David Bailey took my campus card photograph, and was instead forced to register along with the undergraduates. This involved being herded like cattle between department, college, Elvet Riverside and Old Shire Hall at least twice by people with an air of deperately forced jollity and a garish t-shirt with a humourous nickname like Baps or Rozzer on the back. I then queued for at least six hours behind a pashmina princess loudly informing the person next to her of how she caught leprosy on her gap year trip to India, to the general incredulity of all in earshot, before having a webcam waved in my face and coming away with a campus card photograph that makes me look like a perplexed hobbit (although this is at least an improvement on my previous campus card photograph, in which I looked like a perplexed hobbit who had just escaped from a category five hurricane).

Since then I have spent my time attending a variety of safety courses, in which I learnt that the appropriate course of action if you accidentally spill a culture of genetically modified microbes down yourself is to strip naked on the spot and autoclave your clothes (this has actually happened in the department). As I will not be working with gentically modified microbes I'm not entirely sure what the point of explaining this was, unless all female students are warned to be wary of dirty old researchers approaching them with bubbling culture bottles and a glint in their eyes. I have also learnt how to be an effective demonstrator (don't form inappropriate relationships with undergraduates), actually done a small amount of work on my PhD, and discovered that someone had attempted to buy an ipod with my eBay account. I wouldn't have minded this if they had used a) my address and b) their money, but unfortunately it didn't work out that way and so ended my beautiful love affair with eBay ("And we should care why? Customer service? You do know that we have another ten million suckers like you, don't you?").

Other than that all's well. Lou and Ting continue to be extremely generous in letting me stink up their sofa, eat their food and smash their crockery, and living with doctors is certainly educational - you know that any conversation that starts "Talking of genito-urinary medicine, I had a guy in the other day who must have been a professional welder or something" is going to be interesting. After a hairy week in which I feared I may have to change my blog title to Twit in Tanzania when the MRC decided to close the Farafenni research station, it's now looking like I will still be going to The Gambia but to the research station in Fajara instead. This suits me as it is closer to Banjul, which is apparently the only place in the country you can buy toilet paper or any safe meat other than Spam - I swear the stuff is haunting me.

Back in the hood

2008-10-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

I'm back up north, that magical place where you don't need a mortgage just to buy a round of drinks. Lou and Ting have very kindly offered me their sofa until I'm recalled by Rothamsted or until Ting chucks me out for eating all his crisps, and I was delighted to discover that their flat is in a creepy Gothic mansion. Pictures will follow when there's some light to take them by.

I keep expecting Christopher Lee to jump out from behind the shower curtain. Thus far though the most disturbing thing I have discovered was a tin of Spam Lite in the kitchen cupboard - truly you never really know someone until you've lived with them.

I attempted to register today, a process complicated somewhat by the fact that I do not currently possess a passport as it is being renewed (or more likely used as a cup rest by someone in the bowels of the passport office). Credit cards, travel cards, and youtube evidence of me affixing a plastic cape to someone and encouraging him to dive into a pile of cardboard boxes are apparently not sufficient proof of identity. Apparently it is not possible to register as a student without some a passport or birth certificate , although heaven knows why someone would want to impersonate me for the privilege of working with filth flies for three years. However I suppose the policy does have some merits, as if instituted worldwide it would prevent people like George Bush from attending university.

I was at least able to convince the appropriate people of my existence, even if the university systems refuse to acknowledge it. This and the fact that I left the biology department with considerably more paper than I entered it with have encouraged me to view the day as a success. Tomorrow will be spent meeting a man who will tell me that ethidium bromide does not make a good novelty cocktail additive, and will then sign a piece of paper to confirm he has done so.

Durham appears pretty much unchanged, although Waitrose has closed down (it's grim up north) and it has sprouted a bead shop and an Oxfam book shop, both of which are likely to lead to considerable attrition of my grant. The God Squad is still out in force; I was collared by a pair of them on the way out of the biology department which I felt was a little unfair as I'd just negotiated a horde of people proffering leaflets with useful information such as when to register as a demonstrator or how to get your thesis bound (surely a little premature?) so it seemed quite logical to take one more. Still I'd imagine the biology department isn't their most fertile recruiting ground so perhaps they felt justified in taking advantage whilst guards were down. I felt rather miffed as taking the time to explain that no, I don't think I'm going to hell thank you very much meant I didn't reach the student union shop before it closed so couldn't get my 20p Guardian. Which was the only reason I signed up to be a student again in the first place.

Not likely to launch my career as a footwear model

2008-09-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

Thought you might like to see the jungle boots I bought (and just for Imogen, my awful eighties tights to make up for being unable to find my awful eighties jumper):

The boots cost £39.95, and I got four pairs of army tropical socks (padded underneath, thin with lots of ventilation on top) for £6.95 eack, leaving £13.25 to put towards desert boots later. Thank you again for your kindness, everyone.

Right, I'm off to steal a tank and invade EuroDisney.

Putting my foot in it

2008-09-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Obviously there is no part of my body that I am particularly keen to see swelling up, becoming infected or dropping off in The Gambia, but the body part I am least keen to have any of the above happen to is my feet. They are also the body part likely to be subjected to the most insults; thorns, blisters and little wormy things that burrow into your soles then crawl up into your brain and make you like The Feeling or something. For this reason I have devoted more than the usual 4.6 seconds that momentous life decisions tend to merit for me to choosing the most appropriate footwear.

After a lot of research and an afternoon spent having my feet examined at great length by someone who I am increasingly coming to suspect was not an employee of the Cotswold outdoor clothing company but a cunningly disguised foot fetishist, I have decided to go for a pair of army surplus desert boots for the dry season and jungle boots for the wet seasons rather than a hugely complex monument to Goretex that might possibly be able to handle both. Not only are two pairs of army boots cheaper than one technoboot, they come in width fittings for those such as myself who are somewhat gallumphing of hoof, and I like the idea that something designed for combat will be used to help research into reducing human suffering. As a bonus I am hoping that they'll prompt someone to say to me "You're thinking it's Sunday, I'd rather be in Apocalypse Now".

Both types of boots have reinforced soles so that thorns, rusty nails and the splintered bones of your fallen foes can't impale your feet. Desert boots don't have airvents to stop sand (or in my case dust) from getting in, but are made from nice breathable suede to stop your feet from broiling. They beat sandals hands down as thorns, mosquitoes and the aforementioned wee wormies can't get at your feet, and you can wear them with socks without looking like a tit.

Jungle boots are not actually waterproof - that would just make your feet rot when water got in and couldn't get out, but instead have cunning little vents in the soles so that the movement of your feet pumps water out. They are also apparently leechproof, which rather surprised me as I had always assumed than all boots would be proof against any leech that hadn't learned to untie shoes laces (a category into which I would, perhaps complacently, have placed the vast majority of them). However as leeches are some of the very few of God's creatures I find truly repulsive (the others being David Cameron and those horrible bald cats that look like a cross between a gargoyle and a scrotum) I have decided to be reassured by this.

Choosing the right sock is as important as choosing the right boot, and can be the difference between blisters and, erm, fewer blisters. In my extensive googling I came across something called "The Two Sock System" which is fascinating for two reasons; the first is that wearing two socks over each other dramatically reduces blisters by ensuring that the sheer stress is propagated at the junction between the socks rather than between sock and foot, the second is that someone bothered to give the practice of wearing two pairs of socks a name and felt the need to teach it as a course to soldiers. Interestingly I also read that the inner, breathable sock is often made of a material "like pantyhose" - ever since when I've seen footage from Iraq on the news I've been wondering if the soldiers are wearing suspenders under their uniforms.

Where were we? Breathable inner sock - check. Outer sock - wool and synthetic, no cotton as it becomes waterlogged, padding at heel and toe but thin upper to keep feet cool - check. Waterproof outer sock to wear over a dry sock in wet boots in the evening - check. (I wonder if I've just invented "The Three Sock System", and whether I could copyright it). Right, I think that's footwear sorted. To the army surplus store!