Day 45

Sundays in Iringa are a little more boisterous than back at home. We almost always go to the site on weekends, but the epic artifact backlog that you’ve heard so much about kept us in the lab two days in a row. However, yesterday afternoon we were thwarted by cute kids and today we were booted out for a wedding! Setting up a lab on an outdoor patio next to a banquet hall certainly has its disadvantages. With our free time, we decided to have lunch at our new favourite restaurant in the Ruaha hotel. It’s the first place I’ve seen in Tanzania that serves pork, known colloquially as “kittimoto” or “hot thing” due to the large number of Muslim people in the country. While we were walking back, we had another distinctly non-Muslim experience. Apparently on Sundays, the Christians in Iringa celebrate by chanting “Yesu Yesu” while running behind a car that plays gospel music. I reckon Tanzanian Christians must be fitter than some of the ones back home. Just another day in Iringa.

Having these 2 unscheduled afternoons of free time has been both positive and negative. I was able to update my field notebook, upload and back up all my photos, update my photo log, and research a little bit of comparative primate anatomy. However, in the moments in-between, I’ve been feeling rather homesick. Up until now, those sorts of feelings have been largely suppressed by a high level of stress. As soon as I took a minute to unwind, it occurred to me that right now my sister is probably on an airplane. She’s finally moving back to Canada after spending 5 years in a PhD program abroad and I’m missing it. If I were home with her this long weekend, we would be at Heritage Days, our favourite of Edmonton’s summer festivals, stuffing our faces with sticky rice and taking pictures next to the Viking ship. Instead I’m sitting in my hotel room in Iringa, looking at pictures of bones and vacillating between having spaghetti or goulash soup for dinner. I would never give up the opportunity to travel and see the world, but it does come at a price. We only have one month and 36 Malarone pills remaining until the end.