Mugie to Koobi: An Excerpt

Hello all! It is summer, I have graduated from college with my B.A. in Anthropology, and I find myself in an ideal position to finish up my book. 

The following is an excerpt of my current draft.This particular section covers the first day of our two-day drive from an ecological preserve called Mugie Ranch on the Laikipia Plateau to our main destination – the Koobi Fora Base Camp. I am travelling in Dr. Jack Harris’ (the director of the field school) Land Rover with three new-found friends named Jack, Allison, and Eva; Lori Dibble (Dr. Harris’ assistant); and Maria, a friend of Dr. Harris’ from Portugal who spoke little English. We never could put a finger on why she came along. The Unimog is a massive open-air personnel vehicle utilized by the field school. Dr. Harris preferred that we call him Jack, so there are three Jacks in the following passage. Bear with me, and enjoy!

At the gas station, which was only about an hour out of Mugie Ranch, we stopped and waited, thus living out Rule #1 (“hurry up and wait”) yet again. As soon as the Unimog arrived, full of open-air young people who might’ve had an eye-to-buy, the souvenirs and their enthusiastic vendors came out in multitudes. Multitudes meaning five very persistent men with various ornaments in their hands or complex hand-held, hand-made displays. Everyone in our Land Rover besides Jack decided to hang out in the car since a) we didn’t know when we were leaving and b) we didn’t want to face the sales pitches. That being said, the Unimog was taking up much of the business anyway. Many bought rings and bracelets. The blonde Jack bought himself a small spear, and I sent a small round of applause to dead Freud. Personally, I just didn’t want to bother carrying anything yet. We did have five weeks to go. And Lori kept scoffing at the purchasers. “You can get those anywhere,” she gestured at a man walking by with a rack full of thin metal bracelets. “At least wait until we’re on our way back. They’ll still be here.” So we hunkered down, and after a short cat nap, I found we were ready to go.

            Like road trip, journeys through the desert tend to have both aspects that are amazing and those that are not. One of those aspects that is not amazing is the possession of a bladder, which, for whatever reason, decides that it’s a good time to be active when in fact, it is the absolute worst. We stopped for a choo break approximately every two hours, thankfully, since if the driver has to pee, there’s no two ways about it. I had to go about every hour and a half at least. I wasn’t guzzling my way through my precious water and hadn’t had that much tea in the morning, but nonetheless, I had to go and the road was bumpy. At least I had my trusty toilet paper and Purell for those many, many times.

            A perk though, is that in the middle of nowhere, no one can see you pee. Except for the person peeing right next to you. Who, should they leak any gags or comments on your urination, you could blackmail and tease just as easily. The other side of the coin is that in the desert, there aren’t as many concealment options as you might desire. And where there is a shrub or tree that’s just calling to you, there’s probably some other life form lingering there who will not be pleased by your intrusion, whether this be a scorpion or fellow traveler. Shallow ditches concealed by brush turned out to be the best options, but beautiful opportunities like that only came up every so often.

            On this topic (and I’ll stop soon, I swear), Lori Dibble relayed some very helpful wisdom. Always bring a traveling skirt. Something pretty long, made of light fabric, that’s easy to hike up and lets you squat. For most of my life I had waved the tomboy flag and been diametrically opposed to skirts and all they stood for, though I did admit a good traveling skirt would have been awfully nice to have then instead of dealing with pants. Besides, if the skirt is being used to increase efficiency of travel through rugged terrain, the girly-ness factor is diminished considerably.

            Another less-savory but interesting aspect of road travel in the north of Kenya is the camel-jam. From far away, we could see them, and surely, you’d think, they would have moved by the time we reached them. But no. In the big wide-open, you can still hit traffic, in the form camels. When we reached a group, Jack honked and cursed. Only when we were nearly running them over did they prance off the road in alarm. The man leading them kept casually walking along the side of the rode, a rifle slung across his back. After we passed, Jack told us that camels were extremely valuable in this part of the world. If someone tried to steal his herd or an animal attacked, they’d have the rifle to contend with.

            And of course, the most unique and stunning part of the trip was the scenery. You don’t get wide-open, untouched desert lands with smooth roads, rest stops, and no camels, and the sacrifice is well-worth it. Every hour, the land changed from one kind of environmental microcosm to another. Mountain scrub, savanna, desert-savanna, desert, sandy desert, and rocky desert. We drove through it and fast.

            Before we’d ridden in Jack’s Land Rover we’d heard from others that he was quite the road warrior. The alleged “Speed Racer,” rocketed ahead of the rest of the vehicles every time we stopped. We left first, and got to the gas station first (our initial stop to acquire all the petrol we needed). While we were there, we let one of the lorries go ahead and stayed about half an hour after that. We caught up and passed that lorry way too soon. Similar things happened when we left after people during choo breaks and lunch stops. We were always at the head of the pack in Jack’s car. And he protected the sanctity of his Land Rover with ferocity. No one was aloud to drive it without permission. If someone did, he would know.

            At one point when we’d gotten dramatically far ahead of the rest, Jack stopped the car. We were on road that was squiggling its way to higher elevation, and we were pretty high up already. High enough to see for miles out and find the caravan we’d left behind. It was beautiful and open, like the savanna had been at Mugie. It was becoming a trend. We all got out and stood there staring out for a few minutes with Dr. Jack pointing out features in the landscape. We lingered until he decided the rest of the vehicles were getting too close to us.

            When I wasn’t desperately pleading to the bladder gods to give me a break, listlessly gazing out at the scenery, or engaging in conversation with my fellows, I was flat-out-dead asleep. I hate to think of what I looked like with my head bobbing with every jostle and my mouth hanging unfashionably open, but hey, I got some good sleep. The only thing that pulled me out was when my makeshift sweatshirt pillow dislodged itself from between my skull and the brutally rigid window frame. Then there was pain and awake. Then slight readjustment and a return to my beautifully composed slumber. Throughout the trip, beginning with that particular stint on the road, I realized I had the power to sleep where others could not. Allison was the first to point it out in sheer frustration, “Where can’t you sleep? God.” Of this, I was proud.

            In the afternoon, just after our lunch stop with your standard fresh bread and sandwich fix-ins, we passed through a town called South Horr. It was the first time we’d driven through a fairly densely populated area since we left the town with the gas station, just past Mugie. We went right through the middle, slowing down for the pedestrian traffic. It was probably the different-ness of this world from the one I was used to, but the people struck me as exceedingly beautiful. As we went over a bridge on our way out of town, we passed a group of women and children washing clothes in the stream, coming and going with beautifully woven baskets in hand, wearing beads of every color imaginable draped around their necks and lovely kangas (patterned sashes). Some of the children burst into the brightest grins I’ve ever seen and waved as we passed.

            I had a hard time believing that we hadn’t just passed through a small piece of paradise. The town was built on an oasis in the middle of an extremely dry environment. The buildings visible from the road had been of crumbling plaster, the road was unpaved, and the children wore old faded t-shirts that had probably been worn many times by many different people and been faded long before they reached the kids. On the other hand, silly old marathon insignia were probably best worn faded. I couldn’t imagine what kind of fresh food would be available in that place, what kind of educational opportunities there were, what kinds of medical care could be accessed, or what degree of upward mobility those kids would have when they grew up. But still, in that little piece of their lives we’d happened across, and I say this without excusing the poverty in which they existed, they were happy. They were living. They were doing their thing. And as much as I appreciated my middle-class western upbringing, I realized happiness was a different kind of beast than I’d been thinking it was, and probably significantly more unpredictable. 

            Just before sunset, Dr. Jack said we were approaching our first view of Lake Turkana. The vehicles had stuck together fairly well since lunch, so everyone arrived at the photo stop they used each year at more or less the same time. We climbed out of the Land Rover and there it was, its colors exaggerated by the saturation of sunset–The Jade Sea. It was an ancient beacon of life surrounded by a harsh volcanic landscape. The lake had existed at several times its present size when the first humans had come to be, and here it was still–threatened but there. As far as I knew, this lake could have been the reason I existed–making it possible for some ancient ancestor to have survived despite the harshness of the world, against impossible odds. The four of us comrades, Jack, Allison, Eva, and myself, took a picture together, the southern tip of the lake behind us. Too soon, the sun ducked further below the horizon, and it was time to go.

A preview...

Hello again!

It feels so good posting here again. It's been a little over a year since you've heard from me, but I have not forgotten. Your donations to my tuition for the Koobi Fora Field School have in fact gone far past allowing me achieve an academic dream. Here is what I have been up to since you heard from me last:

• Returned to Los Angeles from my year abroad in Scotland
• Grappled with what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, exploring international human rights law in addition to biological anthropology
• Wrote 33,000 words of the book, which is for the time-being called Six Weeks in Kenya, and while doing so was filled with vivid memories of the Koobi Fora Field School
• Decided that despite my reservations about the world of academia, I wanted to discover, and made the decision to pursue Ph.D. programs in biological anthropology
• Applied to eight exciting Ph.D. programs (a grueling process, let me tell you!)
• Began working on my Honors Senior thesis on tracing the co-evolutionary relationship between human populations and tuberculosis

So now, as I wait to hear from those eight Ph.D. programs and power through my final year of undergraduate education towards my Bachelor's degree in Anthropology, I thank you for all you have done for me. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Koobi Fora Field School has had a dramatic impact on the course of my life and career, and for that experience, I have you all to be grateful for.

That being said, I present to you the prologue of Six Weeks in Kenya. I hope you enjoy, and you will be hearing from me steadily over the next few months as I complete the text and go through the editing process. Happy February!

"The orange behemoth careened around the bend at Oak Knoll Avenue and Alpine Street in Pasadena, California, as I waited at the bus stop. The driver spotted my small self just in time to pull up to the curb a sensible distance away from the actual signpost. I boarded, tapped my student fare card, and settled into a window seat. It was early afternoon on a weekday, and the population of the bus was predictably sparse. I looked like crap and felt it, too in my baggy clothes, sunglasses, and grimace, so I didn’t mind keeping my public visibility to a minimum. I plugged into my Ipod and hunkered down with my beat-up pack of travel tissues in hand, predicting the inevitable flow of frustrated tears that would come. I was a teenage girl after all.

Like most days in the greater Los Angeles area, this one was overly bright and chomping at the bit to be summer already. It was mid-March and not even mid enough to be proper spring yet. For that and a few other reasons, I had been scheming to get out of Los Angeles. A series of events and the emotional states they brought about led me to the conclusion that the place held nothing for me but a lonely and uncomfortably-balmy monotony.

One-and-a-half years before, the situation had been different. Feeling similar dysphoria as a sophomore in high school, unprecedented opportunity had crossed my path in the form of the Early Entrance Program (EEP) at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). The people I got to know were fairly pleasant to be around. We were all of a certain neurotic whiz-kid ilk and that condition in common created a fairly well-oiled community. That being said, I didn’t find myself a proper group-of-close-knit-friends. I did find myself a boy. We started sticking together, got close fast, and became a couple. He was the one I could depend on for that easy feeling—being able to ramble and make ridiculous hijinks without feeling foolish. Then in September 2011, after several months, we weren’t a couple any more. Then I was a lone fool. The EEP community that had felt like a safe-haven during that first year of college began to feel more like a petri dish. Everyone who knew and liked me knew and liked him, and in a small community, being known as the dumped one for one day is one day too many. Clearly (to me at the time) I had no choice but to leave and never come back. I did know, being a sixteen-year-old, that this would be quite difficult to do through the as-seen-on-TV methods of hopping on a Greyhound bus with a gym bag, a neck pillow, and $50 to my brand new name and social security number a la Buffy (I added the social security number thing). So I went with some traditional academic escape routes instead.

For a while I entertained the idea of a full-on transfer. Had I finished high school, I bet at least one Ivy League would have caught the scent of my grade-point average and IB Diploma, so there were those places to think of. There was NYU, my legacy school, and Berkeley, which while still in California was far enough north to count as “away.” But a combination of financial considerations, age issues, and matters of conscience ruled out the transfer possibility, so I moved on to study-abroad programs and summer internships. The sooner out, the better. As my search changed focus, I discovered that my desired field of study was just as marginal as I felt. A search for physical anthropology internships yielded only a few feasible options, but I bookmarked all of them. A chat with the study abroad advisor at CSULA yielded a limited field of possibility as well. At the time, I did not want a language immersion program, preferring to focus on degree-relevant material in a new environment. I was not interested in studying in South Korea or China, and I was interested in a year-long program as opposed to a semester-long program. This narrowed down the options, and ultimately, I decided to apply to the University of Uppsala. They had social anthropology courses, which I needed for my degree; they had never explicitly stated that they would not take students under eighteen; and it was in Sweden! A snowy socialist paradise and the perfect place to harden my heart and indulge my taste for Scandinavian interior design. Besides, in Sweden, Santa Claus was an animal-loving dwarf, which appeals to me much more than a Coca-Cola icon.

In early November, another opportunity had come to light. A graduate of the Early Entrance Program had found himself in the position of study-abroad director for Worcester College of Oxford University, and he was searching for applicants. The director of EEP recommended three of us to apply for a year at Worcester through the Institute for Study Abroad at Butler University (IFSA-Butler). I was one of those people. Another was the boy. At this point our relationship, while fairly strained, had softened, and we were, at the very least friendly. I was too happy with the opportunity to think of any conflict that might arise from the joint recommendation. In fact I was doubtful any of us would make the cut, but I was positive that if any of us did, it would be me. After all, this is what I’d been fighting for. I needed it the most.

But as everyone knows, feeling the need to escape isn’t what gets you into study abroad programs. What gets you into a study abroad program is a group of people who happen to think you just might fit based on the words you chose to put down in your application and the recommendations of others. Empirical evidence of appropriate experiences and goals coupled with the whim of an admissions committee is what does the trick, and wishing, as each person learns during at least one major turning point in their lives, does not make it so.

As of the bus ride described above, my search for escape had yielded nothing but frustration. Two internship opportunities and the University of Uppsala had ended up rejecting me because of my age after all. And just that afternoon, Oxford had too. The preceding evening, they’d accepted the boy and wait-listed the other one, and I was left with no word. I couldn’t sleep that night. So I stayed up, lying in bed and checking my phone every few minutes, just in case they were delivering the emails from Greenwich Mean Time. At around eight in the morning, I was finally able to get some sleep. When I woke up again at noon, the email was waiting. The sting wouldn’t have been half so bad if the other two had been rejected right along with me, but there I was with the fact that I was the only one who didn’t make the cut, period. I kept crying on and off as I got ready to go out into the world. It had been a royal defeat, but I had to get to class and be around people. Thus the baggy clothes, sunglasses, and grimace. 

Later in the week, I learned the reasons for my exclusion. I was an anthropology student applying for psychology modules, and what was that about? I was planning to apply them to a psychology minor, but this had apparently caused confusion. They didn’t have proper anthropology tutors there despite the college’s focus on the humanities and social sciences. They had only Classics and Classical Archaeology. God forbid such a prestigious college examine the history of peoples other than the Greco-Romans. But anyhow, the committee took my psychological interests to be suspect given my major, and additionally, as luck would have it, despite the vetting of students of the Early Entrance Program by Dr. King, the psychology tutor on the committee was anxious at the prospect of tutoring a minor. And that was that. My frustration with these reasons was immeasurable. I was pleased that I had not been rejected because of a perceived inferior academic ability, but at the same time, that very fact reinforced feelings of powerlessness I had been party to for the past six months. As one friend said, I had been at the mercy of fools. It was beginning to feel like a trend.

My hope for departure was dwindling, and I was becoming certain I would spend the rest of my life in Southern California serving coffees. If I could get a job serving coffees. As far as I was concerned, the plethora of rejections was proof of how unwanted I was. But the woman at IFSA who processed my application offered me two remaining options in terms of year-long programs in the United Kingdom whose application deadlines had not yet passed, and I willed myself to accept the offer to forward my application on, just in case. She transferred my materials, and all that was left to do on that front was keep waiting.

Other than that, I had one more summer application waiting to be submitted. During the storm of web searching and bookmarking I had conducted in September, I found a website giving the bare bones of something called the Koobi Fora Field School. It was a six-week program in Kenya for undergraduate students who were interested in paleoanthropology – the study of hominid evolution. While I couldn’t picture myself actually traveling to Kenya anytime soon, the description piqued my interest. I sent an email to the professor at Rutgers who ran the program and months later received a cordial reply with an information packet attached. The application deadline was April 1, so there had been loads of time to look it over and think it over.

Summoning the dregs of my confidence, I spent the week after my Oxford rejection beefing up my Koobi application, working on the personal statement and sending away my transcripts, health forms, letters of recommendation, and miscellaneous papers adorned with the signatures of faculty and bureaucrats. I was in a steady volley between my laptop, classes, and the study abroad office. It was a kind of therapy to still be fighting for something. There were still opportunities left, and bloody big ones at that. During this rally, I submitted the Koobi application – the final reach – and as per usual, I waited.

 On Tuesdays I had Medical Anthropology from 6:10pm to 10:00pm, so every week I had a huge gap in my afternoon. I spent those gaps in the EEP student lounge. Sometimes working, mostly falling into conversation with people. That particular Tuesday I was sitting in a triangle with the boy and a friend. We’d returned to a comfortable closeness – I was just happy to be able to talk to him normally again. Normal talking was what was happening on that Tuesday when a lull in conversation caused me to check my phone for any new calls or emails, as I had been doing compulsively since I’d sent my first applications in. The little grey envelope in the upper-left hand corner of my screen indicated a new presence in my inbox. Half the emails I received were from The Body Shop or the New York Times so I safely assumed, despite the reason for my email-checking compulsion, that it was one of those situations. Of course, it was something completely different.

The email was from Rutgers, and it told me that a new document had been uploaded to my online student portal. I had received this notification each time I uploaded anything (picture, transcripts, essay, etc.) and I hadn’t for a while, so naturally I assumed that either a mistake had been made or some malicious party had, for whatever reason, hacked my Rutgers Student Portal (and how very quaint of them). But no. There was no hacker, and there was no mistake. The new document that had been uploaded to my portal was a letter to me, and it began something along the lines of: “Dear Ms. Sabin, We are pleased to inform you…”

 And so the joyous screaming began…"