Alive and Kicking...

I can't believe it has been 20 days since my last confession... wait a minute, I mean my last blog...
I know I am sounding like a broken record, but geez it has been crazy here! Here's the run down:

A veterinary pathologist from Canada and a vet tech from Baltimore visited over the past 2 weeks. They were helping with the capacity building portion of the project - helping train our lab manager and technician, going over protocols, etc. A GREAT two weeks, and we got a lot accomplished.

We worked on Thanksgiving day (go figure, it is not a holiday here!) but had a great Thanksgiving meal with one of the other NGOs in town that evening - complete with turkey and dressing! I skyped the whole family that night and managed to talk to almost everyone, which was nice. Then last Saturday we had a Thanksgiving celebration here at our house. We had 4 chickens instead of turkey, and stove top stuffing, cranberry sauce (the kind I love that comes out looking just like the can - I brought it back from the states just for this occasion!), mashed potatoes, and about 15 friends. It was great fun - Julie brought her Egypt garb again, which is why John and Mike are in dresses! Here we are at the table in our conference room (pay no attention to the many Primus bottles on the table...).


BBC continues to film - here they are shooting our truck going in and out of the gate half a dozen times, but they got the shot! Stay tuned for a 3 part series on Mountain Gorillas sometime next year.

Through our partnership with a group called Project Rwanda we were involved in the donation of a cargo bicycle to one of the sector veterinarians. We even did a press release! Here she is thanking John Huston, who she worked with a lot when he was doing a survey of families involved in the "one cow per poor family" national project.

You might be interested to know that Pacifique, who I wrote about on gorilladoctorsblog.org, has also been given a bicycle, and it has changed his life. Justin, one of our farm partners in Uganda has a bicycle on the way too, thanks to another generous friend!

I finally got to go see gorillas last sunday - there was a blackback that was moving slowly and needed to be checked. I'll write about that soon - remember that all gorilla content must now be posted on the gorilladoctors blog so stay tuned there too!

We also just moved the 2 mountain gorilla orphans from Goma in DRC to a wonderful new facility in Rumangabo - more on that next week!

Thanks to everyone who has been sending messages - I AM still here, alive and kicking! In the next 2 weeks just about everyone I know is leaving for holiday, so I'll have LOTS more time for writing. You'll be sick of hearing from me. Hopefully it won't be another 20 days until my next blog...