Tomorrow it’s my first day as research assistant for the barbary macaque project and I’m a little bit… scared?…frightened??…terrified??? Well, yeah, a little bit. After 6 weeks training, one would expect to be a master with the pocket pc, the codes and identifying the monkeys. However, being honest, it’s not enough; specially when there are two different groups of macaques, the PhD student who is supposed to teach you is so busy that she would need one of those hour-glass necklaces as the one Hermione had one the Prisioner of Azkaban (What did you expect? My generation grew up with those characters!), and the half of the days the rain sent the monkeys up on the trees, where they are much harder to identify even if you don’t consider the fact that you have drops falling into your eyes… But well; I’ll do it fine, I guess… I was one of those repellent girls that went out of the exam quite worried because they were going to fail and then they got a good mark; so I expect that this hasn’t changed.
So yeah, 6 weeks… 7 weeks ago I would have said that 6 weeks it’s a long time, but here the days pass so quickly that I still feel as if I have just arrived, even when most of the people are already preparing to leave…sigh.
I arrived in October, after expending less than a week in my hometown. The preceding month I’d had time for finishing my master, participating on my first field campaign and going to a dissection workshop in Texel, where I gave my first “formal” presentation in English (formal because it was about my own research, but It was a F&%$ing disaster!). So, I didn’t have much time for preparing stuff nor studying the protocols the PhD student whom I was going to assist had sent to me.
After taking a plane to Alicante and waiting for a long time in a mixed queue of flip-flops tourist, adventurers and Morroccan people coming back home; I found myself nearly praying (difficult task when you have no god!) for that toy-like plane to don’t fall in the middle of the flight (Have you guess the company? Yeah, it’s cheap but, f&%k!). Meanwhile, I also had another look to the notes I expected to know perfectly by the time I arrive to Morrocco but…
We landed safe and sound (!!!!) at Fez airport and, after another queue for passport issues and another one to change money, I went out with my luggage to meet the PhD student who, surprisingly, was as short as me and seemed to have the same sort of problems when speaking English as well as a very strong French accent which I could cope with since my best friend during the Erasmus was French.
The first thing she did was to drive me to the supermarket (Marjane); which reminded me to the Carrefour or any other European one!! So my first surprise was to see that the differences weren’t as huge as I had been told!!
After buying some basic stuff, we took the car and after one hour and a half we arrived to Azrou…which wasn’t exactly the “nice little town of green roofs” that my guide book said, but a messy middle-size city full of contrasts and with the typical nightmare traffic. The image I had the first time I put a foot on the city was like to be in a surrealistic performance; everything seemed to me like a puzzle made up with pieces of different boxes; a kind of platypus. Some streets were perfectly paved whereas others not only lacked from sidewalk but were of sand. The cars shared the road with the donkeys and the people that crossed everywhere as if they weren’t risking their life each time they wanted to go to the other side of the street, and the women with djellaba and veil walked together with the ones with tight jeans, heels and purses. The same happened with the shops; you could find one perfectly tidy up and well stocked near another one without painting walls and with only few gadgets on the shelves.
After a few days I became used to that miscelaneous world and that weird impression that you only have the first moments vanished with the time.
But, continuing with the action, the PhD student drove me to the flat which she and her two assistants shared. It’s a first floor, separated from the street (one of those without pavement and a horde of cats) by a metallic door which leads to a big room with a plastic white table and a pair of matching chairs, one of them broken, and a big amount of scientific stuff haphazardly piled in a corner. This big room leads to all the others: the restroom, which has one of those typical african waters without bowl that is also the shower; the kitchen, too small for four people and which stinks to cat faeces thanks to our fifth flatmate; the bedroom of the PhD student, the only one, apart from the restroom, with door; and the research assistants bedroom; separated from the big room by a courtain.
I don’t really remember much more of that day. I don’t know how I met the other assistant girl (I’ll call them by nationalities/cities for privacy issues…and because an international team is a kind of cool…), the Czech. I remember that I saw the assistant boy, the Californian, when I was outside smoking a cigarette and he came from running for a while. Afterwards, the two assistants invited me to go upstairs to “hang out”; expression that I didn’t know so far. There I met the other American, the Ohioan and the German (though I think I met her before in the bakery, where we went before going home). They were asking me a couple of things, if I’m not wrong, chit chat to get to know each other. However, I had to go downstairs to make me some diner; the schedule was completely different from mine and they had already had diner at 18h.
After having one of those typical Mr.Bean moments that one has when is in a new place (or when there is a lot of people looking; Mr.Bean is inherent to Murphy); the two assistants came back and we went to bed at 22 since, next morning, we would have to get up at 5.
I don’t remember what happened before arriving to the field ( I’m not a morning person, my hypocampus starts to work at 10 a.m …and stops at 22h), but I remember, more like a dream than like a real fact, the first time I saw the macaques. We were in a part of their territory that the team calls Texas. The monkeys started to climb down the trees and with them, a crowd of infants and juveniles, jumping, screaming and running everywhere I looked at. I couldn’t believed that I was actually there and I felt like an hybrid between Heidi in a poppy field and a Teletubby with and overdose of sugar ( happiness is usually ridiculous; fortunately is scarce). I took many pictures and I tried to memorize the faces of the macaques while we followed them through Parallel, Big Valley and so on. Probably that was the day that I have seen them travelling more, but I wasn’t tired and enjoyed the tourist tour, thought it was little bit exhausting trying to find out who was who… If I had known then that it would take me four weeks to do it right from a far distance (not including tall trees and nightfall) and I’m still expecting to be able to do it with the juveniles…
Well, I know it’s an abrupt ending for the entrance, but I should study a little bit before tomorrow; the girls worked today and said that the monkeys were most of the time up on the trees, so it seems I will have an awkward first day as assistant. I will try to write some more entrances soon, with brief funny stories about the macaques.
No comments:
Post a Comment