The Gift of Time

Looking back, my original plan to stay in Nairobi for only three weeks seems extremely foolish. I've been here for just over that amount of time and am about halfway through the work I need to do. I've found that it's difficult to estimate how much time it will take to study a fossil collection, and another student at the museum who is here for an entire year told me that she was advised to figure out how much time she thought she would need and to double it. Because you never count on days like I had today - where I spent the morning running around town printing and xeroxing the application materials for a research permit, and then spent the afternoon identifying pieces of rhinoceros bones. There are about 200 bone fragments that I need to identify as either hippo or rhino, and unless you are really familiar with those animals the way to do that is to figure out which bone your fragment is from and then compare it with the relevant bone from both a hippo and a rhino to see which one it resembles. Second to elephants, the white rhino is the largest terrestrial animal alive. The osteology department has skeletons of rhinos arranged in big boxes and on shelves. So imagine going through boxes pulling out these huge and heavy bones and you can see why I only made it through about 1/5th of the work I had intended to do today.

So I was walking home at dusk, freaking out at how little work I had gotten done...and I thought, okay, I have the money, I don't need to be back in DC for anything...so I am going to give myself the gift of time and stay in Africa as long as it takes me to get through my dissertation work and not worry about it anymore.