Saturday, June 2, 2012


WOW!
So I just arrived at Centre Valbio with Dr. Gillespie and my two other teammates for the project.  While driving on a small road it all of a sudden just popped up, a beautiful stone building in the middle of nowhere.  It took us 9 hours on a surprisingly paved road to arrive here.  We ended up sleeping on the floor in the dining hall last night because it was too late to set up our tents.  We are currently working on the surveys, perfecting them and translating them into Malagasy.  I have never worked on survey before and its pretty interesting to see how they are designed.  Our questions have to be very specific, non-offensive, not  leading, and relevant to our project (it's easy to ask questions that are really interesting but slowly drift further from relevance to the project).
Internet here is surprisingly terrible, it took me about an hour of waiting before the internet starting working, and I was told that the high speed internet will not be up and running until January or February.
We will probably start working in the villages come Monday, which I am really excited to start doing.  Primate work will probably not happen for a few more weeks.

Ian

2 comments:

  1. Yay, Ian! I couldn't stand not having photos so I googled and found the Centre Valbio website @ Stony Brook (http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/centre-valbio/). I can imagine how excited you must be!

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  2. wow! best of luck and i hope we can hear from you once in a while despite the internet woes.

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