Encore en fwa!

I’ve been here for over a month now and I’ve slipped quite well into a routine. My grandmas sister 'Titante' wakes up at 6am without fail everyday and puts her radio on to listen to ‘dimoun ti’n mor’ or people that have passed away. Even though she is 85 and can only walk a few metres before getting breathless, she washes the clothes, and cooks curry, with rice, salad and satini (chutney) all before 7am. She then sits on the verandah, saying ‘salaam’ to everyone that walks by. She tracks peoples movements more tightly than a CIA agent. She can tell you, who’s dating who, where they’ve been and what they ate for supper last night. Even though her kids range from 45 to 62, with grandchildren of their own, she still tries to impose curfews on them. Her behaviour is the subject of many amusing conversations and impressions. Since my grandmother and their other sister 'tante' passed away, she is the last true matriarch of the family, and she rather relishes being in charge of all the young 'uns.

Every night she briefs me on the latest goings on in Mont Buxton before we watch the news and then she gives me a creole lesson. She tells me not to let on that I know creole so that I can let people divulge information on the downlow. It’s been quite cool actually. I found out some very interesting stuff in the staff hospital while pretending to read a newspaper in the staff common room a couple of weeks back. The lady gossiping stopped and said to someone ‘I pa comprwa mwa, li?’ which means ‘she cant understand me, can she?’ someonethen said the equivalent of ‘hell no’ before they returned back to their character assassination of a very close colleague...

I usually wake up late (around 7.30am) realising there is a meeting I have to go to and run down the mountain to get a taxi or on those few occasions I'm on time, I walk to the hospital. I say hello to the familiar faces that I meet on the way. Half of them seem to be relatives, close family friends or ex's of my brother who apparently dated the entire population when he lived here.
Whenever I tell people I live in Mont Buxton and I walk to and from the hospital every day, they always says ‘its good for you’ after a quick glance down at my thighs.

Over the last couple of weeks our monitoring and collections have been going ok, I’ve been a bit behind with counting my eggs (I haven’t counted any). I’m starting to know Mahe and know it a lot better than most of my family now. What has been quite annoying is that some of my traps have been turned upside down, stolen or knocked over, so results from some areas are missing. I did get rather excited last week though when I spotted some Culex egg rafts in one of my traps. I cant wait to identify those little beauties. Of interest also is a suspected imported case of Malaria by an Indian worker who has travelled in. I’d be interested to see how that is dealt with and also whether any competent vectors are around as I suspect perhaps they may be. My Italian supervisor has been quite supportive, almost ringing me on a daily basis to give me pep talks as well as new tasks to do for the EMCA conference next year. (Quick plug – any budding entomologists or public health people please sign up at www.zanzare.eu!)

On the animal front, I’m also starting to deal with the dog situation. I’ve learned that if you are going into uncharted territory you need to carry a big stick or a few stones to chuck. I’ve also shouted ‘alle!’ at dogs and they’ve strangely obeyed a couple of times. I always hate it when my cousin gives me food to carry home. I might aswell walk around in a cat suit on all fours. I walk home in fear of being ambushed by beasts whilst dodgy the hazardous driving up a mountain with no lights or barriers to stop you falling 10 ft into a ditch. It's all an adventure I suppose.

Bush (Titantes adopted dog) is my darling. I never thought I’d ever say that about a dog, but he really loves me. I went to the shop the other day and he warned all the big scary dogs off, waited for me and then took me back home. He gets happy when I come home and wags his tail feverishly. He knows I’m not down with the licking yet, so he senses my discomfort and holds back bless him. Hopefully Davinia will come with the flea collar Titante requested as her way of trying to de-flea him (spraying him with bug spray for cockroaches) doesn’t really work funnily enough.

There are other animals a plenty and I’m not so keen on them. I woke up the other night to here some rustling only to find a 20 by 2cm long centipede crawling all over my bag in snake like fashion. I had to kill it, then pick it up with some lab tweezers and take a picture of it, it was phenomenal. There are cockroaches and spiders galore, not to mention geckos, lizards and every night you hear the bats screaming in the mango trees. Bat is a delicacy here. Perish the thought. I hear that if you don’t remove the glands properly you get the taste of BO. Nice. I think Titante summed it up nicely when I asked her if she ate bat, she replied ‘urgh! I can never eat bat! Its like eating a little person – they have periods!’ -I told you she was hilarious.

My friend Davinia arrives tomorrow. I’m quite excited about her arriving, this first month here has seen me immersed in family events, barbecues, beach parties and drinking on the verandah every night. I wonder how she’ll take to life in Seychelles. She’ll definitely fall in love with the surroundings and the people too. They are eccentric but warm and generous. Having said that for the average Seychellois, life is difficult. The backlash from the global economic crisis is taking its toll, and with almost everything being imported, life is expensive here, more so than the UK. People wrangle for foreign exchange and the blackmarket economy is rife. There are often food shortages over here, last week there was no salt in the shops, a couple of weeks before that no oil, there are often fights in supermarkets as people try to stockpile goods. One year there was no toilet paper! (and before you ask, I hear people used kitchen towel).

On this lazy Sunday morning, Im getting ready for another family get together. My cousin Denise the queen of socialites is leaving for America next weekend so I expect a bonanza of party.

I can hear Bush barking outside and Titante ordering him to come and say ‘Bonzour to mama’. Little does she know, Bush has a new mama in town :-)

Comsi, Comsa

Well folks, my intrepid adventures on the 'Pearl of the Indian Ocean' continue. Thanks for your feedback so far, its been great :-)

Time is flying. I've been here almost 3 weeks, and I don't really feel that I've achieved as much as I should have. The first spanner in the works occured when Simon (the ONLY person on this fair island that knows anything about mosquitoes) texted me on Monday morning to say he had come down with chickenpox. Upon reflection he did look terrible on the Friday, but I assumed that was because of the amount of booze he was knocking back at a fellow staff members leaving party. As always, he told me to chill (he used to be a rasta man) and that he'd arrange for someone to drive me around on the Wednesday. I was quite geared up for monitoring the traps on the Monday as it had been raining so hard over the weekend I thought I'd need to start gathering animals two by two.

Yesterday we set off and I felt ill prepared. Resources are so scarce here that I had to improvise. That fact that I'd never seen an Aedes albopictus egg out in the field and yet I had to start counting them terrified me. In the beginning I scraped up every bit of crap from the ovitraps onto filter paper just in case it was an egg.

I almost wanted to strangle Louisanne (one of the assistants) when we were trying to transfer some eggs to filter paper and in the process she crushed the eggs and smeared the remnants all over the place thinking that she had made a successful transfer?!?!?!?!?!

As the day progressed, I became familiar with the eggs and also could see an abundance of larvae. Most sites were positive. I've got lots of samples in my office which I will either try to identify as larvae or breed to adults and identify then. To identify larvae involves counting the number of hairs, looking at the length of the siphon and all kinds of tedious stuff I dont know how Im going to cope. Oh yeah my good friend Davinia is coming to join me in a few weeks :-)

Other than the daily improv that I have to conduct with these experiments, things are good here. Even though they don't know how to queue up or have a sense of urgency when it comes to work, the Seychellois are kind, hospitable and incredibly considerate. Family life centres around the verandah, the kitchen and food (especially fish) is discussed here like the British talk about weather. What's good about staying at Mont Buxton is that by mums' house we have mango, breadfruit, banana, jackfruit, golden apple and pawpaw trees. Titante orders an uncle or cousin to break fruit for me everyday, and there is always some sort of delicious 'satini' (chutney) or salad to be made for me to eat.

Last weekend I went out clubbing twice in a row, once with the older generation and then with my younger cousin Tracy. I was a wreck. My cousin Drina had to dowse my head in orange water and her partner Thomas gave me some gastric pill which miraculously fixed me up. I try to reject going out but I'm cajoled into doing it every day. I'm glad I do go though, it's always fun. I like the fact here that there are no taboos around socialising here. I think it has something to do with the fact that Seychelles is still only a couple of hundred years old, the joyous 'we've been liberated, lets have a damned good time' mentality of the freed slaves that built this nation permeates everything. Didi (my grandma) used to force her nieces and nephews to take her out clubbing right into her late 70's and if she couldn't be bothered to do that then she'd invite a band to her house and charge on the door.

I'm seeing a different side to life I suppose, one that is less serious and embraces the here and now. I'd like to strike a happy medium in time, I cannot maintain this hedonistic lifestyle long term without some repercussions somewhere (i.e FAIL for my project). I keep everything in check by reminding myself that I've committed myself to presenting this data in Turin next year in front of the worlds best in the field of entomology. Aint no room for egg on my face at an international conference so I better get back to my mosquito hunting.

I just found out that an obituary was published last week chronicaling the life of my hero and mentor Chris Curtis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/27/medicalresearch.highereducation?gusrc=rss&feed=science By some fluke I've been chosen to chair the young researchers session at the European Mosquito Control Association conference next year, I know Chris would have been really happy about that. It was a chat with him that started the research in Seychelles and the link to EMCA which provided me with so many opportunities. Catching that article today was well timed and has reminded me that even with the glitches, what I'm doing is worthwhile :-)