17/01/10

Good evening everyone. I have about 10 minutes before dinner but I can’t really be bothered to go over there just yet so I’m just gonna sit in my room and listen to the rain. Well, it’s not technically raining at the moment but the water is running off the roof into tin containers so it sounds like it still is. I’ve just put my purple shirt on and realised I’ve eaten too much since being here. Gonna have to tone down the carbs. Although some of it is a little bit of muscle, that’s really not enough of an excuse. Damn these Kenyans and their mountains of carbohydrates.

So today I went to site. It’s Sunday though, so we had a lie in, breakfast was supposed to be at 8.15 but we didn’t get out Uji porridge until about 9am, so we were quite late in leaving. Finally got to site at about 10am I think. We had Josie (sp?) and his wife and little girl with us as well. Matt was round the other side (at Morpus South) of the rock with Chris, Abel and a couple of the local guys. They were excavating the furnace that they found. I went to see it just before lunch. It looks quite cool; a big bowl with a lump of stuff in the middle and loads of slag around the place. I was carrying on excavating the trench at Morpus North. On my own. Well, I had Emmanuel, the Mzee (the old guy who owns the land) and another local guy doing the sieving for me, but I basically spent the whole day digging on my own in my little patch of dirt. Lol. I went through context 17 which was a grey ashy smear that was left over from what they did yesterday, then I went onto 18. Which covered the whole available part of the trench, which is only half of it as some of it is covered by the large rock which just kinda juts out of the section over half the trench so we couldn’t dig underneath it. And then next to it on the SW side is context 2, which I don’t think is completely sterile, but it’s very very hard, and seems mostly sterile. Matt thinks what we’re digging through used to be a gully which has since been filled up with sediments and occupation layers before being eroded by another gully. Anyway, 18 went on a bit. And it was very hard in the inner section. The outer section is being eroded and is very fragile in places. But yeah, 18 was a pain. I think I may have found the end of it but only in a small patch and under some very hard stuff which looked at first glance to be the same as 2, but can’t be. So I’ve left that for Matt to do tomorrow.

We left relatively early, packed up at about 3.40 and were down at where the car should have been to meet Matt at 4pm as he’d gone next door (about 5 mins walk) to the school (in the car) to see some of the kids he’s sponsored to go to school. He has this thing about street kids so some of them he’s sponsoring to be put through school. I met one the other day, she seemed very nice and excitable. He finally came back at about 4.30 and we came back to Makutano. There’s a police road block on the way, which we usually go through just fine, but apparently yesterday they were stopped and the car was scanned with something, and they searched the back and looked very aggressive at Matt with their guns. But let them go on their way anyway. Today they just let us through. Weird. Anyway, Matt dropped us off and then went to take Josie, wife & child home. He arrived back as I was stood chatting to Leila outside our rooms and came over to see how Leila had got on. Then he very sincerely thanked me for being there today, especially as I was on my own for most of it, which was very nice.

So now I’m up to date again. I’ve emailed to book my room at the Kampala Backpackers place in Uganda. I’m going for about 2 weeks from the 26th. Tomorrow I’ll be back at the museum, and then I’ll be writing up my notes, probably in the afternoon and the next day. Hopefully not too much longer though. Then hopefully I’ll get to see the site before they close, although if I go on Thursday then I will probably have to help close. :-/ Friday Matt and I are having a meeting with the museum peeps and then I’m going to see if I can go to Eldoret to see Sarah and get picked up on Saturday when they come back through. But we’ll see. I’ll need somewhere cheap to stay in Eldoret and for sarah to not be too busy, and for our meeting to be on Friday morning otherwise I won’t make it in time.

Ok, I think I should go to dinner now! Must post this quickly!