Hello,

I've been in Tanzania now for about a week and a half and am thoroughly enjoying being back and also being able to speak Swahili with people. I will sometimes see, hear or smell things that bring me back to four years ago, when I was here as a Peace Corps volunteer. Things like, the white-washed bricks perfectly lined-up outside of primary schools, the shy smile of young girls, the call to prayer in Dar Es Salaam on the coast, the scrawny, miserable dogs, the awful exhaust from busses and trucks, the feeling that the car I'm in is gonna hit every person on the side of the road, the big sky and clouds in the southern highlands area, the baboons along the roads, how happy and surprised people often are to hear you speaking Swahili, the green, green mountains around Morogoro, the beautiful gorge along the Ruaha River, the dogs that bark just like Pookie barks, siafu ants (those ferocious little biting devils), the formalities when talking with people, the huge avocados, geckos, Baobab trees, the funny hats that old men in the villages wear, the pitter-pattering of raindrops on the metal roof when the rain is just beginning...

In case you're not sure about the research I'm doing here, let me briefly explain… Chickens in Tanzania are prone to a disease called Newcastle disease, which causes a large number of chicken deaths every year. A chicken vaccination project was started in a few project villages last spring to vaccinate chickens against Newcastle disease. The vaccine is actually very cheap and easy to administer and some Tanzanians buy the vaccine themselves. The vaccination project has lead to an increase in the number of chickens in project villages. I will be looking at the social impacts of the increase in chicken numbers. I will be measuring the amount of income from chicken and egg sales, the frequency of chicken and egg consumption, household food security and peoples' support for chicken vaccinations in households in the project villages. I will compare the project villages with control villages (where the vaccination project was not implemented).

I was in Morogoro, at the Sokoine University of Agricuture (SUA), for the first part of last week, where I had meetings with most of the chicken vaccination project team members. We drove to Iringa on Wednesday, where we had more meetings and visited a project village and two potential control villages. I'm currently staying in the guest house of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is located in Iringa town. I have daily access to internet here. Iringa is about an hour or two from the project villages. When I will need to be working in the villages more frequently, I'll be able to stay in a guesthouse in one of the project villages.

The villages where I'll be doing research are near the Ruaha National Park. One of the project villages has been having problems with a lion that has been killing livestock at night and who killed an elderly woman about a month ago. I've heard that plans are being made to find and kill the lion. Don't worry; I'm not taking part in the lion hunt.

For more on Danielle's project please visit the GLCRSP Avian Flu School project (AFS), an international train-the-trainer course covering the essential skills for prevention and detection of and response to an H5N1 HPAI outbreak, and implementing a village-level Newcastle Disease and Avian Flu Control Project throughout West and East Africa.