Day 2: Continued

Lunch was very good! I have no clue what it was, but it was good so I guess that's all that matters. After lunch, we met in the lobby of the DG's office and meet Lillian. She took us over to Dr. Moses office and he was yet another kind and friendly Kenyan. We got huge packets of information about icipe's programs earlier in the day and he shared more in-depth information about each of them. Many of you have questions about icipe, what I'm doing, and how I got here..and I promise they will all get answered as time goes by! My internet is a little spotty at times, and like I said, charging my appliances has become a bit of an issue, but I want to continue updating each day! When there's a will, there is a way. Keep posted for a general icipe overview blog in the coming days, as well as posts describing Kenya and my internship project.   Icipe, formally the International Centre for Insect Pathology and Ecology, is a world-renowned research facility located in Kenya, Africa. The World Food Prize has sent over 15 interns to this location over several years. Rico and I are very fortunate to get placed at such a wonderful and cutting edge facility and I'm excited to work toward solving food insecurity in Africa on a very important project. Icipe operates on a 4H Paradigm: Human Health, Animal Health, Environmental Health, and Plant Health. They believe that insects transcend all of those areas and that everything is intertwined; while they are an insect and anthropod based research facility, that is not the only thing that they do. My research, for example, is a social science project about the effects of push-pull and aflatoxin on post-harvest losses in Western Kenya: Genderized Perceptions and before you ask, I can't really explain what much of that means because I haven't met with my professor yet. That's all we'll dive into about icipe right now, but he went into a thorough, nice discussion of what research they conduct and why it is important to Africa and the world. We then went on a tour led by Moses to several of the larger projects on our Nairobi campus. We visited the chemistry department, microbiology, plant sciences, and my favorite stop, bee health. Lucky for us there was a test-tasting of the ecoHoney whenever we walked into the laboratory. We tried several different kinds of honey, but my favorite was the far right one (traditional honey color with yellow cap), it tasted the most like home. Moses, the man in the middle, was very kind and gave us a great tour. Thank you Moses for spending the afternoon with us!