Grade 11 Biology Field course: Chemchem

This year Ms.Chandler and Ms.Reid’s IB biology classes went off to Chemchem in South beach for 4 hardworking days. It all started off on a late Monday morning when we got on the busses and enjoyed our short bumpy, drive to the campsite. After all the hard work, trying to stay in our seats we got straight to putting up tents and mosquito nets.

Not long after that, we began with the invertebrate investigation where we had to set up a method to catch invertebrates in two different locations and record the invertebrates found. The purpose of this was to explore the biodiversity in two areas with different abiotic factors. Once we were done searching for areas to put in a trap or sheet under a tree, we quickly had a delicious dinner and got straight back to our books.

The next day each group had to do 2 coastal quadrants and collect all the information for the long river study... That night we enjoyed listening to Mr.Reid’s lecture on human impact to forests in Uganda.
On Wednesday morning we headed straight to the villagers as each group was assigned one family. This was very eye-opening and interesting as we learnt a lot about their impact to the forest and what they have to do to survive. I was very surprised to hear that a 13 year old boy named Omari walks one hour everyday just to go to school, as he wants to become a teacher in the future.

After that we got back to work as we went down to the isolated beach to do our beach investigation using quadrats to count organisms…soon it became dark and we headed down to the beach to enjoy our last night sitting around the bonfire toasting marshmallows.

It was already Thursday and we still had some work to finish on our plant biodiversity experiment. As we were all determined to get back home to take a 30 minute long shower…we finished up faster than we expected, packed up and jumped into the AC buses. We quickly drove along the bumpy and tiny roads…but as we know everything is “pole pole” in Africa …we had to wait about an hour till we could get onto the ferry!

Once we got to Dar it still wasn’t over …we all came back to school on Friday to process our data and finish one of the four labs we started in Chemchem…once that was handed in we were done for the week and all surprised about how much work we completed.

After my experience I believe Chemchem is a great place to go…to just lay back and enjoy the beautiful scenery of the beach, admire the spectacular stars at night or just to go out there for a walk in the green forest with the river and monkeys around you.

Patrizia Ponti, Grade 11 Biology Student