Web Blurb - Jason Swenson
September 27, 2004
On May 4, 2004, I left Blacksburg, Virginia on a journey that would take me to Rubondo Island National Park in Tanzania. Specifically, I went to install and field test various pieces of equipment including a solar powered freezer, a new digital weather station, a satellite phone and laptop, and new GPS enabled PDA’s loaded with the latest version of the CyberCHIMPP application. I was selected for this project due to my background in communications networking coupled with my current education in wildlife science.
My first stop was in the city of Dar Es Salaam where I hired a private tutor to teach me the basics of the Swahili language. When, I left Dar Es Salaam I flew to the town of Arusha to pick up the freezer and associated equipment. In Arusha I hired a vehicle to transport me and all of the equipment to a small town on the shore of Lake Victoria called Nkome. From Arusha, we drove through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, around the rim of the Ngorongoro crater, and then through the plains of Serengeti National Park to reach Mwanza where we spent the night before reaching Nkome. I then took a boat provided by Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) to the island of Rubondo.
Once I arrived on Rubondo I installed the equipment I had brought and provided some preliminary training to the local research crew headed by Mwana Hamisi Issa. We were then successful in downloading a new version of CyberCHIMPP over the satellite link. Afterwards, we saved data collected on Rubondo to the VT server in the U.S. using the new satellite link. Mwana will maintain the new equipment and carry on with continued testing of the CyberCHIMPP application. This was an extremely educational experience for me and I am very grateful to the entire Bush-to-Base team and the various collaborators who enabled me to 
have such an incredible journey. In particular I would like to acknowledge the support from Dr. Taranjit Kaur who was granted the NSF grant # 0238069 in order to formulate the Bush-to-Base project and without whom none of this work would have been possible.