 My name is Ekta Patel and for those of you who don't know me I am Ilri's Bioscience Communications Manager. I consider myself to be a unique species and how so because I come from an Indian background and if you know many Indians in East Africa then you know that most Indians go into businesses and unlike my family I decided to pursue my passion in molecular and cellular biology and genetics and became a scientist. So for nearly 10 years I've been working in the lab and like many of you here today I understand that feeling and excitement of taking your gel to check if there was a band or if your negative and positive controls are the way they're supposed to be and there's no contamination. And my favorite moment was when we were making some bacterial mutants and knocking genes out I couldn't sleep the entire night because I couldn't wait to get into the lab the next day just to check if my transfections had worked. So that's me and many many years passed that way until one day my supervisor who many of you may know Phil Toy my former supervisor said to me that we're going into the field this time and we're taking the vaccine that we made at Aelri we made a vaccine for the cattle disease known as East Coast fever and we're going to take this vaccine and go into the field and see how it works. And the prospect of him even suggesting that we needed to go to the field and I thought well what is a molecular biologist going to do in the field? I had convinced myself that I belong with my pipettes in the lab where I make magic happen. I was not excited and I don't know if he knows that but I said okay I'm gonna be positive and I'm gonna go because this is not when you put up a fight and I'll tell you something it pretty much changed a lot of things. So what happened is we decided to take a four and a half hour drive to Tanzania and stayed in the town of Arusha and early the next morning we got up and we went and drove another hour into a Maasai village in the town of Monduli. The planes were bare and vast and it was a cold morning and in the distance where they were the Maasai were staying you could see them coming out in their sort of traditional mud huts with their traditional garments also looking very cold and as you get closer to these the Maasai community what happens is anyone that's so hospitable says hey come in you know have a seat but you sit on stones and so we sort of made ourselves comfortable and then something interesting happens so when you go to someone's house they make an offering and they said we're gonna give you some special Maasai tea and I see this Maasai lady pouring out special Maasai tea in our cups from a gourd and I'm completely freaking out at this point because Maasai drink milk with blood and I thought am I is this is this what it's coming down to like you know and I'm looking at Phil and I'm looking at the other vets and the colleagues and then they take a sip of this tea and I look at them and I see no one's sort of passing out or dying you know it doesn't look like tea it doesn't smell like tea but you know I force myself to take a gulp and then I'll be very honest with you I was still looking at a way to like you know disposing the rest of it fortunately for me you know the specks of Sun were coming through and the cattle were gathering near the Bhomas and the Maasai the rest of the Maasai were coming through so I got excited and I thought you know what I'm gonna be done before I know it and we started walking closer to the Bhomas and as we were getting closer to the Bhomas I noticed something I noticed the smell of damp soil mixed with sort of cattle feces and I was also accosted by flies so many flies and the flies would sit on my pen and they would sit on my chart sheet and you know I was just sort of waving my hand around trying to make sure the flies didn't sit on me and I see the women and the children playing around and they've got flies all over them so a little baby and the baby's face and nose was all covered with flies there's nothing I could do about it and they didn't seem too bothered by this nevertheless our our task of our field travels coming to an end and the Maasai men decided that they are going to honor us and celebrate this by letting us eat with them and generally they don't allow the women to sit with the men so we all gathered around a tree and and sat in a circle and the translator there said to us that you know traditionally they don't allow the women to sit but we're so grateful for the vaccine that you've brought to our village and we want to show our appreciation and the next thing we know is that this young Maasai man comes and stabs the earth with the with with a cooked piece of roast meat from some animal that I don't even know and and we're all supposed to eat and and I said oh my god my thoughts were running away with me and I thought I didn't want anything I don't get me wrong I appreciate the hospitality I'm grateful but really I didn't want any of it and the translator asked me that you know what's with why are you so reluctant and I didn't know how to explain that I was out of my comfort zone and would you believe it that that was on the end of the trip I ended up going back there a couple of more times this time I took some non-toxic fly traps with me because I had them sitting around you know Indian people do business and so we had some that we were sourcing from somewhere and I decided to take these fly traps to this community and they worked like magic they were so happy and somehow I earned the name Miss Chana Inzi and every time I'd go back to Manduli they just call me Miss Chana Inzi which means fly girl or fly girl yes so having found a solution to one of their problems the Maasai lady decided to take me into her hut and you know I bent down to get into the doorway and I was it was dark in it's not like dark and she wanted to show me where the family slept so they slept on a bed made out of cow dunk which was at the height of a normal bed and they put a they put a sheet there and I didn't know what she was showing me this but she said something's biting their head and if I could find a solution for that and I'm so ashamed to say this to all of you but I just couldn't wait to get out of there I mean was it lice was it mites was it ticks you know what if it got in my head so I just want to shut up the point is I did not help this Maasai woman and that was probably the last time I ended up back in Manduli that felt completely inadequate in that environment and I went away taking a hard look at something I looked at all of my sort of inflexibilities and the hang-ups that I have and I paired it with all of my textbook knowledge of being a microbiologist and a molecular geneticist and whatever else and then I looked at sort of the needs of the pastoralist communities and I couldn't help but ask the question that how is I as a scientist going to make a difference to the people and their livestock if I wasn't willing to make the change myself so I understood that I needed to change the way I understand things first so most of you are going to say that now as I serve Illry as a communication manager I'm hoping to influence decision-makers but that's not the way that I see it I strongly believe that my main job is to in my main job is to and the critical success factor that I contribute to it is getting the science right because without the communications we cannot get the science right so for those of us who are fortunate enough to spend part or most of our life on the African continent we need to understand the harshness as well as the rich resources that this continent offers to us and having said that I look forward to working with all the scientists and all the non-scientists to make a difference and fulfill all the research that we serve to get our science right and these days I look forward to drinking more of that special mass IT thank you very much