It's an Anachere Life

Like all of our trips to the field, it seems when you’re ready to leave, something comes up, which is why it is so important to be flexible. We are borrowing a canoe and motor from the NGO that Asher works with. This is a huge help because it keeps us from having to find a canoe to rent each time we go to the field. The canoe, we discovered the day before we wanted to leave, needed some serious repairs. It was leaking and some of the wood had been damaged by rocks in the river. Our translator spent two days repairing the canoe to get it back to working order.

Once we finally got on the river, we had a two-day trip upriver ahead of us. From San Borja, we took an hour-long taxi ride to Arenales, a Tsimane village with a port where the canoe is kept. We got everything loaded on the canoe and were on the river by 12 pm.

We made it to Yaranda the first day by 6 pm (sun goes down by 7 pm) and spent the night in the community school. However, the school has quite a few other nightly inhabitants, i.e., bats, lots and lots of bats who like to pee and poop all through the night. Unfortunately, we left our plastic sheets that go over our mosquito net on the canoe, so we were getting bombed all night long, a most unpleasant experience that will not be forgotten any time soon. When we got up in the morning, this little guy was hanging out on Asher’s hat.

We made it to Anachere by 4 pm the following day, after another 6.5 hours on the canoe.

Our house was not fully complete when we arrived: the walls, roof, beds, and tables were done, but the door and inside walls were not. They finished all of the work within a day of us getting there though, and the house turned out to be even bigger than we thought it would be. With all the supplies for the house, the pay for Dino (our translator) to supervise construction and his passage during October/early November, all the labor (32 work days), and the jatata (what the roof is made from), the grand total for the house came out to just under $800 USD, not bad. It’s our first house, and we’re really excited to be homeowners. The house is a two-bedroom house with a kitchen and outdoor shower and latrine areas. It overlooks the river and there’s papaya and plantain trees in the backyard.

Our clotheslines:

Our kitchen table looking into our room:

Asher brought gymnastic rings down with us, because we're not sweating enough as it is in the jungle:

We also have a tenant that doesn't pay rent:

The house right next to the school, so we have a steady stream of visitors each day when the kids come hang out and watch what we’re up to.

Kelly proud to be a first-time home owner:

The kids of the Corregidor hang out with us most frequently. They were the closest family and with 15 of them (he has 2 wives) there were many of them around. Many times we would be inside, and they would just open the door and come right in, pointing at the computer and whispering. They loved watching us work – commenting on everything we did. We spent one afternoon giving them a basic math lesson, which turned out to be quite fun, but also quite shocking at the lack of basic arithmetic.

There are a lot of differences between Anachere and Campo Bello, the close community: namely in Anachere, people are shorter and smaller and the community is smaller with a more traditional settlement style. Five clusters of families live in Anachere, but it’s really just 2 families (4 generations). It’s a 30 minute walk to one cluster where there are 5 families living together. This isn’t a community in the sense of the word. It’s more like artificial boundaries grouping people who happen to live nearby together by building a school. The Corregidor (mayor) complains that the people in the community don’t really come together. Everyone just kind of lives their own life, unlike Campo Bello which is much bigger and there are daily soccer games, more nuclear families, and when a community meeting is called, a good number of people drop what they’re doing and show up.

The diet in Anachere is much more traditional. While people rely on the forest and river more for their food – lots of meat from hunting and fish, they have less diversity (plantains and yucca or corn with every meal) and some families only eat two meals a day.

A collared peccary:

A smoked monkey:

A family eating a soup made with the monkey:

Additionally, families in Anachere almost always were making chicha:

People in the community also were much more willing to trade food with us, trading freshly caught fish, papayas, plantains, and bananas for dietary staples we brought with us.

Early in the trip, we went on a focal follow into the monte (old growth forest) to see one of the men cut down jatata, a thatch palm, and what he does for water when he goes to do this. People spend a lot of time going into the old growth forest to extract jatata. It varies between a 1- and 2-hour walk each way. However, with such a long walk, people don’t really bring water with them. Instead they rely on getting water from streams or two different vines that are full of water (vehucos): Ona de gato and cayaya. They take a machete to the vine, and drink directly from it. We cut a meter and a half piece and measured the amount of water in it (300 ml of water), and Dino, our translator told us that since it had been dry for the last several days, there was less water in it than there usually would be. We tasted the water, and it tasted pure with a bit of a barky taste.

One of the men in the community and Dino making jatata - thatch palm for roofing (how all the people in the community make money/trade for food):

While the views were beautiful of the river, we didn’t spend much time on the beaches as the sand flies were out and about, and they leave really nasty bites where blood clots. We both ended up getting covered in bug bites despite wearing long sleeves and pants and using bug repellant, which these mosquitos don’t seem to mind. There are a lot of bugs upriver, especially in the rainy season.

And it is definitely the rainy season here. One night we got 5 inches of rain in less than 10 hours and two other days we got more than 2.5 inches in 24 hours each time.

It was incredible how much rain can fall here: in the 3 weeks we were there, we got ~13 inches of rain. It’s like we’re in a freaking tropical rainforest. The river swollen after a rainstorm: debree and logs floating in the current:

But it was also incredible how fast the ground dries. There would be more than 2 inches of rain pooled on the ground and within 5-6 hours, it would be dry.

The trip also had a lot of ups and downs, like any trip. A little more than a week into the trip, the interviews were going really well. Asher was getting a lot of different information than he was getting from Campo Bello. We woke up to really hard rain on the morning of Friday the 13^th, Asher's brother’s 32^nd birthday, and as we were discussing which house to visit, Dino tells us that he just got a radio message from his brothers that his mother is seriously ill and that he needs to go back to San Borja. This left us in a bit of a conundrum as he needed to take our canoe with the motor, and he was going to take the mayor with him. We wanted to be accommodating, so we said yes, and he said that the son of the Corregidor who spoke some Spanish would help us while he was gone for four days (one day on the river, one day in SB, and 2 days coming back). We didn’t really consider at the time since it all happened very fast what we would do if we had an accident (with no canoe and motor and no one who spoke Spanish very well). This is especially important in the Anachere since we’re so far from San Borja and fewer people speak Spanish. We were particularly concerned since we saw 2 vipers (nas) within 3 days, one very large one in the path where we walk almost daily. Anyway, when we went to the corrigedor’s house later in the day, it turned out that the son who spoke Spanish went with them in the canoe, and there was no one in the community left who spoke Spanish.  So not only could we not do any research, we had no one to talk to if we did have an emergency. Lesson learned: if we are upriver and any emergencies arise, we will all leave or none of us will leave. Dino ended up getting stuck in San Borja two extra days because of heavy rainstorms, so we ended up being alone in Anachere for 6 days. We stayed together and took extra care getting water (the riverbanks are very slippery) and doing other chores to stay safe.

When Dino got back, the research was back on track. We were getting some really good interviews and data.

However, the third to last night someone came into our house and stole 2 packs of pasta, 1 can of sardines, and 1 bag of lentils. We had enough food, but it was disconcerting that someone came into the house while we were sleeping and took some food. Later that day, as we were on the canoe trying to start the motor to get to an interview, we discovered that the sparkplug for our motor was also stolen. This theft was incredibly inconvenient as this $5 item meant that we went floating down the river. With Dino’s skilled navigation, we were able to grab onto a tree in the river so that we wouldn’t keep floating down – a bit of a scare. Dino climbed the cliff and got our spare sparkplug that he said was not functional but would give it a try nonetheless. After cleaning it and trying it for a while, he finally got it to work. Another lesson learned: never leave your sparkplug in your motor.

Asher wasn’t able to get all of the interviews he wanted due to these unforeseen circumstances, but we had a good trip upriver. Us with one of the larger households - they actually asked for us to be in the picture with them and put the sirai (the Tsimane' handbag) on Asher. Then when the looked at the picture all laughed and said sirai Asher.

We finished the trip on the 23^rd, getting up at 5 am and loading the canoe as it started raining. We got on the river a little before 8 am. We had really good weather for the trip back, only one hour of rain, and by 1:30 pm we were back at the port in Arenales.

To Anachere and beyond!

Hi family and friends,

We’ve been away for a while now. On our way back to the US, we visited Salar de Uyuni (the salt flats) for Kelly's birthday and had an epic time and took a ton of fun pictures. It's one of the world's largest salt reserves at over 10,000 sq meters of salt in an ancient dried up lake. 

Our trip to the United States was great. We had a wonderful time visiting with family and friends. Thank you to our friends for taking time to visit with us and for our families for hosting us and making sure we had plenty of turkey and mashed potatoes!

We had a productive month. Asher revised a paper (his first of three manuscripts from his dissertation) and just submitted it for peer review in Public Health Nutrition. He had a busy week in Athens meeting with his advisor and committee, as well as giving a talk to the department of anthropology on tips for doing fieldwork, and gave a presentation to his lab group. Kelly presented three papers at a conference, started her dissertation data analysis, and revised a paper. In between all of this, we enjoyed some of our US favorites – macaroni and cheese, sandwiches, and warm showers with lots of water.

At the airport leaving to go back to Bolivia:

Although we miss our family and friends in the US (and our cat, Boo), we’re happy to be back in Bolivia. We leave for Anachere tomorrow. Anachere is a community two days away from San Borja by motorized canoe. We visited the community in September for a quick trip and are excited to go back and get to know the people who live there. While we were away, our translator went to Anachere and supervised our house being built. The report is that it is done and ready for us, which means we are now homeowners!

This coming month in Anachere, we will be doing the same data collection as we did in Campo Bello in October. We will be conducting qualitative interviews about perceptions of water, dehydration, thirst, and health, ethnographic participant observation, called focal follows where we hang out with people after the interviews and note their activities and food consumption during the 3 hour period, and finally collecting urine samples to see how their levels of hydration change throughout the day.

We will also be conducting water quality analysis in the field using a method developed by Hach called Pathoscreen which gives us presence/absence results of whether the water is contaminated with pathogenic fecal bacteria. We did the same analysis in Campo Bello last month and found that the river water was contaminated with E. coli, the open well was contaminated with fecal coliforms, but not e. coli, and that the closed hand-pump well did not have any pathogenic organisms.

Water quality results from Campo Bello: dark = no contamination, when it turns to yellow and if it floresces under a UV light then it's positive for e.coli.

Since Anachere only has a stream and river as water sources it will be interesting to see if the water quality is better since it’s upriver and whether people have different hydration strategies.

Thanks for reading and happy holidays!

A&K

A day in the life in the Amazon

Daily life while conducting fieldwork in the Amazon is drastically different than life in the U.S. or any city for that matter, i.e. No running water, no electricity, and a stray mosquito or two :)

Since Asher's research deals with water, we'll start there. In Campo Bello (the close village), there are several options for water: the river, wells, and pumps. We get our water from a pump that is about a five to six minute walk from the house we are renting. We usually get 20 liters of water when we wake up around 6:30am, at lunch around 1pm, and in the evening before dinner around 5pm. The pump is a good workout.

To minimize exposure to parasites and other things that might make us sick, we filter the water that we drink and the water that we cook with. We have a Lifesaver Jerrycan water filter. It can hold 20 liters and is one of the best water filters in the world - it filters down to 15 nanometers, meaning it can even filter out all bacteria, cysts, viruses and waterborne pathogens (for reference, the smallest known virus is polio at 25 nanometers). Depending on the turbidity of the water, it can filter 2-3 liters of water in just a couple of minutes (remarkably fast): If you need any water filters, personal water bottles Lifesaver has great options.

For electricity, we have a great solar panel power system. Thanks to Alan Schultz, we got a pretty elaborate system. For a detailed discussion about solar panel systems for fieldwork, see his awesome blog: Anthrohacker.

 Here are our three panels getting lots of sunlight in front of our house.

The solar panel connection comes into the house and is connected to 2 morningstar solar controllers, which then attach to a lead acid car battery. We can then plug our computers, lights and a fan through the battery.

In terms of cooking, we cook on a propane stove (much easier than cooking over a fire). For breakfast, we usually have oatmeal and coffee/hot chocolate. For lunch and dinner, we have rice or pasta, canned meat (tuna, sardines, or spam) with onion or other vegetables, and plantains. Sometimes we make a quinoa or lentil soup to change things up. Here is our kitchen.

We eat breakfast at 7am, lunch at noon, and dinner at 7pm. From 8-12 and 2-5, we visit households around the community with Dino (Asher's translator). In Campo Bello, houses are on both sides of the river, so we often have to cross the river on canoe. Here's Dino navigating the canoe on the river for us.

The community is large - it is nearly an hour to walk between some of the households. Most days, we walk between six and ten miles.

We had a private area built for showering. We share it with lots of ants and even some mosquitos, but it serves its purpose well. We also have a latrine, but we'll spare you a picture.

Kelly had minimal demands in coming to the Amazon. The one thing she did request was a shower bag. We brought a 5 gallon shower bag from Seattle Sports. We fill it up in the morning, put it in the sun, and shower when we finish research for the day at 5pm. There's a bit of a rush each day when we finish data collection. The mosquitos come out to feed around 6, so we have to get water, bathe, and do our laundry quickly before the mosquito hour.

After our evening chores and eating dinner, we make use of our solar panels for lightbulbs and computers. In between mosquito bites, Asher enters data from the day while Kelly works on papers and grant applications. Usually, we get into the mosquito net for the night before 9pm since the bugs really like to come into the house when the lights are on at night.

We are looking forward to spending some time in the far village (Anachere) in December and will update later about life there.

Fauna in the field

When you're living in the Bolivian Amazon among a population that uses hunting as one of its primary modes of livelihood, you come upon some pretty awesome animals in your daily life. When Tsimane' go hunting, usually in the old-growth forest (which depending on the community and how far away it is from San Borja can be 1 hour or more than 5 hours away on foot), the main objective is to kill one of a variety of small animals for protein. However, many times, depending on the size of the animal and how much success they've had during the hunt, they will catch the animals and bring them back to the community. Many of the animals become somewhat domesticated with the Tsimane' feeding them and letting them grow before being eaten.

Here is a Wasu - or a forest deer. Vicente, one of the translators, picked up this deer and said "Bambi" while we were in one of the communities upriver.

Many Tsimane' come upon monkeys in the old-growth forest and will catch the babies and then raise them as pets for several years. Agustina in Campo Bello had caught this monkey.

Last summer when Asher was in Campo Bello, he was giving his introductory speech to the community, describing his study when one of the families had brought this monkey to the meeting. It caught him a little off guard as the monkey was playing the whole time with the girl's hair (pictured below) while he was giving his speech.

When we visited the family again this summer, the monkey was a year older and still was hanging out (he's 3 and a half years old now). He's really territorial of the family and apparently when they go fishing, he will go into the river and fish as well. We were warned that this monkey will bite, so we gave him some space.

They've since adopted another small, brown monkey (6 months old) that was pictured in our last blog post with Kelly. This one also liked to bite, but we think he was just playing.

Here he is playing with our first guide. He was really curious.

At another one of the families' houses, we encountered what they called a "mono del noche" or a nocturnal monkey. He was Asher's favorite. As Asher moved around, the little guy kept running after him and would stop when Asher stopped. This went on for a good 10 minutes (about the length of Asher's attention span when playing with animals).

He was also very camera friendly.

A few of the families also had Capybaras, who they caught in the pampas. Capybaras - the world's largest rodent (ROUS's) live in the water, but once you bring them to your household, surprisingly, they will hang out with you and not run away.

The kids like to put them on leashes and take them for walks, which the capybaras seem to enjoy as much as cats like going on walks.

The community also had a fair amount of exotic birds. One of the guys in particular had a ton of animals, including a capybara, more chickens and dogs than you could count, cows, and then a few birds. He also had an ostrich-like bird. Asher asked Enrique where he got the ostrich. Enrique told us that his son found an egg, brought it to him, and now he has a giant bird that others in the community joke is his girlfriend. Apparently several of the taxi drivers that come through have offered to buy it from him.

Enrique had so many different animals at his household, including this incredibly ugly bird that we haven't been able to identify. Anyone know what this is?

Several of the families also had parrots that talk.

Finally, here is a wild bird that one of the families found in the old-growth forest (ave del monte) that really loved the camera and people. The bird took an immediate affinity to Kelly.

In our next post, we'll talk about a typical day in our lives in the field. Maybe we'll share some funny stories, including one about a very unfortunate mouse.

First month in the field

We just got back to San Borja from our first three-week+ trip to the field. We spent this month in Campo Bello, a community of about 60 families and 300 people. It’s a large community and is located fairly close to San Borja – just under an hour by taxi in the dry season (right now) and a little further in canoe during the rainy season. Here are our things all packed and ready to go – we’ve got our awesome Lifesaver water filter, our stove and propane tank, buckets for water and washing, solar panels, electronics, and all of our things for sleeping and eating.

When we arrived at the community, there was a community meeting (a reunion) already underway. This gave Asher an opportunity to re-introduce himself to the community (he worked there last summer), introduce Kelly, and talk about his research project. The meeting went well, and people were happy to see that Asher bought a new soccer ball for the community. The children play soccer every day, and the men play on Sundays.

A side note, this ball lasted a week before it was kicked into a stick and punctured. Fortunately, they were able to fix it, so the games continue!

We spent the first day getting our house set up.  We’ll have a post soon chronicling a typical day in the field, so stay tuned, but here’s the house we’re renting plus our solar panels.

The next day, we got on a canoe to visit some of the houses on the other side of the river. The way the community is set up, the main part of the community is almost like a peninsula that the river meanders around. There are also houses on the other side of the river on both sides of the peninsula. As a result, we had to cross the river almost daily. 

Our trusty guide and translator Dino was an expert navigating the river and not tipping the canoe over. 

The nice thing about this community is that there are almost always canoes that you can use – people don’t mind if you borrow it for a bit.

In this part of the Amazon, a lot of the large trees have been cut down for logging so most of the growth is relatively new. This tree was a real site because of its age and size! There were only a few really big trees close to homesteads in the community.

For the first week, we visited each of the houses, verifying the census and introducing ourselves. On some days we were walking 6 to 8 or more miles a day. Some of the sites in between houses were incredible –

There are a lot of interesting pets in the community – some of them we aren’t really sure what they are, definitely a few we’ve never seen before (more on that in a later post). This guy looked familiar though. As we were talking with a family that had two monkeys, the baby monkey decided to come running over toward us. As he came over and was chewing on Asher’s bookbag, he lost interest suddenly and decided that he’d rather hang out with Kelly. He got really quite handsy.

After more than two months in Bolivia, we finally found some homemade chicha – a fermented beverage that the Tsimane make using corn, plantains, and yucca or a mix of those ingredients. While Tsimane’ don’t often share food with non-kin, Tsimane’ widely share chicha to any visitor that stops by a household (sobaqui) that has chicha. Chicha isn’t as common as it was in the past and especially in close communities, they tend to drink it before it has become completely fermented. The individuals drinking the chicha sit often in a circle or on benches and pass around a large tutuma (a gourd made from the fruit of a cresentia tree) and continue to drink until they’re sated, ready to go work in the fields, or they finish the chicha. During one of Asher’s sobaqui’s, a household had some plantain and corn mixed chicha. After Asher sat down, he was quickly offered some chicha. They passed the tutuma around and said “cheja shogdye’” (drink the chicha).

Chicha is a very work and time intensive pursuit. There are many steps involved, we’ll post a separate, detailed blog post on all of the steps involved later, but here is a big pot of chicha after it’s been prepared.

People work very hard here – it takes a long time to do things like washing clothes, getting water, taking a bath, and cooking. Often Tsimane’ use their dugout canoes as an extension of their homestead either on the river or on a stream. They sit in the canoe and either wash clothes, themselves, or even gut fish.

Tsimane’ practice swidden, or slash and burn agriculture. This time of year, the men are all cutting down the small trees in their chacos (fields) and burning the fields (to enrichen the soil) to get ready to plant again (plantains, corn, yucca, rice) before the rainy season starts in November.

The people in the community were incredibly welcoming – we’re picking up a little Tsimane, and they smile when we try to use it.  We spent the second half of our time in the community doing interviews and participant observation. We’ll write a little more about the data collection and research in an upcoming post as well, but the theme of the interviews was about where people get their water from, their perceptions of water and water quality, hydration, and health. Here’s Asher interviewing one of the men in the community.

The river was really beautiful, especially in the early morning. We often got up really early to enjoy the sunrise.

The trip was productive and a great start to Asher’s dissertation research. It was nice to get out into the jungle, live a little bit differently than we’re used to, and get to know what the rest of the year here will bring.