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