Tas

Tas ("Tass"), as they say in Tsimane' when you're done with something or when there's nothing left. That's what we are. We finished our last trip to the field last week. We spent the month in Campo Bello. The road finally dried, and we were able to go by taxi - a wonderful break from canoe travel.

The flooding is over, but the community is very much changed. A large stream cuts through one part of the path that was never there before. Here is Kelly crossing the stream. It seems that logs are always used as little bridges.

After the flooding that happened this year, many of the slash and burn horticultural fields were destroyed. Yet, now enough time has passed that some crops are starting to emerge again.

Like usual, we spent a lot of time walking to visit families.

Amazon photo bomb.

Since Campo Bello is fairly close to San Borja, logging hit the community hard in previous decades. Where Anachere is still very much jungle, many of the large trees in Campo Bello have been removed by loggers. Nevertheless, one of the trees by one of the older families' household, about 30 minutes into the forest has a breathtakingly huge tree with interwoven roots.

We stayed in a different house than in our previous trips and this was our morning view, very quiet and beautiful in the mornings.

We tried to visit as much as possible during this trip, it being our last trip for at least a year to this community. We encountered three of the community elders on a sunday afternoon drinking and enjoying watching one of their sons build a fence to keep a newly bought pig from escaping. They had a great time chatting with us.

Visiting with Francisco and Dolores. Francisco is another one of the elders in the community who we've spent a lot of time with. He's always joking around with us and laughing.

During this trip, Asher conducted a lot of weigh days to validate the quantities and weights of people's diet. Francisco looking at fresh fish he caught that morning.

Here is Francisco and his family eating breakfast, a nice plantain and fish stew (jona). Fish appeared in the diet regularly. 

To make the jona, you start with green plantains and scrape the plantains before adding it to boiling water and fish.

Asher weighing plantain scrapings before being added to the jona.

Overhead view of a family eating dinner:

The fishing was immensely popular this month as the Sabalo were swimming upstream. The majority of the people in the community took advantage of this to fish, especially with nets. And the yields were pretty impressive to witness as many households had up to 70-100 fish. When a family catches this many fish, they will chapapiar (or smoke) the fish. We were lucky enough to have many people give or trade us fresh fish, leading to some really tasty meals.

People in the community have been using nets to catch the fish. They bring the fish they don't eat to San Borja to sell them in giant coolers. Here is Johnny with his new fishing net.

We realize that we've neglected to talk about what we eat the majority of the time - a huge disappointment for our Ochs family readers. We eat well in the field. We bring three weeks of supplies with us, like potatoes, onions, carrots, rice, pasta, dried meat, and canned meat. We also trade in the communities for fresh fish, plantains, and fruits. Here is Dino at the table for our last meal in the field - boiled plantains, and tuna with vegetables over rice.

It's hard to believe that the year of research trips is tas. We're really looking forward to getting back to the US, but we'll miss the people and many other parts of the field. 

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

Just finished our last trip and are resting up in San Borja. It's snake season in the Amazon. We saw 10 or so snakes during this last trip to the field, the majority of them very venomous. Luckily, no one was bitten, and we did not have any real scares. One encounter involved a meter long, small venomous snake the first night in Dino's bed as he was setting up his bedding - he immediately decapitated it with a machete. Our team also encountered a two-and-a-half meter (~8 feet) long snake, which was in a path we were walking. We just let pass by and slither away. One of the guys in the community, Julio, told us a story of a 5-meter long anaconda he recently killed that almost bit him - he killed it with a bow and arrow and then machete for good measure. Asher got a video of him telling the story of how he came upon the anaconda, but the file is too big to load onto the blog unfortunately.

The trip was a great success, minus one of the scariest hours of our lives the second day of the trip. We woke up in the school of Yaranda (where we stop for the night on the first day), and the woman from the family that looks after our canoe over night came to us and said, "you're canoe is gone - it went missing in the early morning." Our canoe - with all of our belongings, minus just the bedding stuff for the night, our computers, the solar panels, water filter, supplies for 3 weeks, not to mention the canoe and the motor to the canoe (which we don't own), went missing. Dino sprung into action, got some of the guys from the community to help him look for the canoe. He showed up an hour-and-a-half later with the canoe - apparently overnight when it rained, the rope to the canoe unlatched itself and went floating down the river on its own. They found it upright (thank goodness) with nothing missing and nothing damaged two meanders down the river. After that scare, we decided to enjoy the canoe ride the second day to the max.

The Anachere fiesta took place during our trip, and we had a great time watching and being a part of the festivities. Since the community had not had a fiesta in a couple of years, we wanted to help out with this one by providing food and soccer jerseys. Three teams from other nearby communities even came for the festivities.

The diet interviews went really well, and we were interested to see how the diet has changed in the last two months since our last trip to Anachere in March. While some families were doing well, it seemed as though it was the calm before the storm as many of the remaining chacos were becoming exhausted. The remaining plantains that didn't die in the flooding were being eaten.

Concepcion making jona, a plantain-based stew, little water, salt, and fish or game if available.

Asher's interviews and data collection went well.

Alvaro, our new doctor, was a great help, especially since people in Anachere have extremely limited access to medical care. Here he is consulting Jose, one of the villagers.

Julio had great success before our interview. He went hunting the night before and killed a 25-kg wild deer. He gifted us close to a pound of fresh deer meat, which was a welcome change from the dried charque we'd been eating.

Julio also took us to a couple of vines so that we could measure the water content, as these are important sources of water in the forest when the streams dry up.

This was our last trip to Anachere. While we are excited to be wrapping up fieldwork and returning to the States, it was sad to say goodbye to our Anachere 'family'. We've spent a lot of time in the community and care a lot about the families there. They welcomed us to their community and houses, and we enjoyed getting to know them. One of our last days, we walked to Angel's house to visit and took this picture with him and his family. We had taken a picture with them exactly six months earlier in December. Just like in middle school when you get your yearbook and you're wearing the same shirt you wore for picture day, we realized that we wore the same outfits both times.

We're also saying goodbye to our first house. We became homeowners in November and have continued to make home improvements to the house and latrine. The house has a ton of spiders, termites, lizards, and even a snake or two, but it's been our home for much of this year, and we'll miss it.

Before leaving, Asher took water samples from stream Anachere and the river. The stream (pictured here) has attracted gold miners over the years, leading to water contamination.

Here is the view of our house from the river. Anyone want to buy it? Great real estate - located between the school and river.

We are prepping for our last trip to the field. The year is flying by, and we return to the States July 7. 

Just 2 months left in Bolivia

We just completed one of our longest trips to the field. 4 weeks without any breaks. We came back to some exciting news:  two papers Kelly had been working on and were under review were accepted for publication, and Asher received a revise and resubmit decision on the first article from his dissertation.

Back to our recent trip:  After all the flooding, April was very gracious with only two inches of rain during our stay in Campo Bello. Nevertheless, March was not willing to leave without a splash, and prior to our arrival to Campo Bello, it rain so hard that the river flooded the community again. When we arrived, the house we rent had water in it and flooding around the house. We spent the first two days of the trip building canals to drain all the pools of water around the house.

Here's the house all set up and our food stacked up. We brought 4 weeks of food supplies. Our little hut was jam packed with foods and presents for the community.

Many places around the community still had a lot of standing water.

Inside the school, we were really pleased to see this public health poster discussing three ways to purify water.

Asher was able to conduct water quality analysis in three of the main water sources: the river, a pump, and a well. And this time, only the river tested positive for fecal contamination.

The signature of the flood, as the community members called it, was evident on every house in the community. Below you can see a line of dirt about 2 feet from the ground on the house (just at the shadow line), which is where the flooding rose for a period of three weeks in February.

The fishing was really good here this month as the Sabalos were swimming upriver. Many of the community members were fishing with nets and caught hundreds of fish, which contributed to the majority of the community reporting eating fish with almost every meal on the diet recalls.

We were able to do a little bit of visiting and exploring this trip. The river has changed drastically and the bank has moved about 20 meters from where it was in October.

We visited Paublina's house and talked to her about the flooding. She lost her house and her water pump during the flood. However, she has a great attitude and was laughing all the while telling us stories. Luckily she has a huge family, and one of her grandkids built her and her husband a new house.

They were able to save the pump, but now it's just sitting in a tree. In the foreground you can see a stick in the riverbank - that is where the pump originally was before the bank fell into the river.

We had a great month of visiting with the community and data collection. We interviewed a total of 46 families with a total count of 186 individuals.

The majority of the interviews are about diet. Diets here are more market integrated than in Anachere, but at the same time, there is a lot of repetition to the diet. People were eating fish, plantains, and rice in some variety of preparation – soap, fried, smoked, or cooked in the fire. While the community members had huge losses in their fields, the majority of households still have some plantains or rice in their fields because almost every households has multiple chacos that are much larger than upriver since they sell many of their crops for income rather than just consume them like they do upriver. This change to cash cropping is possible for communities close to San Borja. We gave out aid to families at the interviews as well as gifts for participating in the study. People also had just received aid packages from the Tsimane’ Flood Relief Fund here.

It seemed as though everyone in the community was sick. The doctor stayed busy and gave out tons of medicines for colds and diarrhea as well as treating wounds and abscesses. She also was a big help to Asher with anthropometrics.

The fruit on the trees was plentiful – lots of limes, mandarins, grapefruits, and pacai (shown below) – it is citrus season. The weather was phenomenal. The rainy season is finally coming to an end – only one day of hard rain in April – it is incredible how dry the village was at the end of the trip compared to when we got there. 

We ate a lot of plantains this trip as people brought them as gifts and to trade.

We are now preparing for our second to last trip to the field, and our last trip upriver to Anachere. This year has gone by really fast. At times, it has felt slow, and we've had lots of challenges to overcome, but at this point there are only two months left. We are excited to get back upriver, but it will be hard to say goodbye to the people we've gotten to know there. We'll be back from Anachere around the 25th of May.