Phase 2 of the research begins

We've spent the last week and a half preparing for our upcoming two months of research. Asher is starting phase 2 of his research after doing in-depth qualitative interviews about water and hydration coupled with ethnographic focal follows, where he would follow people around for 3-4 hours noting their activity and dietary patterns and how these factors affected changes in hydration levels during phase 1. Phase 2 consists of intensive diet, health, economic, and anthropometric interviews targeted at understanding how market participation, wealth, income, and human capital are related to people's hydration strategies and linking hydration strategies to hydration levels, body composition, and water-related infections. He will be conducting interviews with all of the households in both communities.

We're happy to announce that we've interviewed and since hired a doctor to join our research team (thanks NSF) to assist with blood spot collection (to assess C-reactive protein, an indicator of immune activation and inflammation) and fecal sample collection (to assess parasitic infections) as well as help with making diagnoses during the health recall aspect of the upcoming interviews.

We're heading back to Campo Bello on Wednesday for 3.5 weeks. We'll then fly to Trinidad to deliver the blood, fecal, and water samples to the laboratories with whom Asher is collaborating. Then rinse and repeat in Anachere.

Matthieu Paley, the awesome photographer from National Geographic, was kind enough to take a few portraits of us this last trip to Anachere. Here are two of our favorites - we love the boots hanging upside down as was customary to dry them out due to the flooded streams in the foreground, our house and solar panels are on the right in the top photo. (©Matthieu Paley / National Geographic):

Here's to another month in the field!

A National Geographic Trip

We just completed a pretty incredible nine-day trip to Anachere, the far community two-days upriver, with a National Geographic team. In our previous post we described their purpose for coming to Tsimane'land and what their story is about. In this post, we'll describe the trip and some of the crazy things that happened.

The Players:

Asher and Kelly, yours truly

Dino, our translator

Ann Gibbons, the writer

Lily (her daughter)

Matthieu Paley, the photographer

We got really lucky with the rain holding out until we arrived to Anachere. We didn't have any rain or hot sun for our three canoe travel days, which was awesome. After we reached Anachere on the second day of the trip, it rained about six inches in the night. This was the fiercest storm we’ve encountered in Bolivia - thunder and lightening all around us with water coming in the house through the walls. We had rain hitting our feet, but Dino and Matthieu had huge amounts of rain coming in and had to put plastic on the walls to stop the rain. The river and streams swelled - to get to the river, we had to cross two streams with waist deep water. We all fell in, got our boots stuck in the mud, or had water come over our high boots. The water in the river came up all the way to the bank - a big difference from when we visited in August when the bank was a 15-20 foot climb.

Asher was able to get two interviews done (phase one of the research is finished and there are cool findings relating to hydration status and ambient temperature, which he'll write about later), and Kelly worked on revisions to a paper, but we spent the majority of our time helping the Nat Geo team. We showed them around the community and introduced them to different households. To keep the emphasis on Tsimane' diet, Matthieu went alone on hunting trips into the old-growth forest for up to 8 hours with people from the community or visited houses with Dino. It was important for Matthieu to get candid photos, so one of the first phrases he learned in Tsimane' was "look over there", which was very effective. It was very impressive to see what it takes to be a professional photographer for Nat Geo as he took more than 3,000 photos in 8 days. We're very excited to see the photos that he took.

One of the most important scenes Matthieu needed to photograph was meat, but there was very little success hunting this week. We were worried he wouldn't get the photos he needed, but on the last day, our neighbor went hunting with his son and came back with three South American Coatis and two armadillos. Matthieu watching one of the households gut the Coatis after the successful hunt:

Ann, who is writing the story for Nat Geo, was really interested in seeing people eat, how they cook, and their reactions when people came back from hunting with meat. She also was interested in learning how things have changed for Tsimane' in terms of diet, game in the forest, relationship with market foods and river traders, and how people learned to cook and hunt. She spent a lot of time at different households and seemed happy with what she got, the "color" as she called it, for the story. 

Everyone was a trooper about the conditions we encountered. The rainy season is the most challenging time to visit the Amazon - mosquitoes are out in full force,  superglue-like mud is everywhere, and travel is hard to coordinate. The food is great though. Ann and Matthieu brought back fruit from one the houses after a visit, which made everyone happy.

Lily, Ann’s daughter, is on a gap year before starting college in the fall. Having just returned from Greece where she was at art school, she got a whole new set of scenes to practice, sketching portraits of the kids or adults when we visited households. She was pretty intrepid, especially with all the bugs this trip. This was one of the worst trips with bugs - they seem to be getting more numerous and having less respect for us – biting us wherever and whenever they want without any regard for feelings or preferences.

Dino was awesome as always. Ann and Matthieu engaged him a lot and showed him pictures of places all over the world - Matthieu had just visited the Inuit in Greenland for this story, and the pictures he showed us were incredible. Dino loves technology and enjoyed learning about the photo equipment.

Throughout the trip, we had a series of mishaps that reminded us of Murphy’s law. It was as if we used up all of our good luck getting from San Borja to Anachere safely without rain. Here are some of the obstacles/issues we had:

-Immediately upon leaving, a leak began in the front of the canoe, but we sealed it with mud from the river bank, which worked well.

-During the first night, water came into the house during the storm, and the floor became really muddy. We made some home improvements and asked two guys from the community to work half a day and bring in more earth to elevate the floor.

-On day 3, Our Lifesaver jerrycan water filter broke (a crack occurred in the center of the jerrycan and water started to leak/spray out). This was a real shock since it's supposed to be the best water filter in the world and has been a large part of helping us stay healthy in the field. We turned to the old standby - boiling water - for the rest of our trip.

-About 20 minutes later, we discovered maggots emerging from 2 kg of charque (dried salted beef) because we bought it when it was raining and it never fully dried again (we threw it out).

-The solar panels had an issue, but we fixed this without too much work.

-The second to last day, one of the kids came over and said peke peke (motor) and canoe in Tsimane' and motioned to come. I went to check the canoe and found the motor and canoe half submerged in the river. Dino came to help, and we pushed the canoe back in the water (it was stuck on the bank). Kelly and Lily helped Dino get water out of the canoe. The motor turned out to be fine - we'll take it in for a tune-up.

-30 minutes later, Matthieu got back from a household and wanted to go upriver for a visit to a more distant household. Dino measured the gas we had left and found that we didn’t have enough gas to get back to San Borja unless we went slowly (because the current was really strong when we came up river, we used more gas to get there than we anticipated). Luckily, we ended up having enough gas to get back to SB. 

Despite all of the challenges of the trip, it was a great success. We think Ann and Matthieu got what they came for, and we're really excited to see how the story turns out when it runs later this year. The sky was beautiful on the last night of our trip:

We had great weather on the way back as well. Here is Dino driving the canoe as Matthieu travels in style on the way back to San Borja:

Asher, Lily, Ann, and Kelly (left to right) on the canoe trip back, ready for the next adventure:

When Nat Geo Comes Calling...

We are in the exciting position of hosting a National Geographic team (a writer - Ann Gibbons, and a photographer, Matthieu Paley) for the next week and a half. They are working on a feature story for the magazine about the evolution of diet. Ann Gibbons contacted me in late October through my advisors, Dr. Susan Tanner (UGA) and William Leonard (Northwestern University), with whom she's collaborated in the past. Over a couple months of planning, we organized and set up this trip. Kelly and I will be taking them upriver to Anachere with us for a little more than a week. They'll be following us around conducting interviews as well as roaming a bit on their own taking photos. 

Here is a brief description of the story: "The story will take a look at the evolution of diet, starting with australopithecines and moving through Homo erectus to major transitions in diet in Homo sapiens. We can't photograph real paleodiets, obviously, and we know that the diets of hunter-gatherers or foragers are not paleodiets, but they do reflect the diversity of ancient diets in a way. [It will also] explore how the legacy of different diets, activity levels and genetics influences how different groups respond differently today to the nutrition transition."

The main reason they're coming to visit the Tsimane' community upriver where we work is because they still hunt and fish almost daily to get their sources of protein and part of my research centers on diet change. This story will challenge the model that there was only one paleo-diet that humans ate before the agricultural revolution (espoused by the current fad diet) and instead will discuss how multiple paleo diets existed, i.e., humans ate whatever was accessible to them based on their environmental resources (not exact ratios).

It is important to reiterate that living populations are not relics of older hunter-gatherer populations and Tsimane' have a dynamic culture. They interact with the larger regional market economy and the broader Bolivian diet has influenced their health and dietary patterns.

With this trip, we've changed our plans for January. We were going to go to Campo Bello around this time, but instead we're heading back upriver because when National Geographic comes calling, you can't say no (fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory). We'll be leaving Monday January 6th (weather permitting) and returning January 14th. We'll try to write a quick post upon return, but we're looking at a quick turn-around ourselves to get to Campo Bello around the 19th of January.