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.
