Tsimane' Flood Relief Fund

Dear colleagues, friends, and family,

Conditions have continued to worsen here in Lowland Bolivia. While the Bolivian government issued a national state of emergency on Feb. 4th, very little of that aid is reaching the thousands of Tsimane' whose houses are flooded and crops destroyed. All communities downriver or north of Uvasichi are under water right now, including Campo Bello (one of the communities where I'm conducting my dissertation research). To help you get a sense of how widespread the flooding is, check out where Uvasichi is in relation to the two communities where we work and San Borja. Uvasichi is right at the turn in the river (if you look at it like an L). (Update: approximately 56 communities are now affected by the flooding, reaching as far as Yaranda and Cosincho upriver). Map credit: Universidad de Barcelona

Currently, all of the roads are under water as well and people are using canoes and boats on those roads, it's surreal. Being on the ground during a natural disaster in a country with poor infrastructure and among a population that is vulnerable with little in the way of resources to get out of harms way really opens your eyes to how rich conditions are in the US. 

Please consider donating to this flood relief fund: https://fundly.com/tsimane-flood-relief-fund , especially if you've enjoyed reading about our adventures down here on our blog. Any bit helps, even $10 can buy a days worth of food or a mosquito net. Currently, there are 3 camps here in San Borja where Tsimane' are staying and this fund, coordinated by an anthropology team from University of Santa Barbra and Univ. of New Mexico that is helping evacuate Tsimane' from flooded communities, buy them mosquito nets, medicine, clothing, and food. We've been in talks with this team to help out as much as we can, dispensing aid while we're stuck in San Borja. Please share the link to the flood relief fund with friends.

La lluvia sigue (The rain continues)

Some of you have noticed we didn’t leave for the field last week, so it’s probably time for another update. Last week, Bolivia declared a state of emergency because of extensive flooding.

http://www.trust.org/item/20140204163022-0qcs5/?source=hptop

San Borja has had some flooding, but the communities along the river have been really affected. The flooding has really hit the roads hard and many of them are completely under water. During the dry season, the taxi ride between San Borja and Trinidad takes around 5 hours. One time, we even made the trip in 4 hours. When we made the trip a month ago – still early in the rainy season – we got stuck overnight in a tiny town in between San Borja and Trinidad and the travel time was 9 hours total. However, the second half of the trip (5 hours) included us sharing a back seat of a van with a mom and her son of 10 years, who threw up continuously throughout the whole ride. The poor kid had terrible car-sickness and rode with his head in a plastic bag. He filled up 4 or 5 plastic bags and when the bag would fill up, his mom would just throw it out the window onto the road. One time, she accidentally hit the head of the guy sitting in front of her with the bag of vomit and he looked back to see what hit him in the head and realized it was a bag full of vomit and gave the funniest look we’ve ever seen. Anyways, someone told us the trip is now taking 17 hours and some days the taxis aren’t even bothering to leave so people are stranded. Needless to say, no one is going anywhere quickly around here.

Campo Bello, the closer community we work in, is flooded. We talked to some people from Campo Bello who were in San Borja, and they said many of the houses have water up to the knees or even higher. The school, which is supposed to start a new year this week, also has some water in it. Many of the people in the community have moved to other villages or have gone further into the jungle until the water recedes.

Anachere, the community that is two days upriver, is harder to get word about since there is no way for people there to send a message. Anachere is higher elevation and is upriver (the flooding gets worse downriver because the water accumulates), and the communities around it have not reported flooding.

There are concerns about disease – dengue, malaria, parasites, and skin conditions – that come along with flooding. The government is sending medical teams to affected communities to provide care. We hope they can make it to the Tsimane communities.

Once it is safe to travel on the river, we will go to Anachere and then try to get to Campo Bello in March. We’ve given up trying to plan anything – our bags are packed, supplies are purchased, but we’re waiting on the river to go down. It could be in two days; it could be another week. Asher is taking it all in stride. He’s even working on a couple new papers. Kelly finished another grant application and has been working on two journal revisions. We’ve also found time to make a lot of soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Thank you to everyone who has checked in with us – it means so much to get emails from family, friends, and colleagues making sure all is well here. We are fine – this isn’t without its challenges, but we have each other and a lot of supportive people back home. We also love hearing what you are up to, so keep the emails and comments coming!

Here are some pics of the rain in San Borja. Our complex is pretty good at absorbing water, but there's still some parts that flood:

The walk into town from our complex on the road also is a bit under water:

In San Borja, there are a few streets that are completely under water, and people have to navigate them:

You'd think people would look where they're going when there's flooding in the streets, but not so much:

We got stuck in the rain for a bit, when we were out buying produce:

People still go out when it's raining and have their little stands selling bread, or cooking hamburgers, but knowing about water quality, Asher has to comment that anytime there's water in the streets, it's mixed with feces due to all the dogs, chickens, cows, and horses that roam the streets. And if the stand is splashed with the street water, that is a recipe for illness:

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.

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