Back to Campo Bello

After a little more than a week of being back, prepping for our next trip, we are heading out to Campo Bello for the better part of April. We'll be doing the same data collection as we did in Anachere last month. We expect to return to San Borja around the 25th of April. It'll be great to get back to Campo Bello, the close community that we've been unable to visit since all of the flooding took place. We actually haven't been to Campo Bello since mid-October, so we're really looking forward to catching up with people in the community and seeing how things have changed.

Campo Bello is downriver from San Borja and as such was severely affected by all the flooding. During the flooding, we encountered many people from Campo Bello in San Borja, including Paublina, this spry 90 year old woman with a hunch back. When we'd visit at her house, we would always comment about how she had the best view of the river as her house was just meters from the river bank.  She also had a new covered-well, water pump at her house that she was incredibly proud of and would frequently talk about how nice it was to not have to get water from the river anymore. She would always start listing how many kids and grandkids she has (more than 70!).

Unfortunately, during the flooding her house and the well both fell into the river through erosion of the river bank. We're going to be taking aid packages to every family in the community once again as well as conducting interviews. We hope to be able to help out the families in Campo Bello as well as get data collection back on track for this community. Our team is ready to get back to the field:

Asher prepping for sample collection:

Kelly posing with Barbaro, our San Borja compadre:

Dino and Katerine smoking fish from the barbasco in Anachere:

March Madness

We were able to leave San Borja on Sunday, March 2, despite pending thunderstorms. We arrived in Santa Maria, a community of about 30 families, and gave aid packages to the community from donations that we received. Each family there received 1kg of rice, a can of sardines, laundry soap, two plates, and two spoons.

We arrived in Yaranda, a community a little further upriver from Santa Maria, to spend the night. As we were about to leave Monday morning to resume our journey, Dino and the doctor, Katerine, said we should wait a little bit since it looked like it was going to start raining. That was an understatement. We got torrential rainfall all day long and had to spend the day and extra night in the school in Yaranda. With the help of a family, Dino was able to rid the canoe of water, which was filling it. Unfortunately as a result of the torrential rainfall, some of our food and a few presents were ruined.

The next day we resumed our trip, and the river was excessively full with a strong current, which meant it took us an extra 3 hours to reach Anachere (9 hours in canoe on day 2). 

As we traveled upriver, we saw how different the landscape and communities were close to the river. Households were gone, chacos were dead, riverbanks changed, and the water level from the flooding was evident on the trees. We didn’t know what to expect when we arrived in Anachere. Since the upriver communities are so far away from San Borja, no one had heard much about conditions in Anachere. Some of the first houses we saw in the community from the canoe had been underwater not long ago. All the plantains, rice, yucca, and papaya near the river were dead. We weren’t sure if our house would still be there, but we were so relieved to see it. People here who lost their houses have rebuilt, and we visited them in their new homes. Here is one family in Anachere in their new house.

Asher spent his birthday getting data collection back on track, which went very well. Everyone in the community was happy to participate. 

We were able to complete more than 70 diet recall interviews with an emphasis on hydration strategies and the one thing that stuck out this time was that citrus season correlates with a being more hydrated as people regularly "drank" grapefruits, limes, lemons, and oranges all day long (up to 20 a day!):

The blood and fecal sample collection was also a success, for the most part – a cluster of 4 households that has a dispute with the Corregidor (village mayor) did not want to come for the blood/fecal sampling, and so we weren’t able to get 9 of the 36 subsample. The doctor was great – she helped with all aspects of the trip: doing the anthropometrics and the health recall interviews, as well as treating individuals and taking the blood and fecal samples. During the sample collection, we had families come to the school - Kelly made yupi (a vitamin c fortified kool aid type drink), and Asher provided the entertainment for the kids and adults as we were taking blood spots, which people did not seem to mind at all. For the kids, Asher would prepare the items, then as the Dr. was preparing their finger for the lancet prick, he would distract them by showing pictures on his camera of Boo, our cat in the US, and say Mishi (cat in Tsimane’) or whatever other pictures were around. Sometimes he would do a little dance or put a bucket on his head to make them laugh. As his friend, Paula Tallman, who has taken a lot of these samples has said – keeping people relaxed and making them laugh, as well as soaking hands in warm water, is the best way to get good blood spots.

Two weeks into the trip, we had all noticed some of the gifts (31 bullets, 5 knives, 60 candies, and a bag of pasta) and food items (1.5 kg of dried beef, 1-2 kg of sugar, 1 kg rice, 1-2 bags of pasta, a box of yupi, 2 boxes of crackers) were lower than they should be. We figured out that someone had been stealing from our house. Upon close inspection of our house, we discovered that they had removed the chuchillo (bamboo-like wall) and stuck their hands in and stolen the items. Fortunately, they left just enough gifts for the study participants and food for the four of us. That put a damper on the trip. It’s always a few rotten apples that spoil what was otherwise a mostly perfect trip (aside from all of the bug bites). This time there were hardly mosquitoes, surprisingly, but the no-see-ems were everywhere and ruthless and we got hundreds of itchy bites.

We got to experience and partake in a traditional communal fishing event called a barbasco. Barbascos are a community-based fishing activity when either an entire community or several sets of families dam a small tributary stream to the Maniqui Rio and place a plant poison in the water so the fish become drugged and dull and are easy to pick up. 

It was a great event and people were successful. Although it’s important to note that Asher and Kelly caught the first (and smallest) fish of the barbasco:

Everyone got 4-5 kg of fish, some more, but people said they didn’t bring enough of the poison and so it wasn’t as successful as it could have been. Since meat rations in our house were low after some of our food went missing, Dino caught 3 kg of fish - the smaller ones we fried and the bigger ones we smoked – so we had a nice buffer of meat for a few days. Angel’s family told us that they will have another barbasco in May when we return.

Jose is in his 80s and looked like he's been to a few barbascos before. Here he is - wearing the traditional shirt worn by Tsimane - with a machete in one hand and fish in the other. Some people used bow and arrow to catch fish; other people brought machetes and were just as successful.

Here's what we brought home:

Although the flooding meant that many of the lakes near the river are full of fish - great for barbasco events - the effects of the flooding will be felt here for the next year or two as so many people lost the majority of the crops in their fields. Here is one house and chaco - all the plantain trees, which are a major part of the diet here, have died.

It seemed like the majority of the community was sick while we were in Anachere, especially during the second half of the trip when colds and diarrhea ripped through households. Though we were all feeling run-down by the end of the trip, unfortunately, we were also afflicted and had to leave the community a couple days early because Dino was exhibiting three of the classic signs of appendicitis. After talking with the doctor on our team, we decided we had to get him back to San Borja and to medical care immediately. We moved quickly - packing as soon as we knew what was going on and leaving in the early morning once it was safe to travel on the river. It turns out he doesn't have appendicitis which is great news.

Phase 2, take 2

Here we go again! We were scheduled to head back to the field in late-January but were delayed more than a month due to devastating flooding in the Bolivian Amazon region. After a prolonged stay in San Borja, we are finally heading out – this time to Anachere (the community of 16 families located two days upriver). Before leaving, we want to provide you with an update on the flooding in Bolivia.

For a couple of days in San Borja, it looked like the river might enter the town. Work crews built a mud walls to hold the water back, but the water came pretty close for a couple of days to coming over the dikes and into the city. Here is the dike –

The river, usually around 200 meters wide, was several kilometers wide. Many people who live outside the city have lost their homes, many of their possessions, and cattle.

As we’ve shared previously, the communities were very affected by flooding with many of them underwater. Campo Bello, the close community that we work in, was completely flooded. The Tsimane Flood Relief Fund and other NGOs have responded to the crisis. During the severe time of flooding, hundreds of Tsimane' families came to San Borja to camps set up in the schools. In the schools, they were given shelter, water, and food, as well as medical care.

During a visit, we found little Rabiano, the son of the corregidor of Anachere, who had come down with his older brother to go to school in a closer community.

What has struck us is how little international coverage this flooding has received. We kind of assume that when big news items happen around the world, we’ll hear about it, but this experience has taught us that a lot of things can be happening around the world that we are not aware of and other times what is actually going on on the ground level is very different than what information is shared.

We’ve had a break in the rains for now. Water is beginning to recede and the ground is starting to dry in some places, though not all. We flew to Trinidad this week and were shocked to see the flooding from the air. The city of Trinidad is an island – surrounded by water.

The road between San Borja and Trinidad is closed. We figured it was pretty muddy, but what we saw from the plane was very surprising. In many places, the road is completely submerged in water. Yes, that line in the picture is the only road from the west to Trinidad under water:

Many of the communities outside of Trinidad are still under water and from the flight we got a sad view of the reality of the situation as many houses are half under water:

On a lighter note, after spending more than 3 weeks in Customs here, our water filter finally made it to Trinidad for us to pick up. We are looking forward to bringing it to the field.

On the flight to Trinidad operated by TAM, the military airline which is now also commercial, we had fun jump seats and we were pleased to see the plane had a spare wing. 

Because you never want to fly without a spare wing and a good wing man to hold it up.

And finally, we celebrated Asher’s birthday a little early this year with a great steak dinner followed by an exciting win over NC State.

Thank you again for your concern and sending your thoughts to the people here. Family and friends have responded with an outpouring of love and compassion.  We can’t wait to get back to Anachere! We don’t know what to expect there – we’ve heard very little from the communities far upriver, but we are hopeful that they have not been affected as much by flooding since they are higher. We’re taking aid packages to 2 communities (46 families total in Santa Maria and Anachere), where we’ll give out a package of plates, spoons, soap, rice, and canned fish to each family with donations we’ve received.

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: