Last days

I'm home now!!  It's great to be back home, although I'm missing everyone and it feels like I just woke up from a four month long dream.  Here's an entry that I was writing before I left:

For our last weekend, we went on a “surprise” trip to this beach on the Osa Peninsula.  At least I think that’s where it is – part of the trip being a surprise is that they didn’t even tell us how long the bus ride really was.

The beach, Playa Tortuga, is so beautiful here that I finally realize why all of the Ticos said that Jaco was such an “ugly” beach.  Having caves to run into, crashing waves, and a secluded shore right by some majestic mountains makes palm trees in front of buildings pale in comparison.

 The beach was wonderful, and if it weren’t for the scorching tropical sun we could probably have stayed in the waves all day.  Although afer sitting around at this resort all day, I was getting a little stir-crazy.  To ease my restlessness, and to keep the Spanish muscles working, I now possess a copy of the fourth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter y el Cáliz del Fuego.

  

Our last night was a great note to end on.  We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, Antojitos.  It was Costa Rican Mexican food though, so of course it wasn’t spicy.  There WAS guacamole, however, as well as some veggie kebabs, tortillas, beans, salsa, and potatoes. We went around and everyone said their favorite moment of the trip, or anything that stood out in their mind, and the nostalgia set in.

I chose this program because I wanted something that was completely different from a typical university experience, but I didn’t expect that it was my interactions with the other students that would also be so different from a typical university experience.  But after only knowing each other for three and a half months, its amazing how much we know about each other.  Its a friendship that’s definitely reminiscent of my wilderness orientation trip.  Although about twenty times as long as the wilderness trip, this program also lets you see former strangers in any situation, not just dressed up to go out on Friday night: we've been sweating and hiking up a steep, muddy mountain all day; debating each other during our journal club talks; running around in caves on the beach; painting masks; interviewing indigenous people about their healthcare; dancing in a gringo circle while all the Ticos stare at us; and just kicking it during our long bus rides.  I’ve definitely learned a lot more about these people a lot quicker than I would have otherwise, and I’m so glad that I was able to form very close friendships with people I may never have though.

 

Last Assignment!

We finished up our research with a poster presentation to the Las Cruces community.  Other groups had studied medicinal plants or maternal health care in the indigenous territory (the Ngobe), so the traditional healers and the midwives were invited to come to our presentation, which was great. 

Apparently the Ngobe healers took a tour around the botannical garden afterwards, and were very interested in getting some of the plants for their gardens back at La Casona.  Since relations regarding medicinal plants are a little sensitive with the indigenous communities, since they've had their secrets taken without much regard for intellectual property rights in the past, it was nice to know that we had a positive relationship with the community.

My group didn't have much interaction with people, but we did see lots of interest when we collected water samples from houses.  The people we talked to were genuinely interested in the outcomes of our projects, and they were always very friendly and welcoming.

Yesterday we made some Costa Rican moonshine, i.e. chicha.  This is a take on the fermented corn beverage that the Ngobe and other indigenous groups make.  Ours consisted of pineapple, ginger, maize, cloves, and lots of raw brown sugar.  There's no distilling involved, just fermentation.  It's going to be quite the brave tasting adventure in a few days.

 Doesn't it look delicious?

Today some of us took a quick hike around the jungle -- flashback to our first weekend here.  This time, we went to a little waterfall!  The hike was very necessary to shake off the cabin fever that's the result of two and a half weeks in the same place.  Since when has that happened in this program?  We also haven't got our fair share of nature lately, aside from crawling around in pastures and digging up soil from forests and coffee farms.

Now we just have our papers to hand in tonight, and then we have a surprise trip this weekend!  Scheduled fun time strikes again.

In exactly four days, I will be ready to land in Miami International Airport and then to Logan.  I am definitely ready to come home, see my friends and family, and celebrate United States festivities again (July 4th will make up for missing Marathon Monday), but it's going to be hard to say goodbye to the great people here.  For a bunch of science students who signed up to experience the same schedule and classes day after day, our group is a lot more diverse than I would've expected.  This semester gave me so much insight into medicine through the lens of humanity and anthropology, instead of the biological perspective that I'm used to. As well as more information than I ever dreamed about regarding tropical plants and diseases.

Hasta luego!
Anya

Things I will miss from Costa Rica when I am back in beautiful New England:

1. Sunshine starting at 6 am (even though it sets at 6 pm ERRDAY)

2. Gallo pinto.  Rice and beans, take it or leave it, but warm seasoned gallo pinto with tabasco sauce and sour cream first thing in the morning -- nothing like the GP.

3. Fruit.  Cheap, diverse, and EVERYWHERE.  We've tried fruits this semester that I had no idea existed before: guayaba, guanabana, cas, and maracuya (passionfruit; I'd heard about it before but never tasted it).  The cacao plant even has this delicious fleshy watermelon-tasting fruit enveloping its cacao beans!

4. Seeing people from this program everywhere, all the time.  Basically, always having someone to go to breakfast with.

5. The hospitality and laid back Tico attitude

6. The stunningly gorgeous green misty mountains and jaw-dropping scenery everywhere

7. Watching Jurassic Park while living in Jurassic Park (also noticing that the beach-bedecked, palm-tree filled San Jose from the film is NOT the smoggy, mountainous, zinc-roof covered San Jose)

8. Walking through forests of bananas and heliconias to breakfast

9. Falling asleep to the sounds of cicadas and waking up to the sounds of parrots and toucans

Easter (Pascua) in San Vito

We had a lovely Easter brunch, consisting of a cheesy zucchini casserole, some yucca (a starchier version of potatoes), salad, and ribs for the omnivores among us.  For dessert: trifle!  It turns out that pudding is pretty difficult to obtain in Costa Rica, so it was more like a flan-fruit hybrid decked with nilla wafers.

We had some lovely centerpieces, but they were lacking the necessary peeps and other caramel or cream-filled candy.  While Semana Santa is a bigger deal than Christmas, Easter doesn't hold the weight of the holiday here in Central America -- it's more focused on Good Friday.  The suffering, the repenting for sins, and not so much the chocolate candy and pagan symbols of spring.

Here we are, enjoying our Easter lunch!

We did some egg-painting afterwards.  Some of us got a bit more creative than others.  Most of the eggs had slight cracks, and some even had craters....so when life gives you cracked eggs, paint them into a traumatic brain injury victim:

Then of course, the egg hunt.  This was a whole new saga.  I actually ended up winning, but it came at a price.  I found four eggs, and a giant palm found me!  A branch cracked and fell on me -- but don't worry, it didn't hurt that much and there is no lasting damage, except for my dignity of being attacked by a palm branch.  This garden is becoming more and more like Jumanji as the days go by.

Easter did make me miss home, but I'm glad that people organized a little celebration here -- usually the OTS program doesn't do anything, so it was a nice touch.

Otherwise, it's been data analysis and poster-making time here.  We're giving our poster presentations tomorrow to a group of people, most of them from San Vito.  This will be interesting, as our posters are written in English (except for a Spanish abstract we hand out), so it will be a great exercise in getting our points across.  Nothing simplifies something more than trying to say it in a different language.

Hasta luego!
Anya

Soil and Semana Santa

Data collecting continues.  We've now moved on to soil samples, obtained from coffee farms, cow pastures, and forests, and we HAVE found some nitrates in -- surprise! -- the soil of coffee farms.  Here's Tavid having fun sifting soil samples before they're mixed with calcium sulfate, shaken, filtered, mixed with a cadmium compound, and shoved in our nitrate detect-o-matic.

Yesterday, Good Friday, most of us headed to San Vito in the morning, where they had a procession of the Stations of the Cross.  And no, I didn't give up anything for Lent, but I can always pull out not watching TV or not sleeping in past 7 am or whatnot for 15 weeks.  Aside from the procession, everything was completely closed down in town.  It is a very sober holdiay -- literally, because the only times that alcohol is not sold is the day of, before, and during elections, and Semana Santa.

It was a small procession (although the turnout was probably all of San Vito).  While we only made it through the first seven stations (it was a lot of slow walking and somber singing), it was cool to think that nearly every town in Costa Rica, and likely in Latin America, was doing a similar thing.

I still prefer Easter baskets.

Finally, a giant moth to end this post!

 Hasta luego!
Anya

Things I am going to do when I am back in beautiful New England:

1. Eat Indian food

2. Enjoy driving on paved roads with cars that obey lane divisions

3. Watch TV! I'm not a big TV person so I never thought I'd say this.  It'll really be more like watching computer -- we aren't able to stream video here and I need to catch up on The Office, and I could go for some Always Sunny/Curb Your Enthusiasm.

4. Be jaw-droppingly shocked at my multiple drawers and closets of clothes after living in the same 8 shirts, 3 shorts, and 4 pants for the past 4 months

5. Climb a mountain and enjoy the cool air at the summit

6. Cook!

7. Turn off my watch alarm from its three-month-long position at 6:40 am

8. Go for a looonnng run and realize how little the occasional car beeps bother me when compared to hisses, kissing sounds, and other piropos.

9. Watch my 21-year old friends go to bars without me for another month :(

10. Try to remember to put toilet paper in the toilet and not in the wastepaper basket next to it

11. Do laundry with good smelling dry sheets

12. Obtain dark chocolate and rich desserts.  No one can do gooey, sugary, artery-clogging sweetness like the United States.

13. Listen to the radio and discover if there really is any music that's emerged since January besides Rebecca Black's "Friday" or parodies of it

14. Probably still wear my field pants a couple times a week

Nitrate-Collecting

Phew.  It's been a long week since I last updated.

Our research project got off to a slow start -- although it's nice to have finals first to get studying and memorizing over with, the timing of our project coincides with our two professors (my project mentors) going to a conference at Duke, as well as Semana Santa, when we can't go out to talk to or interview people during the holiday.  Also, our nitrate testing kits were sitting at customs until Monday, so it was a whole lot of sitting around, making maps on ArchGIS (by which I mean, watching Steven, our resident bioinformatics major, make maps on ArchGIS).

This was definitely frustrating, and it felt like a lot of factors were out of our control, but THANK GOD, we finally got out to the field on Tuesday and even on our low-budget projects we get to do some SCIENCE, i.e. mixing cadmium to react with any nitrates in the water samples and identify the nitrate level.

Basically, our project is to look at the incidence of gastric cancer in the Coto Brus county, in the Puntarenas of Costa Rica.  Costa Rica, as I've mentioned before, has the world's highest gastric cancer incidence, along with Japan.  However, because Japan has mandatory endoscopies, they are better able to catch and treat these problems early, leaving Costa Rica with the highest gastric cancer mortality.

We're looking at different areas of Coto Brus and comparing nitrate levels in the drinking water in high gastric cancer areas to those in low gastric cancer areas.  The best way we've found to do this is to go up to people's doors and ask them for a water sample.  They've all been really happy to give them to us, and it's nice to interact with the locals.  So far, we've found....no difference between the areas.  But now we're going to explore some coffee farms and test the soil there. 

Once we got over the initial frustration of not being able to start data collection, it's been fun!  We've pretty much seen nearly every corner of Coto Brus, including winding, red dirt roads with sharp cliffs on either sides, or thin bridges that creak as the safari drives over them.  There have been beautiful views of gorgeous green mountains everywhere, but also the constant tests of the safari's abilities and confirmation of my faith in our driver Christian's ability to perform a death-defying three-point turn.

Some of these towns are REALLY out of the way.  And for many of them, we would drive, ask for directions, drive some more down hilly dirt roads, and then find a house, or maybe even a pulperia (small store).  We'd ask if we were in the right town, and where we could find the center of town.  Usually, our response would be, "This is the center!"

On our way home, we were graced with the presence of many beautiful toucans.  They were too quick for me to get my camera, but they were gorgeous!

Hasta luego!
Anya

Last finals until....senior year!

Today at approximately 2:41 PM, Mountain Standard Time, I finished my last final!  The causes, control, clinical manifestations, and complications of 36 tropical diseases was a lot to be carrying around in my brain.

Our research project is coming up hard and fast, though.  Tomorrow we head to the Area de Salud to check out the incidence reports of gastritis, and then we're spending all day grouping gastritis data by town and EBAIS.

In the meantime, its time to finish the Stieg Larsson triology!

Medicinal Plants and Horseback Riding

Today is our last day in Luna Nueva -- we're leaving for San Jose for a night, and then the trek back to Las Cruces on Monday morning.   It's our final destination and we're there for a full three weeks; maybe this time I'll actually unpack!

Friday was entirely devoted to our mini-projects.  In the course of one day, we collected data on 186 different plants, ran statistical analyses on them, and had an almost-finished paper and a powerpoint presentation ready.  My hamstrings are still suffering from the three hours of squatting to measure plant base diameters.  The whole thing certainly gave new meaning to the word "deadline," and a new appreciation to semester-long projects.

It was very cool to see a project from the very beginning, when we were first given our assignments, to the end of the day, when we had a whole conclusion drawn out from our findings.  Oh, and if you were on the edge of your seats, Quassia amara grows most efficiently in partially obscured light.

While we polished up our presentations and papers on Saturday afternoon, we spent the morning visiting the Maleku indigenous tribe.  This is the smallest indigenous group, with only about 600 people.  They talked to us about their culture, which -- not to belittle their problems -- was a lot like what we've heard before: the government not really acknowledging their land and slowly pushing them to recede.  They do still teach their language in their schools though, and seem to still have a strong connection to their native spirituality.

After browsing their handcrafts, the Maleku man we talked to (I'm terrible at remembering names) took us outside, where we shot some bow and arrows!  I doubt that they use these bow and arrows anymore - it was pretty touristy - but it was fun, and with my mediocre accomplishment as the 5th best arrow-shooter I got one of the prizes they had for us, a Maleku balsa mask.  I guess those years of archery lessons came in handy.

On Sunday, we relaxed in typical OTS style: by waking up even earlier!  Vanji, Jane, Kayla and I went horseback riding, which was great.

We took a shuttle to a stable near Arenal, and took a trail ride around the volcano.  It was beautiful weather, and a very idyllic landscape of green pastures and giant blue mountains all around us.  And we even all came back in one piece, despite the lack of helmets provided.

Tomorrow we're going to Las Cruces to study for final exams and prepare for our final research project.

Hasta luego!
Anya

Luna Nueva

Goodbye, humid, sticky lowlands.  We’re spending the next couple of days in Luna Nueva, a lodge near La Fortuna (toward the northwestern side of Costa Rica).  We even passed the volcano Arenal on the bus ride, but even if I had been conscious, it was still too cloudy of a day to distinguish the floating mist from volcano puffs.

It’s beautiful over here.  This place is a vegan’s paradise.  Everything is organic, and even the pool at the resort doesn’t use chlorine.  It uses ozone, which weirded me out at first (a dangerous air pollutant?) but apparently it oxidizes and removes chemicals and leaves oxygen behind.  All of the milk and cheese comes from the cattle nearby, like the water buffalo that we saw hanging out by the medicinal plants garden.  

Speaking of the garden, we went on a walk around it for about two and a half hours yesterday.  It has a huge variety of plants, from plants with sticky astringent sap that we’ve seen the indigenous people using in Panama to the miracle berry, which makes everything you eat taste sweet.  Unfortunately these plants weren’t fruiting (although in Costa Rica, everything tastes sweet as it is!), but we did try the plant used in traditional toothache remedies: chewing the leaves gives your tongue and gums a strong but pleasant numbing, buzzing sensation.

While we’re here, we’re working on a research project.  My group is studying a plant, Quassia amara, that has antiulcerogenic properties, and is used for a variety of stomach ailments and even for an antimalarial treatment.  Since some of its medicinal compounds have higher concentrations in the sun, we’re studying the growth of the plant in different exposures of sunlight.

 Out in the field collecting some Quassia amara

We watched the Michael Moore movie Sicko last night, as we prepare to head back to the country of greedy insurance companies and expensive copays in three weeks.   Sensationalist moviemaking and political agendas aside, it’s horrifying and outrageous how securely the insurance companies have their hands around our throats.  There’s actually a woman here in Luna Nueva who comes to Costa Rica from the United States to have her hospital appointments!  

We're visiting our last indigenous territory, the Maleku, tomorrow.  Nostalgia!

Hasta luego,

Anya

Pineapple Problems

For the past couple days we've been surviving the heat in an air-conditioned classroom, having a whole lot of class to prepare us for our Luna Nueva trip on Thursday (water buffalo await!). 

Since my last post, a bunch of us went on a night hike with Hector and an entomologist researching here.  There weren't many mammals (those guys were too busy hanging out on the bridge earlier in the day), but we saw a whole bunch of wandering spiders, glow-in-the-dark scorpions, and a boa constrictor!  Apparently ALL scorpions have the rave gene, and can glow in the dark (under a black light).

A little later on, during the day, we found a blue jeans poison dart frog too!

On Monday we visited an NGO, an environmentally friendly farm that grows fruit, mostly maracuya, or passionfruit.  The woman who greeted us showed us a documentary about the huge problem with the pineapple plantation in Costa Rica.   We even walked around a section of the pineapple plantation and saw how they egregiously flouted some of the regulations: pineapple can't be planted at a slope greater than 8-12 degrees because its irrigation erodes the land, but some pineapples were planted on slopes of 45 degrees or greater.  There is supposed to be a buffer zone of 50 meters of forest around every river, but we saw only about 10 meters of forest around a river that is probably harboring some delicious pesticides.

This was in direct contrast to the banana plantation that we visited last week.  Although we saw the cheery touristy side of the banana plantation and we never heard the NGO's side of things, there were still fungicides being sprayed near the worker's area and it was clear that the conditions were less than ideal.  That being said, the pineapple plantation wasn't open for people to come poke around like the banana plantation was, and the only reason why we were able to see the blatant disregard for the regulations on the pineapple farm was because it was near a public water source (even more alarming with the heavy pesticide use!) and therefore a section was public property.

The clandestine, sweep-it-under-the-rug nature reminded me a whole lot about the meat industry and the problems with factory farming in the States.  Incidentally, Costa Rica doesn't have the same kind of meat industry -- it's mostly local farms -- so the cattle here are more damaged by the bloodsucking flies that come every pineapple season with the burning and harvesting of the fruit.  I'm definitely going to be a lot more conscious about where my pineapple is coming from back in the United States.

As a natural sequitor to our pineapple tour, the man showing us around asked some of us if we wanted to ride a horse!  When in Rome....

We've been having our last set of lectures -- we finish with our classes tomorrow, as incredible as that is to believe.

Plant hunts

The wildlife continues to be amazing here.  On the bridge over a gaping river that we cross to get to our classroom, there are usually iguanas as well as SLOTHS.  We've seen many two-toed sloths hanging out (I haven't had my camera on me, unfortunately), and even some sloths eating!  My friends have even seen a kinkajou

We went on a medicinal plant treasure hunt the other day.  To prepare for our fungicides lab, in which we obtain plant extracts to test anti-fungal properties, we needed to collect some specimens.  In order to practice our GPS skillz, our ethnobiology professor Hector chose some plants and gave us the GPS points to find them for a geocaching romp in the rainforest.

Sometimes we had to get a little creative to actually get a specimen....

We've been doing some research on agrotoxicology as well, which applies directly to the plantations that we've been visiting (we've been to a banana plantation, and we're going to the Dole pineapple plantation on Monday).

Somehow along the way, it has inexplicably turned into April.   Once this week of lectures and field trips is over, we're going to Luna Nueva, where we'll visit a giant medicinal plant garden, and then visit the Maleku indigenous people.  Then it's final exams and research project time!!

Hasta luego,
Anya

Dengue day

Banana facts time.

1. Bananas were originally planted in Costa Rica to feed the railroad workers.  It was convenient to plant them by the side and have fruit ready along the railroad (although questionably legal), so that's how the industry began.  Boston has a role to play in this, too: this business tycoon from Boston brought bananas from Jamaica to Boston, where he formed the United Fruit Company.  This started a huge monopoly and lead to the UFC placing and removing Latin American presidents where they saw fit -- it's now the Chiquita company!  I had no idea.

2. There's no fertilization in bananas - they are polyploid and produce immature seeds (nonfunctioning ovaries).  The rhizome at the bottom of the plant is replicated in vitro and up to 1,000 genetically identical plants can be produced from one rhizome.  This obviously leaves the plants vulnerable to wipe-out from a pest, but its a major pump up of productivity.

 3. Sweden has the highest per-capita consumption of bananas!

As promised, here are some pictures from the banana plantation.  Here are our lovely volunteers demonstrating how the bananas are harvested with a shoulder bag and a machete:

And here is the utmost extent of my photography skills, capturing one of the workers chopping down the banana stalk (they're not trees; they're giant herbaceous sheaths).

Wednesday was Dengue Day.  We headed to the Area de Salud (an EBAIS outpost in more rural areas), and met up with Dr. Alvarez, who spoke to us about how Sarapiqui, where La Selva is located, is a dengue hotspot.  Dengue, as many of you world travelers probably know, is a hemorrhagic fever disease with no vaccine, and the only treatment is treatment of the symptoms.

With this risk, there's lots of education campaigns in the community.  We got into groups with flyers and surveys to conduct some epidemiological surveillance.

It was a great opportunity!  At first I was worried that we would be too invasive, but the Tico attitude toward strangers knocking on your door is very different.  While in the United States, where if you're a stranger who isn't a cute girl selling cookies, you're out, in Costa Rica Ticos are very welcoming and trusting of government employees.  People were very nice and willing to talk to us -- this one guy tried to distract us from asking about dengue so he could show us around his backyard, with yucca and banana plants.

We took the mosquito larvae (or alleged mosquito larvae) to the lab and examined the specimens.  My group found two midge larvae and a C. culex larvae, but not any A. aedes, which carry dengue.  Other groups did though.  At any rate, it's cool to look at these little critters up close and personal.

Speaking Spanish requires a lot more concentration coming from a place of authority (in our case, Caja, their social security establishment), because you don't want to sound like an ignorant or unintelligent person when you are requesting important information or establishing yourself as working with an authority they respect.  It was good to practice Spanish again!

It was a tiring day, but I still devoted some solid hours to flying through Girl Who Played with Fire.  It's better than the first one.  Stylistically, not my favorite (good thing the plot is so gripping), but I attribute some of that to possibly getting lost in translation.

Some comforts that I have been missing recently include:
Laundry detergent that actually works (I'm all for saving the planet but this eco-friendly detergent plain and simple doesn't make my clothes smell good), Indian food and sleeping in on weekends.  The food here is good though (SO MANY MANGOES FOR LUNCH), and we've surprisingly had enough downtime for running AND reading, in between copious lectures about which diseases we will now start to include in our collective hypochondria.

Hasta luego!
Anya

La Selva

La Selva, round 2 is quite the experience.   Last night I shared a bed with cicadas, some ants, and the random moth now and then.  Trying to go to bed with all of this insect fauna in and around my bed is an adventure in itself.

Running through the rainforest is a new venture as well.  Not only are the peccaries everywhere, but on a trail in the jungle, I saw some butterflies as big as my hand!  Running itself is not quite such a marvelous joy in this weather -- even the temporary relief from the cold shower is forgotten ten sweat-soaked minutes later.  It is very beautiful here, but I miss seeing the mountains everywhere.  I don't think I can ever cease being awed at the stunning misty mountain views around Las Cruces.

We arrived to this humid locale on Saturday, after doing an exercise in examining spiritual remedies in Mercado Central.  When we first got the assignment, I was pretty skeptical about finding these remedies to bring luck, love, and money, among many other things.  But it turns out there's a great market in spiritual candles, incense, and bath salts!  Nearly every corner of the giant market had these superstitious remedies, and apparently some of them were quite popular.  The vendors were also quite open and willing to talk to us about their products, even though we didn't buy anything (that may have to do with the fact that my group consisted entirely of blonde girls).

Saturday afternoon we arrived in La Selva, and after dinner we donned our new Costa Rica national jerseys for the inaugural game in the new stadium against China.  It was pretty exciting for the first half -- Costa Rica scored the first goal, and they were up 2-0 -- but then China retaliated and the game ended up in an anticlimatic tie.  I think I was in bed by 10:30, and that seemed like a late night!  We had gone out on Friday as our last night in San Jose, and a lot of the Tropical Biology group (of the TWENTY EIGHT OF THEM) were out in the same place.  There were lots of dancing (and of course the relentless reggaeton....); it was a good night to end on.

On Monday we visited the Dole banana plantation.  We had an enthusiastic guide who gave us a little too much free reign of his machete.  We learned a lot more about the banana plant history on top of our information from the National Museum and the Musaceae family presentation by yours truly.  Anyway, bananas have a long history in Costa Rica that have origins in the railroad, and I will provide more information tomorrow once I get my field notebook and pictures uploaded.

Today (I can't believe it's only Tuesday!) we went over some statistics and had a bunch of lectures on various diseases and epidemiology, but we also went for a nature hike around the myriad trails in La Selva.  I haven't seen any snakes yet, but we did see a lot of big birds, peccaries (you can smell them before you see them) and bullet ants.

Tomorrow, after learning about dengue fever, we're going to a dengue hotspot in a nearby town to work with the local EBAIS and Area de Salud and take a community survey about dengue awareness and prevention.  We're even going to bring any larvae we find back to the lab to see if they're A. aegyptus species, the carriers of dengue.  Bring me to the microscopes!!

Hasta luego!
Anya

Semana en San Pedro

I’m about to fly through a week’s worth of field trips.  We’ve been seeing a lot of the public health services in San José: hospitals and aqueducts and universities, oh my!

First off was INCIENSA, or Instituto Nacional Costarricense de Investigaciones y Enseñanza en Nutricion y Salud.  This is the national epidemiology center.  There, we saw the different monitoring centers, one for bacteriology, one for leptospirosis, one for tuberculosis, and one for virology.  The presence of a lot of technology, including computers in almost every room, really stood out from the EBAIS that we’ve seen so far, which don’t even have medical records.

 

On Tuesday we headed to University of Costa Rica (UCR) to hear a lecture about soil helminthes.  Moral of the story: they’re everywhere!  And a tapeworm will not make you lose weight.  This semester is brought to you by the incubation period 8-12 weeks, and the word ‘heptosplenamegaly.’ 

Then Wednesday we went to Hospital Mexico, a huge and very well organized general hospital in San José.  What jumped out at me there was the fact that they told us that the average emergency room wait is 5-10 minutes!  As much as I would like to believe that Ticos have emergency response down to an art, after difficulty even finding an ambulance in all of Costa Rica, I have my reservations. 

Thursday to the water treatment plant, AyA (Acueductos y Alcantarillados).  All very interesting, and lots of information – although it makes me wish I knew more about these systems in the United States so I could fully compare them.  Meanwhile, we’ve been having a bunch of classes in the afternoon at the OTS building about lymphatic schisostomiasis, macro and micronutrition, the role of fungi in ethnobiology, ecology of food and nutrition, and (best for last) statistics.

As you may have gathered, our lectures have now taken a temporary lean away from the anthropology/indigenous studies side of things toward microbiology and pathogen studies.  I enjoyed seeing something new, and I know that studying other perspectives on health is important for a veterinary career, but I can’t say that my bio nerd brain didn’t do a little flip of elation when I looked at our biology-packed schedule for this week.

The main news of this week is that I have gone not once, but twice to the roller skating rink in San Pedro, Salón de Patines Música.  It was great!  Finally a chance to do what I do best: go around in circles wearing spandex for extended amounts of time.  Seriously though, this disco 50’s roller skating rink is apparently the place to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  There are some people who you can tell are regulars.  Synchronized skaters and even breakdancing skaters came out of the woodwork eventually!  It was great to see two guido-like guys with faux hawks and fanny packs with their arms around each others’ shoulders, swaying and doing a roller skating routine to “Billie Jean.”

Also, as an observation, Ticos definitely have a more diminutive stature.  Although Tomas tells me that for Central Americans, they’re on the taller side (he was volunteering in Guatemala this fall), it is noticeable enough: as Vanji observed, the buildings like UCR and the buses are us-sized.  It’s nice to have all of the shelves in reach!

This morning we went to INBIO, the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad.  It was the field trippiest of field trips we’ve had so far, since we went to the INBIOParque, the show-off touristy area of the research institute.  We even got admission stickers to put on amidst shouting lines of children.   

Our trip consisted of a walk around the mini-jungle (strange to think that there was this plot of rainforest right in San José), a talk about how INBIO researchers are seeking to uncover more biodiversity (aiming for the discovery of four new species every six months!), and then looked around at the animals.  Iguanas were everywhere; we also saw turtles, birds, caimens, and some farm animals at the petting zoo.  We even got to see the rare species of college-age mutant ninja turtles:

Tonightt is our last night in San Pedro.  My attitude has drastically changed about this place – I’m going to miss my host family and the convenience of the city!  Mainly, being in a city, taking the bus around, and establishing a routine really makes you feel integrated into your home-away-from-home, and with such a pack-up-and-go program, it’s a nice change to feel like we’ve established ourselves in San Pedro.  That being said, sacrificing the convenience and the comfort is a small price to pay for fresh country air, bright stars, and wildlife everywhere you look.

We’re heading to La Selva again tomorrow afternoon, where we’ll do who-knows-what.  All I know is that I will be researching the United Kingdom and its health care system for my Know Your World presentation.  I rarely am aware of what exactly is happening in this program beyond the next day – lo que sea.

Hasta pronto!

Anya

Chilling in the city

It feels so nice to be back in San José (I think I might hear hell freezing over with that sentence – we were so relieved to leave to head back to the jungle before).

While  I had a blast and a half on spring break, there were still occasions that reminded us that we are in a tiny developing country, and made us long for the convenience of a city.  I should specify: the convenience of our planned-out, tightly-scheduled, food-provided program.

First of all, mild impatience turned to heat-exacerbated frustration while Ryan and I were waiting on the bus back to San José. He needed to be back at the airport by noon, and we sat on the bus, still 90 km from the city, from 9:15 to 10:15, with no knowledge of why we had stopped.

Luckily we made it on time, but the problem turned out to be a broken-down truck blocking the small, winding road – highways would really speed up these unnecessarily long bus rides.  Then again, as our program has drilled into our heads, who knows if a highway would end up damaging the surrounding ecosystems hugging the roads.

However, another more troubling problem was the lack of emergency medical attention that was found when one of our friends, sick with dehydration and likely one of those ubiquitous intestinal parasites, went up to go to the bathroom and hit her head.  Thankfully she is now back to normal, and more thankfully she was not bleeding profusely or losing consciousness, because the ambulance service neglected to come after repeated calls, and there is no taxi service in Cahuita.  After some heroic people pulling all-nighters to no avail, she had to wait in the clinic the next morning.

Costa Rica seems to be somewhat paradoxical in these matters – having such a well-established and accessible primary care system, but a deficient emergency response system; being the first country to legalize in-vitro fertilization, and the first country to ban it; having a woman president in a machismo culture, etc.

It’s great to see my familia Tica again – the sense of familiarity is so much more valuable in a foreign country.  Returning here, despite the barbed wire and dirty streets, has an air of coming home, which is very welcome when we have been so nomadic this semester.  Plus, my mama tica makes a mean omelette – hell is apparently not only freezing over but looking like Boston in February because I am developing a taste for eggs.  I sense impending reverse culture shock upon my attempt to return to veganism.

Also, there’s another student from OTS in mi casa now!  Tomas is from the Tropical Biology program (also from Bowdoin – what up NESCAC), and talking to him about our experiences this semester – with the same sights and the same cast of characters at the biological stations with different experiences and different interpretations – has a weird sensation of existing in parallel universes with slight differences, like their Shelbyville to our Springfield.  It’s great to have another student in the house though.

I spent part of tonight talking with Carla, my mama Tica’s daughter, about a song she is teaching to her 8 year old students learning English.  Something lost in translation are the words “wiggle,” “jiggle,” “waggle,” and “joggle,” things I demonstrated for her so that she could show them to her students in a song about dancing.  Explaining this in Spanish was definitely much easier than trying to determine the difference between “jiggle” and “joggle.”

I’ll update later about our field trips we’ve been taking (to INCIENSA, the lab network of epidemiogical surveillance – that’s for you, Emily – to the UCR soil helminthes lab, and to Hospital Mexico!)

Hasta luego, or another phrase I like that more or less means “we’ll see each other later:” ¡Nos vemos!

Anya

Reunited with San Pedro

Spring break is officially over.  I spent 10 days sleeping in 8 different places, traveling to 4 different cities through a distance of 186 miles across the country, getting well acquainted with several bus terminals, and seeing a whole bunch of wildlife.

The first day, Ryan and I stayed in San Jose just long enough to have some gallo pinto and fruit, and then headed to the Terminal Caribe to take a bus to Cahuita.

Our cabin in Cahuita was smack dab in Howler territory.  We got to see some majestic little primates running around the palms outside, and also got a free alarm clock when we woke up to their soothing voices at 4:45 in the morning.  In reality, their howls sound like this horrible, gutteral roaring that sounds like it comes from some chimaerical beast, and not from some sweet looking monkey.

The white-faced capuchins were even cuter, although to add to the pickpocketing climate of Limon, my friend got robbed by a monkey!  Ryan and I didn't experience such monkey hostility aside from the howlers barking furiously during prime sleeping hours, but we did catch some great monkey moments outside of our cabin, like this guy enjoying some fruit that he may or may not have pilfered from the fruit vendors

 Another wonderful mammal we encountered was the sloth.  Sloths are pretty freakin cool.  We saw them at the Cahuita Sloth Sanctuary - a place where people rehabilitate injured sloths or sloths abandoned by their mothers.  They are actually ectothermic (not "warm-blooded"), as our tour guide was telling us.  I've never heard this before, but it makes sense - they are constantly near the sun, and can't need much energy when they sleep 15 to 18 hours per day.

The tour guide then proceeded to prove to me that yes, in fact, I had died and gone to heaven, when we took a tour of the sloth nursery, full of baby Bradypodidae!  Many of these sloths were a distinct burnt orange, henna-like color, and our guide informed us that they had mange.  Instead of using typical veterinary mange treatment, as is used for dogs but is damaging to sloths, at the Sloth Sanctuary they use achiote to kill the parasites!  I guess examples of traditional plants don't stop outside of our ethnobiology classes (achiote is that orange-colored plant with the dye that some indigenous groups paint on their faces).

Feeding time for the baby sloths!

Puerto Viejo is full of expats from the US, Germany, Switzerland, and England.  It had a lot of funky restaurants, including Bread and Chocolate, a place with lots of organic (and vegan!) ingredients and delicious whole wheat pancakes and waffles that we had for dinner with fruit, honey, and chocolate sauce.  The beach was also beautiful.  It was like standing in a reef-filled beachy bath

Although we've been warned about how dangerous the Limon province is (where Cahuita and Puerto Viejo are), I did feel safer there than in San Jose...there was no barbed wire on every building, for one thing.  However, some of my friends had some sketchy experiences, and the locals in Cahuita were definitely ready to rip off or shortchange tourists at any opportunity, so I'm glad that we didn't wear out our welcome on the Caribbean coast.

Not to mention Limon has the most cases of malaria and of lymphatic filariasis, some more diseases to become hypochondriacal about with the myriad bug bites we've collected.   I'm reluctant to post about this, because last time I mentioned that everyone was getting sick, I got feverish shortly thereafter, but I'll go ahead and push my luck.  Four people in my group so far have suffered from intestinal/diarrhoeal problems (likely from the water in Panama - we were brushing our teeth in the sink when tadpoles came out), and I feel like these next few weeks will be very telling about our effective treatment of water from Limon.

Monteverde was a breath of fresh air (literally) from the beachy humidity and the threat of getting some diarrhoel disease from the Limon water.  Everyone was so friendly and welcoming there too, and the environment is very crunchy/outdoorsy, geared towards travelers and backpackers. 

We spent our St. Patty's day appropriately, surrounded by greenery on a canopy zipline tour.

Overall, it was a phenomenal experience - who needs coffee when instead at 10 in the morning you can fall from a Tarzan swing (a rope to your harness where you literally just swing like Tarzan on a vine) and zip through the whole jungle on cables?

But it turns out that we did need coffee.  Our next stop was the Don Juan coffee plantation tour (the closest thing to a brewery tour in Monteverde), where we learned about the different layers and functions of the coffee berry, how the beans are collected, processed and dried, and how the different size and presentation of the bean determines whether it will be whole bean coffee, ground coffee, or candles and candies.

To cap it all off, we found a rainbow - although we couldn't see the pot of gold at the end.

All in all, spring break was a wonderful chance to take advantage of being a tourist, although as my mom would say, my money was burning a hole in my pocket.  As relaxing as this week was, I am really looking forward to hopping on that Turismo bus, being told where we're going and where we're staying, and getting  hot meals put in front of us three times a day.

I have spent 63 days in Costa Rica so far.  Only 42 more left!  What a crazy thought.

Hasta luego!

Anya