Ahhh, back in Las Cruces. How ironic that I have more reliable Internet access and more warm water in the middle of a rural, isolated biological station in the middle of a botanical garden in the mountains than in the middle of San Pedro. We have had a power outage (it just wouldn't be college without a power outage every year....Vanji, Kristen and I missed the Tufts Parent's Weekend blackout experience so it's only fitting that the lack of power follows us to the jungle).
Our Spanish professors, who are staying in town while they come to Las Cruces and teach us, enlightened us to the power outage: while they were eating dinner at a restaurante, a telephone pole right outside fell into the street, crushing an empty car, cutting the power, and causing all of San Vito (all twenty-seven people) to gather around.
First of all, here's a picture of the sloth, or perezoso, that we saw at Rio Celeste last weekend! It's just another moss-looking blob in the trees, but you can see its head poking out into the sunlight!
It's great to be back, together with everyone again, especially now that we're upstairs in the hostel-style building, so we have a whole common area to ourselves. And literally, it is to ourselves: instead of sharing the building with another huge group of researchers, we are actually the only ones here! It's nice and tranquil, especially on the top floor. The only exception is the raucous birds that get all worked up at each other around 5:50 in the morning. It was forgivable yesterday though, because outside of our bedroom window we saw a toucan!!
And it has been very tranquil the past few days, because we've all had so many homework assignments and projects. I finally finished my Plantz project and presentation on the Heliconia and Musa (banana) families. Where was the banana costume when I needed it?
We watched a movie: The White Masai, the other night. It's based on a real story about a woman who goes to vacation in Kenya and marries a tribal warrior there on a whim, but winds up leaving the terrible situation she ended up in because she ignored basically every custom they had. Basically the ethnobiology lesson for this semester: don't be culturally insensitive.
We're starting to delve into some great and gross lectures on diseases, my kind of territory. Diarrhea and Charga's disease this week, leishmania next week.
Our Spanish classes have started up here: they're on medical Spanish, so right now we're back to lots of vocabulary for body parts, ailments, and drugs. Other than that we've learned how to properly collect, press, and preserve plants for an herbarium, had lots of lectures about conducting research/making observations/conducting surveys/not being culturally insensitive.
We've also got our final research project topics. Mine is going to be examining soil minerals and other goodies to see if there's any correlation with gastritis in the surrounding communities. We get to use some GPS/mapping software too, should be fun.
I also have my journal club coming up next week, an assignment where we choose a topic to stimulate and lead discussion on for an hour. Dad, you will be interested to hear that I chose water fluoridation and the surrounding controversies. I don't know the details of the Costa Rican water fluoridation system, but I will keep you posted, as I'm sure all you blog readers are waiting on the edge of your seats.
Even with our busy schedules, there's still time for birthday celebrations. Meghan turned 21 today and we had two cakes to celebrate! (the professors bought a cake not knowing that some of us had gone into town earlier and picked one up). Cake here is not torta or pastel, but queque (sounds like kay-kay) -- cute.
Hasta luego!
Anya
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