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

Procrastination from Midterms

Now for the rest of our Panama trip:

We visited the Finca Educativa chocolate factory in the BriBri territory.  ACOMUITA is this organization for indigenous women, and they run the chocolate factory and much of the farm.  Women are very empowered in the BriBri community, and they do a lot of the management and organization.  It's even a matrilineal society - the people are grouped in clans, and the clan depends on the mother's heritage.

The chocolate was absolutely delicious.  Here I am grinding the beans into a chocolately paste to which we later added brown sugar to form a divine creation.  It apparently has more caffeine than coffee, but it gives you a steady supply of energy so you don't crash. 

On a related note, I haven't had coffee for a week (only a steady supply of any kind of chocolate) - how did that happen?  To my horror, waking up at 6 am is now second nature.

The next day we visited Cachabri, where we learned a lot about the spirituality of the BriBri.  They're very in touch with their traditional religion, and the Catholic influence hasn't permeated their culture the way it has in Boruca.  We entered this conical house, which has a very spiritual meaning for them.  It's where the Adwa (traditional healer) communicates with Sibú, their creator god, to diagnose and treat a patient.  The whole structure is heavy with spirituality - each ring symbolizes a level in which the spirits live.  In the conical house they performed a dance and a drum routine for us. 

This indigenous group was really the most in touch with their traditional religion out of all the groups we've visited, and it was fascinating to see how their spirituality was intertwined with their medicine.  We took a walk around the medicinal garden to see a bunch of treatments that they used.

After a delicious lunch served to us in a banana leaf, we headed on the bus to La Selva, where we met up with our stuff that we'd sent over the week before.

La Selva is a muggy, buggy pocket of rainforest.  HOWEVER, there are some great animals here.  Most of them are thusfar unseen, because studying for midterms isn't very conducive to exploring the rainforest, but I have heard some howler monkeys and LOTS of birds, and seen toucans and LOTS of peccaries every day on my way to the classroom. 

There are also a lot of elderly birdwatchers, which are a species of their own.

All in all, studying for midterms isn't quite so bad when it's summertime weather and the rainforest creaters are chattering all around you.  It's no President's lawn, but it'll do.

Spring break is just around the corner (the day after tomorrow!  Unfortunately counting down to it also means counting down to midterms).  Ryan is coming to visit, which is really going to help put this trip in perspective. 
By that I mean, without personal contact from the part of the world I left behind and without SEASONS (ok, the seasons here are dry/rainy, but the variation in sunsets is about 15 minutes throughout the whole year), it feels very surreal to think how much time has passed.

Border Crossing and Carnaval

This past week has been a blur of one new passport stamp, a 4-hour border crossing, two indigenous territories, countless boat rides down the river, and five nights in different places.

First, we left Las Cruces and headed to the border.  This was a loonnng wait, and really brought into focus the difference between the US and developing countries.  After hours of waiting in a congested line, smelling bus fumes and urine from a steaming puddle in the ground, we doubled back, had some men poke our bags for a couple seconds, and headed across the border with no proof that we had our bags searched and seemingly nothing stopping us from having walked across the street four hours ago.  The way back into Costa Rica took fifteen minutes.

Here was the sign taunting us as we sat in line

The first night, we had lunch, lost yet another hour to the time difference, had dinner, sterilized some water, and pretty much called it a night.  We woke up the next day to head to Wekso, a territory of the Naso people.  The only way to get to this territory is by riding in a motorized canoe for an hour upstream.  This was definitely one of those days when I looked around and it hit me how much I was not in Boston anymore.

Panama, the cheaper and warmer cousin of Costa Rica, is so beautiful!  I will never ever get tired of looking at the various shades of blue-green in the mountains.  The boat rides were so fun - I was waiting for the water flume drop to come.  Before we reached our destination sometimes we would pick up a couple kids waiting for a ride to school, or people trying to get to the other side of the river.  The whole community is centered on this boat transportation.  In their native language, the Naso call the river their grandmother.

When we arrived at the territory, we got the spiel about how this Avatar-esque scenario is going on, and a hydroelectric dam is being built on the river.  It's going to disturb their river transportation, as well as the flora and fauna that rely on the river for their ecosystem needs.  It's tough, because after hearing the praises of hydroelectricity sung for so long, now it's the villain here.  So even after eschewing fossil fuels there's still valuable livelihoods and ecosystems being destroyed.  The Naso people are definitely very active in speaking out against this, but the government still hasn't acknowledged their land as an indigenous territory, so its a losing battle. 

We stayed under mosquito nets for the first time in the Pana-Jungla camp.  This was basically a camp for elite Panamanian jungle soldiers, until the military was disbanded.  However, Panama didn't completely let go like Costa Rica and still has the "military police" which is basically the military with less funding.


We had electricity from a generator every night, but showers were in the ever-helpful river.

Tamales for lunch!  We didn't make them this time but we had nice portable ones wrapped in banana leaves to bring on our hike to the neighboring Naso community of Sey Kiem.  We of course took boats over there.

At Sey Kiem, we learned a whole lot about medicinal plants.  We've been spotting plants on our nature hikes a lot and talking about what they are used for, but these garden walks were all about the uses for headaches, fever, diarrhea, and even soap.

Afterwards, we got to watch some traditional dances, and partake in one.

We even got facepaint with another plant that produces orange dyes.  Clearly this day is brought to you by plants.

In case you were worried, we are not done with boat rides.  It was a hop, skip, and a short bus ride the next day to our water taxi to Bocas del Toro, which skimmed across the water.

 Our first night was spent listening to the constant beat of the island, checking out the Bocas nightlife, and watching masquerading demons in the streets (more on that below).  There was no attempt to disguise our trip as anything but having fun - no cultural activities, just the most free time we've had all semester.

The next morning, finally, we got to the clear waters of the Caribbean that I have been waiting for.  Sadly, there were no hermit crabs to be found on the beach (I am still on the look out for these huge crab vacancy chains!), but there were some wonderful echinoderms.  Starfish beach lived up to its name -- the waters were full of giant, majestic sea stars.

Here's a view from our walk to Starfish beach.  It was cloudy in the morning but miraculously it turned into a gorgeous day

Carnaval itself was milder than I expected, but still exciting.  I feel like New Orleans would be more crazy (the way our professors were hyping it up it sounded like we wouldn't make it back alive here) but the week long celebration here has such a fun, chill atmosphere, and a whole lot of wild costumes.  During the day, the mojaderas would spray water to the crowd, and everyone was walking around soaked.

The streets were rife with reggae music and dancing demons.  These aren't the same kind of diablitos that we saw in Boruca: these are giant costumes of demons waving around whips and slapping people in the crowd who provoke them.  It must be some kind of show of bravado (or too many drinks) to start yelling at them, because the whips look like they HURT, but yes, some people were actually dancing with the devils.

For the rest of day we looked around the shops, found a used bookstore with Harry Potter in four different languages, and soaked in the constant dancing and music.  I also got a compliment on my dress (above) from a Rasta man - not bad for finding it in the used clothes pile at Jumbo Drop.

Tomorrow I'll post about our trip to the BriBri territory and the chocolate factory!  Right now we're in La Selva, the research station in the middle of the rainforest, and we've gone from almost a mile above sea level to 60 meters.  It's damp and humid, but full of animals that we may or may not get to see because we have to study for midterms on Saturday and submit a research proposal.  I did hear howler monkeys lurking around this morning, though.

Rasta luego!

Anya

Panamania

Another night, another time to pack and say goodbye to Las Cruces.

Our days here have been packed with lectures.  We finished up malaria and today we talked about leishmania, yet another disease caused by a pesky protozoan.  The hypochondria and paranoia of many diseases that we didn't know existed two months ago is beginning to set in.

Tomorrow we leave for Panama!  To give you a preview of what's ahead:
We are going to visit the Naso indigenous group, talk about border health, and work on our research proposals.  Then we're going to head to BOCAS DEL TORO, this beautiful beach area that I've heard people raving about.  We do have our day off when we're in Bocas, and we also will be around for Carnaval, this huge celebration for 40 days before Holy Week -- the equivalent of Mardi Gras, but for three days.

Assuming we survive, we'll go to the BriBri territory and the Chocolate Factory, and then to La Selva, the rainforest biological station in the lowlands.  Humidity and mosquitos await...but also pecaries, monkeys, and biodiversity everywhere!

I've got to go pack now -- you'll hear from me in a week from the jungle!!

Anya