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