A Quick Update

This week hasn't been terribly exciting, but I've got some pictures and I'll give a quick update. First, Easter Sunday was a lot of fun. I woke up early and made three trifles for our group and they turned out well. I tried to whip heavy cream, but it turns out that it won't whip well when it's been stored at room temperature. So instead of making whipped cream, I made the mistake Mom always warns me about and made butter. The kitchen ladies were amused, but I couldn't believe a Dairy Princess emeritus could make that mistake.

Lunch was absolutely delicious; we had chicharones (which are basically pork ribs), an amazing zucchini casserole, yucca and lots of juice and trifle. It was a really nice Easter lunch, despite not being with my family.

 

After lunch, we decorated Easter eggs and, later, our professors hid them for us. It was amusing to try to explain the purpose of an Easter egg hunt to people who grew up in a culture that doesn't "do" egg hunts. I found... 0 eggs. But my friend Anya found 4 and a palm tree branch fell on her head. She was fine, and it was the most eventful egg hunt I've seen in a while.

Our poster presentation was Wednesday morning. We presented to the staff at the biological station, local doctors and some local indigenous groups (because some of my group did projects in the indigenous territory). It went well and I was proud of the straight lines in our poster. Here's a photo of my group- Jane, Thomas and Ashley, next to our lovely poster.

We spent Thursday and today, Friday, writing the final paper, which I'm about to submit, and packing! We're hitting the road for our surprise weekend at 7am tomorrow and I can't wait! Here's one last photo from the hike I took to our little waterfall with some friends this morning.

There's a chance my next entry will be written from Los Estados Unidos!! Pura Vida everyone!

Final Project Progress and Semana Santa

I don't have too much exciting news from the past week, but it's certainly been a busy one. Starting on Friday, the day after our finals, my partners (Tom, Jane and Ashley) and I went into the field to begin our research. We spent Friday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday bouncing along the roads of southwestern Costa Rica and walking many, many miles to interview people about risk factors for gastric cancer. By the end of those five days, we had interviewed 251 people and walked by almost 1000 houses (we were only stopping at every other house and we could only complete an interview if someone over 40 was home). In case you're curious, it appears that salt consumption (with canned food intake serving as a proxy) and having ancestors from a certain province in Costa Rica are the most strongly correlated with gastric cancer prevalence. It was really interesting to see some results from our piles and piles of surveys and hours of work. Though I wore sunscreen every day, I still managed to get odd little patches of sunburn (behind my knees!) and I was pretty tired by the end of our field work. It was also refreshing to take a break from the back of the safari, though Christian (the driver) was a really fun guy to work with. These are my group members, and some others, bouncing along. (I know it's blurry, but trust me, it's an accurate representation of our week). Can you notice the pouring rain outside? That was another highlight. Imagine a little blond gringa showing up at your Costa Rican door in a huge poncho, in the pouring rain, with a clipboard. I'm making quite a reputation for myself here.

On Sunday, our one day off, I volunteered to go help Tom's older sister Maddie (Tom is in the green shirt). She did this study abroad program two years ago and received a Fulbright Scholarship to continue her research here. She is studying the Ngobe community, one of the local indigenous groups. They have pretty unhealthy diets and are almost all obese (at least the women are), but diabetes rates are incredibly low. Maddie has been investigating why that might be and she needed help running a little program that invited people to come answer a questionnaire and have their blood glucose level tested before being served a free breakfast. I administered surveys (I'm a pro!) and took heights and weights and helped serve some pancakes. I also explained what peaches are (in Spanish, of course) to some women who had never seen them. It was a nice, albeit early, morning and I was glad to help Maddie out.
After we finished our field work this week, I've been keeping busy writing my final paper and reading American Psycho and watching Mulan. Yesterday was Good Friday and we went into town to see the Stations of the Cross procession, which was a nice cultural experience and a good break from work and the field station. There was an impressive parade, though I think Jane (also blond) and I got just as many looks.

This morning, I went into town to buy the ingredients for a trifle, which I'm making for everyone and will serve at our Easter lunch tomorrow. I'm also going to decorate some eggs and, if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll go to Mass in the evening. I'll definitely miss being home for Easter because I miss my family and, partially, because there is no Easter candy here. The coming week brings our poster presentation, more paper writing, a surprise weekend trip and the end of our program (Tuesday 5/3!) Then I've got one week to travel around Costa Rica and it's back to the States! I'll be back with an update toward the end of the week.

The Final Stretch!

  Believe it or not, I'll wake up in my bed in Ancramdale four weeks from today! I can not believe how quickly this semester has flown by and, though I'm excited to come home to family and friends and cows and cats, I'm determined to make the best of these last few weeks.
  To catch up from where I left off in La Selva: we spent a few more days there and finished our classes for the whole semester, which left me with a total repertoire of 36 diseases and about 25 plant families ingrained in my head. After leaving La Selva (for the last time!), we took a long trip to Luna Nueva, which is a sustainable farm/lodge near the Arenal volcano in the north-central part of the country. This is the view from Luna Nueva's look-out tower.

  Luna Nueva was absolutely beautiful. We stayed in beautiful rooms and spent one night running from the hot tub to the pool and back. It turns out that hot tubs require cooling off in the pool when you're in the tropics. During our bits of day-time free-time, I tracked down some of the farm's water buffalo, which were a great reminder of the cows at home. Water buffalo don't really look like Holsteins and Ayrshires, but they all have the same mannerisms. We walked up to their fence and one of the buffalo troubled herself to stand, but the others lazily flopped their heads over so they could check us out. During our walk, we also saw some pigs and we heard sheep and goats all week, though they managed to hide in the pasture pretty well.

 

   Besides seeing the animals, we also got a tour of their useful plants gardens. I munched on turmeric for a while, which, apparently, has some temporary effects on teeth. This is my friend Vangie (from Tufts!) and these are our orange teeth. You should see my toothbrush, but my teeth are whitish again. And the bug on my shirt is George II. It's a cicada exoskeleton and we find them all over. Their little feet have these hooks so the exoskeleton can just hang on cloth, so I'm finally foraying into wearing jewelery. The other photo is some of the turmeric and ginger they've harvested from the garden.

 

  Unfortunately, Luna Nueva wasn't all fun and games; the main purpose of our being there was to do a research project about some of the plants grown there. My group was responsible for Chaya, which is a large shrub whose leaves taste and look a lot like spinach. The young leaves are more nutritious and grow more quickly than spinach and Luna Nueva would like to increase their production so they can feed more than the few tourists that visit the lodge each week and actually sell some of the product. We spent a day in the field counting (yes, counting) new and old Chaya leaves, measuring the trunks and the distance between the trees and the sunlight, and counting branches. After some statistics (which I'm learning to love), we showed that of all the variables we considered, the branching pattern has the greatest effect on the biomass of young leaves. It was an interesting project, and we did it all in a day and a half, which was intense.
  On our last day in Luna Nueva, we took a trip to visit the Maleku, the last indigenous group we'll see. There are only about 600 Maleku left and they have been pushed into a very small area without enough land to continue their traditional, subsistence agriculture. Incredibly, they have maintained their language. All the children are required to learn it in school and many families speak it at home. Our host spoke some Maleku for us (about the dangers of global climate change) so we could hear it and I can tell you that it's nothing like anything I've ever heard. We also walked through the forest and saw some of their medicinal plants, many of which we've seen used by other groups (which means they probably work, to some extent) and, finally, tried to shoot bows and arrows. We all had fun competing amongst ourselves and with some Maleku. They were no better than us, which isn't surprising because bows and arrows are only used to entertain the visitors. I was horrible, but don't I look good trying?

  After our trip to the Maleku, we had a three hour trip to San Jose, where we spent the night, and a six hour drive in the morning to (finally) return to Las Cruces, my favorite biological station. Since we arrived in Las Cruces, we haven't done much but study because our finals were today. I hope the exams went ok, though I don't feel great about them; I'm just really glad they're finished. Our next big project launches tomorrow morning at 7:00. Three of my classmates and I are researching gastric cancer in San Vito, the town nearby. Costa Rica has one of the world's highest prevalences of gastric cancer and San Vito is the highest in Costa Rica and nobody is sure why. Over the next two weeks, we're going to talk to over 200 residents and ask about their smoking habits, diets and family history of gastric cancer in an attempt to pinpoint which of those risk factors is the most strongly correlated to gastric cancer rates in San Vito. We hope that our information will help local doctors and the local people prevent, detect and treat more cases, thereby reducing the mortality. This project is certainly going to keep us busy (and tired) and I'm going to get so good at saying "do you smoke?" in Spanish. Next time I post, I'll certainly give an update on our results. In the meantime, it's dinner time and respond-to-emails-I've-ignored-because-of-finals time.