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.