Where thro' gleams that untravelled world: Life at the end of the road in San Jose del Guaviare

Greetings from San Jose del Guaviare, where lunches are heavy and beer is cheaper than water!

Hope this post, as always, finds you well. As I left you, life was a mad dash of last minute things. As life stands now, I’m sufficiently busy, but busy in that way where meetings are missed, lunches are overstayed, and any excuse is an excuse for a beer. Welcome again to Latin America, or more specifically, to rural Colombia. It’s been nearly a month since I arrived in Colombia, and things are moving along just fine. For the moment, I’m on track to finish my University of London assignments by March 31, and project tasks appear to be on course. It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon, and the house is quiet and peaceful. We had a huge lunch as usual, but I’m trying to keep myself up on ‘tinto’ as they call their coffee, long enough to get some pictures posted and a few brief stories.

I’m here in San Jose, in case you hadn’t heard, as a field assistant for a Stanford University PhD. candidate’s dissertation in Anthropology. We’re studying human ecology and malaria transmission in two indigenous communities here, with the ultimate aims of 1) obtaining a successful dissertation and 2) helping the communities and the local health department(s) better understand and prevent malaria transmission in these two particular groups. Currently, I’m working with one other American field assistant, Ariel, and Alejandro, the PhD. candidate. We’ll be expecting a few more on the team within a month or so. [A disclaimer: our internet is laughably prehistoric. It works for email, but uploading photos?? I was desperate to share a few, but be warned that the ones below are warped and semi-crazy. Give me a few weeks (until I'm on a mini-vacation) to share more photos of higher quality!]

Originally, when I had planned for San Jose, I had imagined a tiny river town perched on the edge of the jungle: dusty, hot, and slow. The list of suggested packing items included a GPS, a tent, and a compass among other things. I wasn’t expecting to hunt my own monkey meat in the jungle after that, but I was anticipating something much more isolated and ill-stocked with necessities. What a pleasant surprise it was to find, then, a small but stocked city with a main plaza, two (two!) decent supermarkets, a busy airport, multiple blocks of downtown, and slow but serviceable internet for email. Wow! You know you’ve been living in ridiculously small towns when the following impress you:

-Stoplights
-Taxis (real 4-wheeled ones, not just motorbikes)
-Ambulances
-Sirens on ambulances
-Lights on police cars
-Chinese restaurants
-Bars with projector screens
-Veterinarian’s offices (multiple!)
-Any sort of specialized health center (Dentist! Optometrist!)
-Pizza

All that said, San Jose does remain in some respects exactly as I imagined it: hot, dusty and slow. The hot and dusty parts are gradually transforming as ‘winter’ or the rainy season sets on. This change, I imagine, will actually slow things down that much more, given that there is no rhyme or reason as to which roads are paved and which ones remain unpaved. Even some of those that are ‘paved’ are like a bad road in reverse: instead of pavement filled with potholes, here the whole road is a pothole, marred here and there by little island lumps of pavement that stick up about a foot higher than everything else. It makes some of the drives feel like a strange go-cart or rally course.

Speaking of roads, San Jose is pretty much the end of the road in this part of Colombia. Beyond this point, rivers dominate transportation and commerce through the dense forest. San Jose does not appear in the indices of a single guidebook I found, and, if it did, they might advise you against travel here. Over the past few decades, San Jose has been captured and held by a number of forces, including the FARC, paramilitary groups and the Colombian government. Now for several years it’s been tightly under government control, surrounded by three large military bases, one of which is staid to house American soldiers manning the coca field-spraying flights. Nobody’s really sure what’s in the pesticides they’re spraying, so bottled water is definitely preferred over tap. That said, the real preferred choice is beer…approximately 40 cents cheaper per bottle than water. Just as a reassurance from someone who’s been to several ends-of-the-road now: you will always find cold beer when you arrive.

My first two days in Colombia were spent in Bogota, a surprisingly cold place. The setting is quite stunning, as the city sprawls through a valley and up onto the sides of some strikingly picturesque Andean mountains. We stayed in a neighborhood called ‘La Candelaria,’ which is one of the more colonial and popular-with-tourists parts of the city. The Gabriel Garcia Marquez center is here, as well as a variety of little cafes, community theaters, universities, and so on. Some of the streets are breathtakingly steep. Perhaps the thing I noted most about my brief stay in Bogota, however, was just how expressionistic this city is: everybody’s got something to say or share. Most obviously, expression is plastered across nearly every wall in the form of graffiti. I’ve never seen so much graffiti anywhere in my life. Paintball also seems to be popular, but as a form of protest. Certain government offices have been particular targets.

A pretty section of La Candelaria

I guess that's what they think of the work of the Ministry of Social Protection...

Throughout Colombia, even in the capital, horses and mules are used to move furniture and the like

Construction workers resting at a construction site in central Bogota.

A snack vendor in La Candelaria

Anyway, more on Bogota later, as I should be on my way through again in a couple of weeks. For now, we’ll move on to San Jose. The drive between here and Bogota was about 8 hours by car, and will likely be more for any future bus trips. Colombia’s topography of mountains and rivers and coastlines and Amazons make for a variety of microclimates. We passed through a few of them as we gently sloped down from Bogota into the flat savannahs of Meta Department, and then into the flat and forested edges of Guaviare Department. On the way, we stopped for my first arepa, a filled cornmeal staple prepared slightly differently in each region. The drive is quite pretty, though we were almost constantly stuck behind some large truck, waiting for a turn to pass on the two-lane highway.

Upon arrival, I found we actually had a comfortable mid-sized house, with two back rooms reserved for Ariel and I. We don’t have a fridge, but we’ve got a stove top and a blender…far more than I had in Sangkhlaburi, and even more than we had in Mae Hong Son. So far, knock on wood, we’ve seen a big spider and some little geckos, but for being on the edge of the Amazon, we’ve had very few run ins with wildlife in the house. The one exception, as you may surmise, is mosquitoes. We’re in a near constant battle with them...stealth and speed are on their side, but the electric racket of death is on ours. I first learned of these remarkable inventions in Sangkhlaburi, where my old roommate Allison was an aficionada. They look exactly like a tennis racket, but they have a button on the side to charge the racket with electricity. As soon as they make contact with a mosquito, or any other bug, they shock it to death, setting off a series of mini-fireworks. It's kind of torturous, of course, but I have to admit a huge feeling of satisfaction using it nonetheless.

Nuestra casita! We're on a street across from the hospital, just a few blocks from downtown.

My bedroom, complete with mosquito net. It's actually a convertible mosquito net for use over a bed or over a hammock--it took me a couple of days to figure out what the knotted section on the front was. I felt so smart when I realized what it was!

Soon after arriving, we got to work on the project. Mostly, for the first few weeks, that just involved learning names and basics of town. We have some contact with local government organizations and health departments, but we are working very independently. The two indigenous groups we are working with are the Nukak and the Jiw (or ‘Guayabero’). It’s been a pretty remarkable opportunity so far—an anthropology dream with recently contracted Amazonian tribes, shamans and ground coca leaves. Of course, it hasn’t been all that smooth. There have been several days of ‘field frustration’ and a couple of miscommunications with the communities. The line between socializing and work is blurry on good days, and invisible on others.

There’s barely an hour that passes when a guest doesn’t drop by the house. ‘Convivir’ is really the operative word, we all live inextricably together. Here the neighbors don’t feign ignorance as to who your guests are or what you’re doing. You don’t need an excuse to come by the house and hang in the hammocks for an hour or two. And it’s always best to cook for more people than you’re expecting...though if you don't feel like cooking you can always grab your peanut butter out of your neighbor's fridge. On that note, the food here is ridiculously heavy. A typical lunch is a chunk of some sort of meat or fish, followed by every starch available: yucca, rice, potatoes, and fried plantains. It’s no wonder that siestas are associated with the Spanish-speaking world, at least based on our diet here. Being a meat eater is a bit strange, it’s a bit too heavy for me. Fortunately here at the house we’re able to cook whatever we’d like.

I've been posting daily field notes, as have Alejandro and Ariel, on the team blog "Alicia en la planeta de los simios" (or, "Alice in the planet of the apes"). The address is www.adaptacioncultural.blogspot.com. Eventually I'll start adding some of the same notes, or selected sections, here. For now, however, I'll leave some photos--as my capricious internet permits me--of the cute kids we've been working with on site, and some scenes of San Jose.

Until the next time, le vaya bien bien! Chau y besos!

An adorable family in Agua Bonita: the older brother, the middle sister, and the younger brother.

Baby butt! The littlest ones never wear clothing, which makes them easier to tell, boy from girl, but may be one of several factors contributing to their higher load of malaria cases?

She is clearly a natural in front of the camera

A little boy preparing for the rain...

The little boy is carrying a puppy, mimicking his older friend.

Can you spot the anthropologists? Not conspicuous at all...

We came out to visit one day, and found the boys had constructed their own fort, chopping down trees and lining everything up. It was pretty cool, and they graciously let the anthropologists play with them for awhile.

They let us join the fun because we gave them our cameras for awhile, which they obviously loved.

I was pleasantly surprised how some of the shots and the framing turned out (though there were the cut-off heads and blur shots I was expecting as well).