an email to my buddies Phil and Chris ...
I miss you guys! It´s Saturday morning, I have the TV tuned to the blues channel, the sun is shining into our cliff-dwelling apartment and life is good.
The week before last I spent in a little town in the middle of the Chiquitano Forest, with 30 other people, from Argentina, Boliva, Chile, Costa Rica, France and the UK, planning a project. The town is called Concepcion, in the Department of Santa Cruz, if you want to see it in Google Maps. Some of the meetings were even further out in the forest, at a facility the NGO I'm with operates called Alta Vista, a convention centre - resort sort of place with cabins and meeting spaces. It also has a tiny fly that I think is responsible for nasty welts that are appearing on my body. Other people were complaining about this but I appeared to be spared, until a week after we came back. In the meantime I've read about truly frightening organisms in Bolivia, such as the chaga, which lives in old thatch roofs, falls down and bites you. Ten years later, your doctors puzzle over symptoms of paralysis and early dementia. Another one lays eggs in the flesh over your cheekbones and after a few days you have sores there with little worms crawling out of them, perfect for a first date. Yet another insect has a bite that becomes a necrotizing ulcer that gets bigger and bigger, doesn't heal for months and leaves a pitted scar. I have fears that I may be a victim of this last one, because the welts are raised and red like a ripe pimple without a pus head, itching like crazy. I'm waiting for them to split open like little rotten pomegranates. They're mostly in places you wouldn't expect, as though the insects' intent was to burrow as far under my clothes as possible. For example, I have one on my perineum and another on the side of my dick, several on the backs of my knees and a couple on my belt line. I've been back for a week now and see no improvement, so maybe I'll visit a quack on Monday.
The Concepcion visit was fun. My boss has a house there where I stayed, with Pepa initially until the bats in the roof, and their prolific turds, drove her back to Santa Cruz. I saw lots of interesting wildlife, including the 2m long crocodile pictured below. In particular I learned a lot about the project I'm in, called EcoAdapt, which aims to strengthen capacity for climate change adaptation among the various stakeholders in the Chiquitano Forest, as well as in two other model forests, in Argentina and Chile. It's funded by the European Union, which has hopes to disseminate the approaches and lessons learned to other forests in the world, eg, in Indonesia, Africa, etc. My first task is an analysis of climate variability, based on data from the Bolivian Meteorological Service, which I've been doing all week and have to finish by the end of June. I'm not sure what they're expecting, or if they'll be impressed if I finish sooner. I've made a ton of graphs showing temperature and precipitation trends since 1942 ... baffle them with bulk, is the best advice. An interesting part is identifying "exceptional events"; first I need to understand what's normal, which isn't clear to me yet. For example, it's May, a usually dry-ish month, and a couple of days ago after work Pepa and I went to look for wooden furniture in a market with a cluster of such vendors. We found more than we expected and while we lingered, the skies opened in a downpour that turned the street into a canal. Leaks in the corrugated iron roof of the market building dripped into the stalls. We tried to wait it out but eventually convinced we'd wait all night, we hefted two rustic bedside tables and a chair, made of a beautiful but heavy wood called tajibo, out into the rain. I took my good office shoes off and barefoot (euchhh!) moved the furniture onto the median, then returned to piggy-back Pepa across the mucky pond. We stood there in the rain for a while hopelessly waving at full taxis going by, then picked up our stuff and hiked in the honking traffic to a big roundabout where even more people waited. I managed to claim a cab by offering the driver fabulous wealth, and we put the tables on the roof and the chair in the back with the LNG tank. Anyway, the point of this story is, I'll scour the met records for signs that this was exceptional, or not. The information is not directly relevant since the study watershed is not here, but the analytical method would be, I guess.
Pepa is excited because my boss, who has taken an interest in us, hooked us up with a friend of his who runs a gallery (google KIOSKO Gallery, Santa Cruz, Bolivia) that's interested in developing art techniques workshops, and they're keen to have her give one on a method called "photo-transfer" where you can move an image from a laser printed paper to canvas using an acrylic solvent that's available from paint manufacturers. Also she has applied for an advertised Cuso placement that will help an artisan products marketing NGO design new products. This would double our tiny income. We've discovered that the Cuso allowances, as small as they seem, are way more than salaries here. My boss, Hermes Justinano, is one cool dude: unpretentiously well-off, connected, aviator, biologist, famed photographer, environmental advocate and director in several NGOs. He's constantly flitting off to other continents fund-raising and delivering papers in conferences. His wife is a painter, and Hermes is clearly looking for stimulation for her so Pepa is a candidate. In the time we've been here they've taken us out to two social-cultural events and had us to lunch in their home, which is gorgeous with a lush garden of avocado (my first understanding of where avocados come from) and other trees festooned with orchid plants and hopping with colourful noisy birds.
I hope you made it this far and are not thinking I'd expect a response at such length. This place is stimulating and keeps popping descriptive phrases into my mind that I feel compelled to record. You're the (un)fortunate targets of thoughts that may appear in my memoirs.