Sunday, September 14, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
will post more later
A few more photos up; almost caught up now. I'll post a bit about them and my adventures at Cabang Panti (the research station I was at this past week) later. I had a lot of fun, saw a bunch of wild orangutans and came back with lots of itchies. Mostly the main pest there are leeches though; got about 200 in the course of about 85 hours.
Friday, September 5, 2008
done with human sampling
I finished my human sampling on Thursday. I ended up collecting 249 samples from 8 locations around Gunung Palung National Park (about 30 from each location). Now to cross my fingers that I’ll actually find anything interesting when I get home (assuming sample export goes smoothly---not a guarantee when the Health Ministry I need to get approval from is only sometimes reachable by phone, not reachable by email and claims to not be receiving the faxes I’m sending at $8 a pop). No more driving to malarial swamps, staying with random village leaders, being shown people’s kids’ rashes, talking to old people about all their aches or poking people with needles for me. At least for now. But it was a whole lot of fun and very interesting to see so much of this area and meet so many people, even if I can only speak a very little Indonesian.
The last two places I sampled, Cali and Pangkalan Jihing (just try saying that) were the furthest out of the way. P. Jihing is 7 km past Cali…7 km that takes about 1 hour to 1:15 to drive on moped. To be fair, I was warned not to drive there by other researchers, but I also heard it had a good bit of malaria. And so as I just can’t stand not to where the tropical disease action’s at, I went there. The road was abysmal in just about every possible way (I’ll upload some pictures). Huge mud pits, deep puddles, clay as hard as glass and with the same amount of traction as glass on steep uphill and downhill gradients with occasional mud patches, boulder fields, etc. I only fell a couple times though and ploughed through with minor bruises and scrapes (mostly caused by the foot rests since much of the time you had to use your legs for balance, sometimes with a few foot drop on one side and a fairly high ledge on the other). Then between Cali and Nek Doyan about 30 km away, the road was a bit better, but only a bit. Still 30 km that took about 2:30 to drive. But all in all, it was exhilarating driving, especially when the rain hit and I got soaked through (also reducing the visibility and increasing the depth of the puddles/ponds on the raod…). That kind of driving gives you a real good workout and makes you feel very alive. And when I got home, for $12 I got the two mopeds (mine and my worker’s) cleaned, put the mirrors back on and checked over all the components. After that and several hours of washing myself, my clothes and my bags, all I had left were the pictures and the memories. And the bruises.
For those of you who don’t know it, Ramadan started 31 August (at least for Sunnis, which most Indonesians are). During Ramadan people do not eat, drink (even water) or smoke between sunup and sundown (actually a bit before sunup; around 4am to 5:48pm here). This means that my hosts became much less likely to give coffee, etc during the day and also that I could not sample during the day. It also meant that I did not eat or drink between 4am and 5:48 pm for most of the last week since there was no food available then. It’s also incredibly awkward to eat in front of fasting people. The first day of Ramadan I had the leftovers of the people who I was staying with at 8am (they had eaten at 3am but hadn’t woken me). There were about 20 people watching me eat noodles with a spoon, which is already an awkward proposition. Apparently I was very awkward, as halfway through one of them got up and got me a second spoon. I felt a little like a drowning person handed a bottle of water, though. I did not need another spoon (in fact trying to use it to look grateful made me more awkward), though a fork would have been nice, or no spoon and then I could have eaten with my hands. You may ask why I have such a precise time for the end of fasting (or “pwasah”). Each day at about 5:30pm people would get tea or coffee and pastries and sit and stare at them until 5:48pm and then devour them.
Ramadan certainly made my sampling more interesting. People tend not to like to be pricked by a needle after not eating or drinking for more than 12 hours. In fact, people tend not to like anything after not eating or drinking for more than 12 hours. So my sampling was mostly restricted to 7:30pm to 10pm (often without electricity as the outlying regions frequently get their power shut off). But I still managed to get >= 30 samples from each location, so that’s good.
Some more random notes:
Many of the women (I’d say about 2/3rds of those over age 40 and about 1/3rd of those age 30-40) can’t read or write in the villages I sampled. They couldn’t even sign their names and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t just want their husband to sign it anyway. Having them make X’s on the signature line was mostly sad to me and mostly funny to those around them. I just can’t imagine never learning to sign one’s own name.
A lot of the homes here are built on stilts over semi-permanent stagnant swamp water. I’ll try to take and upload some pictures that show this well. I’m amazed there isn’t even more malaria here, frankly, but I guess I’ll see more about that as I analyze the samples.
I played volleyball the day I was in P. Jihing. I actually did surprisingly well given that it’s been a couple years since I last played, though several of the guys I played with clearly did not have much else to do and so were quite good. Still, I was of about average skill for the players and I used my height advantage well at the net.
On the drive home I saw several guys with rifles and hunting dogs and heard a good bit of chainsaw action. I’m pretty sure that was illegal logging. I also saw my first wild monkey in Indonesia…a long-tailed macaque crossing the street.
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