Meet the newest member of our team

I wasn't exactly looking to get a dog, but it was in the back of my mind that if some day a dog in need came along, maybe I'd take it in. Well it finally came to pass last Saturday. I went to my office to pick something up and the guard wasn't there to let me in (off buying tortillas), so the ladies across the street invited me to come wait in the shade at their place. So I was chatting with them in their yard when this tiny little wobbly thing came along, and the ladies were like, 'Poor little thing, it's going to die. It doesn't like to eat.' Someone had given it to one of their daughters, but apparently it wasn't thriving on the standard Guatemalan pet diet of cast-off rice and tortillas. I figured if it had no appetite it was maybe a lost cause, but then they said that it loves fish, so that gave me hope. And after they said that it was going to die for the fifth time or so, I finally asked if maybe they'd like to let me have a try caring for it and they said sure, go for it. So she and I got in a tuk-tuk and then a launcha and went to my place in San Miguel. Here is a picture of here about to tuck into her first dish of tuna at my house. They said she's two months old, and the vet on Monday said she weighs 3 pounds. She looked really funny when I first got her because she was so skinny and here ears are so big that they were just ridiculously out of proportion. She's already noticibly put on weight, I've pulled about 50 ticks off her body, and her hair is growing in thicker so she already looks less ridiculous. Here are some more pictures from the weekend I got her, I'll put some newer ones with her looking a little less bag o' bones soon. I didn't come up with a name for her until Monday night. I brought her to the office that day and people quickly started calling her Rata and Dumbo, so I knew I had to come up with something fast, so that night when we got to the guard station where we're staying during the field work and one of the guards called her Perla, I was like, 'I'll take it!' So Perla it is! I think I ended up looking pretty ridiculous in front of the Guatemalans there at the guard station with the level babying I was providing her, but I think she's becoming a bit of a mascot there anyway. And I was kind of unsure of how my parents would greet the news given that they are currently caring for my other rescue dog, but my mom was happy to hear about it, not only for the sake of the dog but also so that I wouldn't be alone here. And in case you're worried about how Josie has been faring all these months, here's a recent pic from my parents.

The Dustpan of Life

It’s been raining for days, which has been a welcome relief from the incredible heat we’d been experiencing before that. It’s been a pretty dramatic switch, to go from boiling hot days to gray and rainy all the time, but I prefer it this way. It’s actually bordering on chilly at times, last night I went back to my winter habit of wearing two pairs of pajama pants (since I don’t have a blanket, just a sheet) and today I risked electrocution to take a shower with warm water, whereas for the past months the unheated water has been such a relief at the end of the day. And everything is damp and nothing dries out. All my money bills are slightly moist to the touch. Anyway, I was at home on Sunday preparing for going out to the park on five days of field work this upcoming week when I started to hear the sound of thrashing about in water. Most houses, including my own, have a big cement sink with three basins, called a pila, outside on the patio or in the yard. They’re actually pretty handy, they make hand washing much easier. I just assumed I could hear my neighbor splashing around in her pila while doing some cleaning, but then I did become curious because it sounded closer than my neighbor and was coming from a slightly wrong direction. So I went outside and peered in my landlady’s pila, which is unsheltered (unlike mine) and had filled up with rainwater in the central portion. It was a little bit difficult to get a good look inside though, because there is a big, wet lime tree hanging close over the basin, so I could only easily see the far corner without pushing the lime branches out of the way and getting soaked in the process. So when I saw the frog in the corner I assumed that was it, but then the thrashing continued even though the frog was perfectly still so I peered in closer and there was a big blackbird submerged up to mid-wing and not able to propel itself out of the tub. So I got my camera, duh, then I got my plastic dustpan and it turned out to be the easiest thing to get it out. I just hooked the pan under the bird and it was like I’d announced to the bird “going up!” because it just held on and I raised the whole thing out of the water very smoothly. I put the whole thing in the shallower basin, and we looked at each other for awhile. It actually didn’t decide to move for awhile, and even though I didn’t want to freak it out after waiting about 10 minutes I came towards it a bit to motivate it to move so I could see if it was actually hurt. I have to admit that I did have some fantasies of me and my new best friend the blackbird living in harmony, it hopping cheerfully towards the front door when I came home. They’re supposed to be really smart animals. I just happen to have a National Geographic on animal intelligence and it says the blackbirds not only can use tools to reach food stuck in a recess, they can take a material and create an apt tool (like fashioning a hook on the end of a straight wire) to grab the food. But I knew that plan would never work because starting tomorrow I’ll be away for 5 days so I couldn’t be there to take care of it. Happily, it hopped away from me (almost falling in the washtub again), and chilled out for awhile longer protected by the limbs of the lime tree. I looked again at the frog, which looked dead, and then I realized it had a long tail so it was actually a lizard, not a frog. The way it’d been floating in the water looked very frog-like. But I left it there because I didn’t want to freak out the bird again and I figured I’d fish it out later when the bird had recovered a bit, striking a balance between not hassling the bird and letting a dead animal decompose in my landlady’s washbasin. Next time I went out, the bird started hopping from limb to limb in the tree, seemingly mostly recovered, and I used the dustpan to get the lizard out, which turned out to be alive. I put it in the same place I’d put the bird and I guess the extended soak in the water made the lizard sluggish because it didn’t do anything. After a few minutes I decided to move it to a more sheltered place, since it was still sitting in a bit of water and I figured that the bird trying to eat the lizard is probably how they’d both ended up in that mess to begin with, so I put the lizard under my own pila where the ground was at least dry and it scurried to a more covered spot. So there you have, the dustpan of life safely escorting two animals from a premature demise.

Are my neighbors trashy?

As mentioned, the people with the little store in front of my house, Tienda la Bendición, are always around. They’d always seemed like good neighbors to me (even if rarely allowing the privacy I want when it comes time to burn my toilet paper), I’ve started to wonder a bit about their character. I was leaving my house a few weeks back to go to work, and one of the boat pilots, Arnaldo, came running up to me and asked me for a loan of 2Q (quetzals), which is about a quarter. Since I have to cross from San Miguel to Flores and back at least once a day, all of the boat pilots are familiar to me, and this one is also the brother-in-law of my landlady so he’s even done some work in my place. So I gave him the 5Q bill I had in my pocket and when he leaned in to give me a thank you kiss on the cheek I caught a whiff of heavy drinking. When I left my house the following morning, I saw Arnaldo sleeping on the cement patio of Tienda la Bendición. Then a few days later as I left my house, Arnaldo arose from where he was sitting on the patio of Tienda la Bendición, leaving a wet spot behind, and came running up to me again as I was leaving my house and asked for 5Q. Well, despite my misgivings I gave it to him, and he said he’d pay me back in boat crossings. That evening, I got on a relatively late night boat back to San Miguel, piloted by my landlady’s actual brother, Andreas, and since we were waiting for more people to arrive before leaving I casually started asking about Arnaldo and Andreas was like, “He’s drinking now.” So apparently Arnaldo will not drink for a few months and then will go on a binge of a few weeks to a month, during which time he is not welcome at home with his wife and 8 children because he will steal things to sell. He spends his time on the street, then comes home when he’s done. And the reason he asked me for 2Q was because he drinks rubbing alcohol, which at 2Q a bottle is much cheaper than grain alcohol. Apparently not too long ago another gentleman of San Miguel died from drinking rubbing alcohol. And that brings me to the question of whether or not my neighbors are trashy, because even though it’s illegal and deadly they sell Arnaldo the rubbing alcohol. Boo!

Soon after learning that, I went away for almost two weeks, and passed my proposal defense at UCSB. Now I’m back in San Miguel, ABD, and another 6 months to go here. This morning I saw Arnaldo sitting on his son’s boat and chatting, so maybe his binge is done. Anyway, the good news is that I now have a “new” camera with me. “New” because I think it might be one of the first digital cameras ever made. We’ll see how I ornament my blog with it.

Toilet paper fire

Here in San Miguel, where perhaps two or three cars or trucks pass through per week, it is a common occurrence to see people burning their garbage. Unlike in Flores, no truck comes by to pick it up and take it to a dump. And since pretty much no where in Guatemala is the plumbing up to the challenge of sucking down toilet paper, every toilet has a wastebasket next to it for depositing the toilet paper. Even if you can get a kid to take your garbage off to the dump here, everyone would agree that toilet paper should just be burned. The first time someone suggested I burn my toilet paper I laughed at the image of myself out front tending a burning pile. I’d been able to avoid it to date because a few times my landlady’s mother was sweeping up leaves out front and asked me for my toilet paper, and a few times I used a piece of corrugated metal as a base for burning it within my little fenced-in compound, away from the eyes of the public, but I figured enough was enough. No one else is embarrassed to burn their paper in front of their house, I could already imagine my landlady asking me what happened to her piece of metal, and I had some guests coming over so I had to do something. I’d been thinking about it for days and days. The people who live across from me have a little store where they sell about ten things and they are constantly out front of their house. I honestly can’t imagine this is how they earn their living because they can’t be selling all that much of anything, but as far as I can tell both the husband and wife seem to be there pretty much constantly. This is nice because they kind of keep an eye on my place, get new 5 gallon water bottles for me when the truck passes by once a week, and whenever I pass by the husband calls me Laurita, which for some reason I love. It is bad, however, because if I want to do anything discreetly there’s not much chance until past 11 pm, at which point it seems that making a fire in front of my place in the middle of the night would enhance the oddball status I already enjoy as the only gringa in San Miguel. But, because of my impending visitors, I decided to just suck it up and do it yesterday morning, Saturday. I got excited as I was walking to the gate of my place to see that the family across the street were actually all leaving as a group, so I hung back a minute until they were gone. Then I went outside, made a pile of the bags of paper on a preexisting burn mark, and nervously went through about 7 matches before it caught fire. Then I realized I’d have to stir it around to make sure everything caught fire, so I found a stick and did just that. All this time, three or four people passed by and looked at me, I thought, oddly. I might have appeared strange, but most likely that’s because I’m seldom seen out front of my house, I’m usually coming or going to the boat and because my house is a little removed from the street I don’t pass a lot of time in public view so for some this might have been a rare gringa sighting. I remember when I’d been living here only a few weeks I took a walk around San Miguel and as I turned a corner I’d never turned before I heard a kid yell, “Here comes the gringa!” Anyway, yesterday I finally confronted something I’d been dreading and I’m glad about that, though it pained me later on to deposit more paper in the empty basket. Well, in about six days I’m going back to the Santa Barbara for a week and half, so at least there I won’t have this kind of concern. There I’ll just have the situation that passes every time I come back from here, of finding myself with toilet paper in my hand and looking around for a wastebasket before I realize that I can just drop it in the toilet.

Dog eats chicken bone… And survives!

Anyone who has spent much time around here will tell you that there are a lot of gnarled-up looking dogs. Skin conditions, fur and ear tips missing, ribs poking out, a dozen ticks ringing their eyes, it’s all common place, even in cases where the dog actually has an owner. There are, of course, many well maintained pets, but even then are distinct from the dogs you see around the US because so few of them are neutered that dog balls and saggy tatas are commonly on display. One of the more painful things to see is an absolute stick and bones female who is obviously nursing out scavenging for their food because many owners don’t feed their dogs anything at all. Such dogs make the rounds at the post where I stay at in Bethel when I’m visiting the park, and for that reason I can tell you that a dog can eat a chicken bone and survive. They come at meal times and wait where the guards and the odd visiting researcher might throw the cast-offs of their meal. These dogs are so skinny that even I, raised with a multi-generationally strong tradition of not giving chicken bones to dogs (my dad has said that as a child he’d believed a dog would die instantly upon taking a chicken bone in its mouth), will toss my bones to these creatures. This is something I would never do with Josie. And these dogs come back for more the following day. Well, I think in the face of all the hazards these dogs face, the danger of a splintered chicken bone raking their digestive track is pretty minor. I still feel conflicted, however, every time anyone tosses these dogs a chicken bone, and doubly so when it’s me.

Speaking of gnarled-up dogs, there is one less in the world now. Black, the little dog that lived my little fenced in area, is no longer with us. Well my landlady spends great stretches of time in Guatemala City, caring for her two little grandsons while her daughter and son-in-law attend classes at the medical school. She hasn’t been up here once since I came back two months ago, though she has called me a few times to see how things are going. I stop by her mother’s house to pay my rent, a woman who is probably about 80 years old and caring for her great grandchildren (after raising their dad, her grandson) since their dad is off working at the airport during the day and the mom has been in the US for about a year as an undocumented worker. This is the 3^rd generation she’s raised. Anyway, Black hasn’t been here since I got back and I asked a few people around here about him and no one knew what’d happened, and then finally when my landlady called me the other day I remembered to ask and she said her nephew had called her months ago with word that he’d died, must have been when I was in the US at the start of the New Year. Well, he was an old dog, but I also suspect he was rather neglected by the nephew that was supposedly caring for him. He spent his time chained up on the side of the house, poor fella, and I can tell you that when I came back the plants outside looked like they hadn’t been watered in a long time, which I imagine was another of his responsibilities.

The Blog Must Go On!

I’ve been back in Guatemala for about a month now, but the blog has had a set-back because my camera was stolen. It was actually stolen at some point when I was en route between Flores and Santa Barbara last December, my hunch is during the bus ride between Flores and Guatemala City. I realized I didn’t have my camera when I got to SB, but then I figured there was a small chance I’d forgotten it at my place in San Miguel. When I got back to San Miguel after being away for 3 months, I scanned my room and saw it wasn’t there, and that’s that. I’ll be making a quick trip to SB in about a month, so I’ll pick up a new camera at that time. Until then, it’ll be words, words, words!

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks making journeys into the park to familiarize myself with the communities in which I’m going to be doing my interviews. There are two roads which run along the edge of the park, the Bethel route and the Naranjo route, so I visited each route over the past two weeks. So far so good. I’ve been staying at the field offices of Defensores de la Naturaleza, the NGO that’s hosting me here. Accommodations aren’t too bad, usually a bunk bed in a room shared with a bunch of other people, mostly park guards and then the outreach technicians that I’m running around with, plus my two student helpers. Occasionally there will be a huge glut of people at these places, like when they’re trading out the guards from the posts down the river they all show up at the more accessible Bethel post for the night before heading home on a two week break. Two weeks on, two weeks off. So there will be like 10 dudes sleeping in the room, scattered all over the place. And then last week, at the post along the Naranjo road (in the community of Villa Hermosa), there was an issue with some illegal logging in the park. Apparently there were something like two big truck loads of illegally harvested timber, but both of the exits were being watched to try to catch them on their way out. So the military showed up at the post at like 10:30pm but I didn’t hear them arrive because I had my earplugs in. So I woke up at around 1am to go to the bathroom (err, pee in the bushes) and to my surprise there were about eight soldiers sitting on the patio, some of them sleeping and some of them keeping watch. According to Aracelí, my student assistant, occasionally you’d hear a gun go clattering to the ground as a soldier fell asleep and relaxed his grip. This was all a few days ago, I need to ask about what happened with the wood. So other than the room for sleeping, each place also has a separate kitchen, and cooking is done over a fire. The Bethel office has a kind of fancy stove for cooking with firewood, I think they bought it from some NGO that gives them to households to try to reduce the frequency of respiration problems since many women spend most of their day in these partially ventilated kitchens with open fires. It uses less wood and has a chimney for ejecting the smoke out up higher. I’ve heard that some of the guard posts don’t want to install it because they hear that it takes a long time to heat up. I think everyone at the Bethel post was happy with it, though, so we’re going to try to go forth and talk it up to everyone who is reluctant to use it. The other post, the Villa Hermosa one, hadn’t installed it yet and there is definitely a difference being in a room with the open fire vs. the stove, even if they both use fire wood. And each place has a latrine, basically a deep pit with a seat over it. Not too nice, but considering many households within these communities don’t even have a latrine, it’s nice to at least have a wooden box for some privacy. Every time I go into the latrine I think of my friend Enki, because she would not be okay with it. She doesn’t even like to use a gas station bathroom, on road trips she’ll stop at a Denny’s and use the bathroom there. I can understand that, but here there are not a whole lot of options. For bathing, in the Bethel post there is the river about 10 minutes walking away. The river is probably about 30 feet wide, and on the other side is Mexico. In the Villa Hermosa post there is a well about 20 feet from where we’re staying, so Aracelí showed me how to use a bucket to draw up well water, and then there is a semi-private area set up nearby for bathing. I did it at night so it was a bit more private since people were done getting water for their home for the day, and no one else seemed to choose to bathe at that time. The first two nights Aracelí helped me set everything up and then waited for me to finish, but the third night she went to church so I did it all by myself and wasn’t she proud of me when she came back. It was pretty funny to be bathing in the middle of a little wood, in the moonlight, with a white horse grazing nearby. I figured if there was an opportunity in which I’d run into a duende, a forest elf that people tell stories about here, this would be it. But alas (or actually, fortunately), a duende did not interrupt my bathing, even though they supposedly have an affinity for white horses.

Updates and Happy New Year

For completeness, I just thought I'd note that I'm back in SB for the next couple of months, working with my committee on getting all my ducks in a line before doing the actual field work back in the Sierra del Lacandon. Here is a picture of me snuggling my well-fed nephew Tommy at my brother's house a few days after Christmas. This is the face of the next generation of Suters. Does that fluff on his head appear to have a reddish hue to you?