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~Sisters Holding You Hostage

A Night in Waspuko Abajo Nicaragua

Between my 1st and 2nd First Year Of Vet School, I spent the summer studying brucellosis and tuberculosis in diary cattle in the buffer zone of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve in Nicaragua.  I was about as remote as you can get north of the Amazon.  The following is a story about one of the nights I spent at a house in the jungle. (and some old powerpoint slides)

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Allegre a Regressar a Siuna…o Informacion Demasiado.

My week was filled with getting up at the crack of dawn, folding my sheets and hammock, eating a breakfast of beans and rice and quehada (the local cheese that’s sort of like feta, only you have to hope it comes from a cow that isn’t infected with the diseases I am studying), mounting my horse and riding all day through mud and rivers, stopping at farms to rope cows, take some blood from their tail vein and give them a subcutaneous PPD shot to screen for TB.  In the afternoon, we would return home or move our things to the next community, eat lunch or dinner (beans and rice and quehada again), and sit around, waiting for dark so we could go to bed.

----At this point, if you are someone who doesn’t like “too much information,” this is your warning to quit reading immediately.  It just gets worse.----

After a week of riding 5 or 10 hours per day, sweating the entire time, I had developed mad saddle sores.  All my myriad bug bites got infected from the mud, sweat, and cow shit, so I had open, red, oozing bumps covering my legs, bikini line and torso.  One of the houses that we stayed at was in a community called Waspuko Abajo, and the house was on the top of a little hill, moated by standing water on 3.5 sides.  That = mosquito haven.  Worse, at the top of the hill, directly surrounding the house was moat of muck.  The muck was comprised of equal parts mud, cow shit, pig shit, chicken and goose shit, trash, dirty dish water, human piss, dog shit, with an even dusting of algae and fungus to top it all off.  The Muck Moat was 20 feet wide and if you fell in, it was shin deep.  There were strategically placed wood planks and plantain trunks/leaves for you to take a running start and hop from one to the next to the house without getting nasty.  Under the house, because it was dry, lived all the animals and the animals’ fleas and other bugs had direct access to us people through the wide cracks in the floorboards.  I slept with my beekeeper’s net on my head, and so my head and neck is the only place without bug bites.  Sleeping in a hammock is not the most comfortable thing in the world, but wasn’t terrible.  There was also a parrot there that whistled songs and imitated horses whinnying.  We thought it was great until he also started to imitate the chickens squawking and the pigs squealing incessantly.

If you have heard my Sleeping At the Masaai Boma story, this runs for a very close 2^nd place in the history of Terrible Nights Alyssum Has Had.  It started with hours and hours of the parrot chicken-squawking and pig-squealing before bed.  After dinner, I had to pee, but was not about to brave the Muck Moat after dark.  I set up my hammock, donned my mosquito head-net and climbed in.  Because the family as well as my traveling companions and myself were all sharing a single room, I slept in my “clean” pants (my dirty ones that had 2 cm of mud caked from the knee down were outside hanging to dry a little before the next, the last morning of our week out in the bush).  The culture here includes no concept of “disturbing the peace” and in fact I think silence is somewhat taboo, so the head of the house had his radio going as we fell asleep, and Carlos (the vet student with me) had his radio going as well.  On a different station.  In the same room.  So I had to wait for hours before they finally turned them off.  Then a puppy started whining from hunger pangs under the house.  Whine, whine, whine, puppy squeal.  Sounded like someone was stepping on his tail, except that no one was, and the puppy yelped and whined for hours on end.  I felt like the worst human for being annoyed by a starving puppy's crying.  Eventually he quit, and I just started to fall asleep when the pigs started fighting.  It sounded like I lived in the lake from The Princess Bride with the shrieking eels.  Pigs have the most monstrous, hellish sounding voices, and a chorus of six of them, directly under you is absolutely blood curdling.  On it went, pigs, puppy, puppy, pigs, and I was cursing foully under my breath, “Shut the fuck up!  Goddammit, I can’t sleep!…Stupid fuckers stop it!…Goddamn puppy!”  glad for once my companions couldn’t understand me.  The thing that puts this as 2nd place, rather than 1^st with the Masaai, is that I actually did fall asleep at one point.  Unfortunately, it was only long enough to have a dream about luxurious shoes (my leather boots were sprouting 80 types of fungus and mold, and actually the sole fell completely off when I was crossing a river a couple days later), and running to find a bathroom.  So, yes, at the age of 25, I peed in my bed (hammock) because of a dream of going to the bathroom.  I woke up furious and disgusted, and managed to take my pants off, find a piece of cloth to wrap around myself, found my headlamp and braved the Muck Moat to get to the latrine and finish the job.  Next morning, I was faced with Which Pants To Wear.  My dirty pants were not only muddy but also soaked through because it rained in the night, and now my “clean pants” were wet with my urine.  I put off getting dressed as long as possible but eventually had to suck it up and put the “clean pants” on, apologizing to my saddle sores for the insult to injury, and hoping it wouldn’t get hot enough for the smell to reach the noses of my companions.  A few hours later I was checking a cow's tail for evidence of a reaction to the PPD, and--whaddyaknow--she had explosive diarrhea that sprayed me from chest to feet. I thought, “and I was worried about a little human urine on these pants?!”

The Sandanista's colors are black and red.
My legs were red with bug bites and black/hairy.

Finding Inspiration Through Dance

What a pleasure.

This past Saturday night, I attended a modern dance performance by Dance Ethos in which my friend Althea Skinner (seen here) was performing.  Every time I see a dance performance outside the genre that I participate most actively in (bellydance), I am reminded of the countless dance performances that my parents took me to see as a kid, of the thousands of hours of rehearsal and classes that I have participated in over the years, and how much I appreciate this education and practice.  Dance, no matter the genre, is a language that I speak.  I understand it, I feel connected to humankind and to my core self when I am engaged with it, either as a dancer or an audience member.  I am inspired creatively by others' expression of movement or choreography.  And I tend to become overwhelmed emotionally by these experiences, eliciting tears that underscore the magnitude of personal gratitude, and motivation I feel.  Despite however pressured I may feel for a sense of balance in my life ("Just say 'No' to more work and activities!"), watching a dance performance inspires me to reach deep in my own dance to manifest the creative ideas I have, including making a difference in the environmental realm through dance ("Don't stop now! You can do more!").  Sometimes I get scared that I will lose the ability to speak this language, or that I will stop making sense in this language, the same way I have forgotten much of my veterinary training since leaving vet school.  I want to be taken seriously, and seeing the result of dancers working very hard to accomplish the performance I'm watching motivates me to take my own dance practice very seriously, and to devote more time and effort to it. I don't necessarily need more motivation, but the fact that it's available for the taking is luxurious and makes me feel like I'm living life fully.

Because I missed Althea's solo piece in the Saturday show, I took the opportunity to see it performed at the Harman Center for the Arts during today's Happenings, their weekly free lunchtime show.  Talk about being overwhelmed.  Not only was I watching some really beautiful dance (sight/kinesthetic sense), to some really beautiful music (sound), for free (important to my measly Fellowship income), near work (exercise/biking midday, yay!), but I was also eating simultaneously (autumn-fresh roasted butternut squash with carraway seeds and nuts from the farmer's market--a yummy taste and smell-explosion).  My senses were attended to. I was so grateful for that moment.  *cue tears*.

The performance today included several pieces from Saturday's show, as well as a couple from an earlier show that I had seen this summer.  I really enjoy the work that Dance Ethos supports and creates.  The fabric in Tiffany Haughn's "The Lines We Draw" reminded me of all the possibilities that exist for each of us.  Possibility can support and carry us, or it can hold us back and cause tension.  Even if we are aware of these issues--they are transparent--that doesn't mean that navigating them is any easier. We struggle or glide through, past, with, in spite of, or linked to possibilities.   Althea's piece (choreographed by Vladimir Angelov) was stirring, dynamic, beautiful, thoughtful, curious, and expertly executed. I was struck in her piece and a few others at the use of explosive movement followed by stillness or slow movement.  It's a technique that I use less emphatically in my own dance, and it reminded me to go whole hog in that direction.

I had to leave early to get back to work, but my lunchtime inspiration infusion will last for quite some time.

Toledo's Chronic Urban Flooding

One of the projects I have been working on as a Digital Coast Fellow is researching and writing up this mini-case study about Toledo's chronic flooding issues for the Great Lakes Planning Guide.  Two thoughts about this process:
1.  It's really hard to distill such a rich story into just a couple paragraphs!!  Research took quite a while, and locating appropriate images that really do help tell the story (with attendant sources and permissions) was a bear of a project in and of itself.
2.  Although this is a local story, as part of the Planning Guide, it reminds me that individual stories like this are a part of the whole.  Climate change causes more frequent and heavier rainfall in many places, and stories like Toledo's help bring peoples' attention to the importance of mitigating climate change itself by decreasing our individual engagement in carbon-emitting practices, as well as proactive planning and management of infrastructure.  I am proud that this is a piece of the repertoire of work that I do.

Naval Observatory Digital Coast presentation and tour

My favorite part of going to present at the Naval Observatory was all the really cool old telescopes and rare books I got to see during the tour we had after my presentation.  They were edited out of the blog post that I wrote for work, but I'll share them here for you because they're awesome.  But, yeah, I got to present Digital Coast to a bunch of Dept of Defense folks.  Yippee!

An original edition of Copernicus’ book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium from 1543, in which he describes that Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around

The observatory’s 26-inch diameter refracting telescope from 1873