Creature Feature - 4th of July Edition

I was trying to think of some clever way to write about Rhode Island's fauna. In waiting, however, I was able to capture the elusive Cookie Monster, rarely seen away from Sesame Street, NYC. He was a part of the July 4 parade in Bristol. (Incidentally, the longest and strangest parade to which I've ever been.) Reece, who knows "Cookie" from the show, was quite terrified of him from afar. Later, Elmo came walking by and Reece cowered.
I'll throw in this "two-fer," which I believe meets the requirements of this challenge as well as a challenge past. Caitlin and I are trying to potty train Reece. I never really noticed that this task was called "training," rather than say "teaching," but it's basically the same thing as training a dog: lots of messes, a great deal of frustration, and ever more laundry.
One more... City folk need to get out to the country every now and again to rediscover their agrarian roots (in Johnston, which amazingly enough transforms from suburbs to rural over about 100 yards). In this one, Reece meets his first donkey after strawberry picking. There was a llama in the pen, too, but not close enough to get a picture of the two of them. Of course, this doesn't really help my case for being "in the field," but it's the truth.

Lagos Safari

So, much to the disappointment of everyone I've ever tried to convince to come visit me in Africa, Nigeria is not really renowned as a safari destination. Its booming population eliminated most all wild large animals long ago, and its poorly developed tourist industry has done little to make up for it, aside from a few reservations sites mostly known for skiddish antelope and skinny elephants. However, that does not mean my life is deprived of wildlife!

First off, Lagos is literally crawling with lizards, especially this orange variety. They can be found sunbathing between rain showers and bob their heads and bodies up in down in general humping like motions. These guys are pretty big, say like ten inches long or so, but their smaller cousins (unfortunately too tiny and quick for me to photograph this week) often venture indoors and are often seen crawling along your walls and windows, especially in the bathroom. If I name those ones and pretend they are pets, they no longer freak me out. Wish I could say the same for the two mice living in my room, also unpictured.


Next off, another favorite household invader. Nothing unusual here, but this motherf*cker was so big and beautiful that I couldn't help but snap him postmortem a few months ago. Mmm!


Believe it or not, I also have some freshwater intruders lately, in a sense. I rent a room in a compound immediately adjacent to a huge swamp, and with the rainy season in fully swing, the floods have been out of control. The management thankfully moved me up from the ground floor (just after I'd got it all fixed up and everything!), but the first floor of this new building is the worst of them all. It's been at least a foot underwater for months, and there are actual little minnow like fish swimming there around all the time. Let's not think about what all this means for the foundations of the building.


There are of course much more interesting animals around outside of my immediate residence as well. One favorite though odd encounter was at the Lagos Carnival, held at the old cement stadium where they announced Nigerian independence 50 years ago. At the end of the day, they set off a bunch of fireworks to this super somber orchestral soundtrack, as all of the bats flew out of the rafters into a stormy gray sky. A strange end to an otherwise super festive celebration, but a cool one nonetheless. Those black specks are the bats, which, unlike James, I tend to find creepy in even the best of circumstances.

And finally, the pups! Of course Lagos has it's own sizeable stray dog population, though I am happy to say they are not nearly as aggressive or intimidating as Susan's adversaries in Bolivia. In fact, I kind of love these dogs and fantasize about bringing one back with me someday to the US. Most of them resemble the African basenji, which was brought over to the US from Congo and is now a recognized AKC breed. I'm just obsessed with their big ears.


These guys are so friendly that just yesterday, I saw a few rummaging a beachside trash pit with a wild monkey! They seem to get along well with all of the goats and chickens that wander around most neighborhoods too, which means the right one could most definitely be best friends with my own Maddy, right?

And last but not least, I could not do justice to my Lagos canine life without reference to my dear friend Friday, German short hair pointer and regular excuse for me to come back to expatland whenever his owners are traveling, or even when they're not.


If only I could get Maddy in a box and ship her over here too. Just a couple months until our own reunion anyway. Crazy!

Zotz!

In my fourth year of fieldwork at El Zotz (not to be confused with Zotz!), which means "bat" in many Mayan languages, I finally visited the bat cave after which the site was named. I'm not sure why I hadn't gone before; it's not like I have any major fears of bats or ammonia-smelling guano piles. The biologists at CECON say there are three types of bats in the cave, including vampire bats.

So we left camp under the rising moon and setting sun.
The signs were pretty clear.
There was quite the Jurassic Park approach.
The interesting thing about the cave is that it's more like a fissure, or a cenote that has since collapsed. There are some very interesting rock formations though.
To see the main attractions, one must enter the belly of the cave, which involves navigating through rocks completely covered in decomposing bat guano.
But it does afford some nice dusky views.
And, after many, many failed attempts to capture bats in flight (they are in fact much faster than one imagines), the best image is below.
The most impressive part of the journey to the bat cave was the sound that millions of bat generates: it starts like a humming and rises to the sound of a roaring ocean punctuated with staccato infrasonic squeaking. The never ending river of bats that poured out of the cracks got me to thinking: how does one bat decide to go first?

Another close encounter of the Chiroptera kind happened while drawing my final excavation for my dissertation fieldwork at the site of El Palmar. I noticed something small on the ground and asked one of my assistants what it was. "A strange-looking toad."
A baby bat! Not only was it adorable, it was clearly in daylight shock ("blind as a bat," anyone?) and had little idea what to do. I transferred it from our trusty dustpan above to a tunnel created by looters long ago and he perked up and began chirping. I trust mother bat heard his calls that evening and found him.

But what archaeologist would I be without pictures of monkeys?
Or weird bugs?
How about a little jungle escargot?
(Sidenote: Pomacea was a very popular [tasty?] genus with the ancient Maya, as well.)

But really what people want to know is how I deal with the CREEPY things. Tarantulas?
Check.

Snakes? Check.
This poor fer-de-lance wandered into the wall of our laboratory and, unfortunately, became a victim of natural selection.

Over and out!

The Hounds of Hell-Alto: Scavenger Hunt #6

A still from the below video clip -- can you spot the brown dog baring his teeth at me (click on the photo for a close-up)? This explains my distraction, leading me to walk into the man with the bicycle....

Since anthropologists love to foreground their positionality – that means all the stuff that make us who we are (class, race, gender, childhood traumas) and shapes the way we do ethnography and interpret the world around us -- let me say that my experience of the Hounds of Hell-Alto is shaped deeply by an early childhood experience that has left me super scared of dogs. Period. I like them little and yappy and the size I could drop kick if necessary. Some friends with big dogs have helped me (begin to) face those fears (e.g. Elizabeth and Ben’s sweet yet massive pup Dalva). But as a general rule I permanently give off that musky “I fear you” scent that drives the dogs wild. So forgive me if I am unusually negative in this post.

Terror, Panic, and Trepidation are particularly bad scents to give off in El Alto, a city that has recently been the site of much lamenting and gnashing of public officials’ teeth over the astronomical stray dog population. Well, stray dogs and “pets” that residents encourage to hang around their streets at night to keep watch. Thus in addition to the usual factors contributing to strays, El Alto’s enormous dog population thus reflects circulating anxieties about “citizen security,” as residents crown their adobe walls with broken glass and keep vigilance over people who are not recognizable as vecinos (neighbors), a powerful trope for separating the known from the unknown. In a city notorious for its loteadores – people who sell land claiming it as their own, and disappear when the real owners show up to claim the property and start legal proceedings against the new inhabitants -- many lotes (empty properties) and homes still under construction include guard dogs that pace nervously around the skeletal structures, growling menacingly at people as they pass by.

Now I do not condone animal abuse. And yet, I do fear for my hide and am generally in favor of self-preservation, particularly in a city struggling with endemic rabies. Alteños will commonly advise you to just carry big rocks for self-defense. In my zone I frequently see people picking up stones as they approach the packs that circulate on our streets. And, in fact, many dogs are so abused that at the mere sight of you leaning down as if you plan to pick up a rock will cause them to flinch and back away.

This pretense to rock throwing is usually my strategy. But my neighborhood seems to have attracted a particularly rowdy pack of dogs that is unfazed by my pantomime of violence.

The other night I got home much later than I like to (close to 11:30pm), and had to walk a lonely stretch that takes me past their favorite hunting ground: an unpaved callejon (alley) where my neighbors (and I) regularly dump and burn trash when our collection service is being unreliable. Most days the pack can be seen foraging through plastic bags of toilet paper (the septic system can’t handle paper) and vegetable scraps. It is a lean dog’s paradise. On this particular night, an exceptionally mean white dog that often gives me trouble spotted me on the empty streets and came at me full tilt, growling, baring his teeth, and setting off the impulses of several dogs roaming nearby. The whole group flew at me, and I was only saved at the last moment as they crossed into another dog’s territory and he bolted toward them, coming between us. As soon as he had chased them off, he turned his sights on me. With my path home cut-off, I spent the next 20 minutes trying to make my way home through unlit back alleys where I encountered more and more dogs whose instincts had been aroused by all the hysterical neighborhood barking and my stench of terror. I have been jumpy walking home ever since.

This video is a small taste of my daily dog interaction – all clips shot over a 2 day period within 2 blocks of my house (walking to and from the corner store, standing in the doorway of my home). None of these clips include the pack in all its fury – because I try to avoid that scenario. But as you can see, I am still skittish and basically run away at the first sign of approaching canines – thus the unusually shaky shots (many of them of the ground as I flee). So, uh, please forgive the palpable cowardliness.

Scavenger Hunt #6: The Wild Beasts of the Field

As we sojourn in our various anthropological field sites, we are often haunted by people’s misapprehension that we study dinosaurs (paleontology) or bizarre insects (entomology). Or people imagine us trekking about virgin forests among wild beasts and spearing our own boars.

But the wildlife we encounter is often far more mundane.

You’ve got your run of the mill anthropological discussions of animal husbandry and subsistence practices. You have Evans-Pritchard studying cattle sacrifice among the Nuer, Clifford Geertz analyzing the “deep play” of a Balinese cockfight, anthropologists debating the significance of llama fetuses in Aymara rituals, or the ways wealth, prestige and power are expressed in animal form. You’ve got biological anthropologists tracing human evolution from our ape ancestors (Australopithecus afarensis – LUCY!). You have all the anthropologists calling for a radical re-thinking of the role of animals in anthropocentric anthropological accounts.

And then you have me, who spends 90% of my time running away from El Alto’s enormous stray dog population. My sophisticated anthropological analysis of the wild dogs of El Alto?
They’re SCARY!
And they are after me.

What are YOUR experiences of non-human animals, insects, or other wee beasties in your field site? You have two weeks to complete this assignment.

* Finally, a note regarding an upcoming Cohorticulture assignment. In the next couple of days Sohini will be posting the details of our next scavenger hunt task – one that comes in 3 parts -- so that we have time to ponder while we work on this first assignment. Be on the lookout for her explanation.

Chicken bus!

I was trying to figure out how to describe the concept of "chicken bus" here in Guatemala, but good thing Wikipedia has done it for me!

A chicken bus (Spanish: "camioneta") is a colloquial English name for a colorful modified and decorated US school bus and transit bus that transports goods and people between communities in Honduras and Guatemala. The word "chicken" refers to the fact that rural Guatemalans occasionally transport live animals on such buses, a practice that visitors from other countries often find remarkable.^[1][2] The buses are also commonly used in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica.

Often two young men will partner in the operation of a bus, one of whom will have his license, while the other dubs himself the ayudante or "helper". The ayudante is responsible for heckling passengers aboard, collecting money, and organizing the luggage, livestock, produce, etc. onto the roof of the bus — often while in motion. In Guatemala this helper is also known as the "brocha" (brush), referring to the fact that this person prompts people to get inside the bus (brushes them in) by shouting the destinations the bus is reaching.

Each bus is painted vibrantly with its name and permanent route. Buses are stuffed with passengers (whenever possible) and then hard-driven to their destinations at top speed.

An anatomy of the chicken bus: the plaque at the top describes the route in colorful text. This includes local names for places, e.g. "Reu" for "Retalhuleu" or "Chichi" for "Chichicastenango." The "MENDES" is probably the family name of the owner/operator, as many of these are family businesses. Bright stickers mandatory.

How do they modify the school buses? A classmate of mine from Vanderbilt, Mark Kendall, is making a documentary called "La Camioneta" about them as well, photostream here. Preview here.


Now living and working in the same 4 block radius means I don't take the chicken buses very often. However, I do encounter them every day near 9th calle oriente, nicknamed "Calle Sucia" or "Dirty Street" for the layers of chicken bus exhaust that exist on all the walls and sidewalks.

Cough.

Danfo-bonanza

Ok, so I hate starting every post with an apology and an excuse, but it's so hard not to! I was so ambitious, so optimistic, but really have nothing to say for myself. I beg your forgiveness. Part of the reason I've been putting this off, though, and also the reason I was originally so excited, is that buses really are a big deal here. Even the BBC says so. They have their own weekly column in my favorite newspaper and have become a popular icon of the city in the few tourist-friendly souvenir markets, which feature countless impressionistic paintings like this one. And they are central to the next project of a certain junior faculty member in a midwestern public university. So I wanted to do them justice. But that's stressful. So here's what I've got.


There are several different classes of buses in Lagos, but the beat up old yellow Volkswagen "Danfo" vans like the one above are easily the most iconic. Theyare completely hollowed out and installed with three or four hard benches instead of seats, fitting up to 22 people, including one drop seat for the conductor, who hangs out the side of the van as it becomes full, collecting fares and bellowing out the next stop. A favorite Lagos memory is the first time I saw these guys really in action, when they have to actually jump out of the van as it's still moving and then run along side it as passengers exit and new ones enter, all still while the bus is in motion! I don't quite have footage of this (of course, excuses excuses), but here's a conductor getting ready to hang out...



Bus decor is another beloved danfo institution. You can see decorative reflectors on the above piece, and some superfluous antennae on this one.


This one sports a number of common painted motifs -- the Nigerian flag, bad Nike swooshes, and praises to God:


Here's one of my friends' personal favorites (the buses are green on in the super special Victoria Island area), with praise for both family and Chelsea football, of course.


As you can imagine, with 22 people in a van built for what, 8?, danfo are quite crowded, hot, sweaty, and sticky, with everyone sitting shoulder to shoulder jammed in rows with little ventilation. Not extremely desirable, and not the safest either. They break down often along the side of the road, but what's worse, the motor parks where you catch them and change lines are notorious for gangs of area boys, and I've heard too many stories where the driver, conductor, and other "passengers" are all in cahoots to rob you of your money at some remote off-route destination.

So, with all that, I don't really take them by myself too often, usually only riding them with friends who know the system a bit and can give me a heads up if any trouble comes our way. Not surprisingly, then, most of my expat friends have never taken them, and find the idea of it just ridiculous. Which is why, at my friend's Nigeria themed going away party (based primarily off of local funeral traditions--thus the aso ebi matching nativewear), he decided to hire one for the night, and we all posed for photos in it. We definitely earned the crazy oyibos award that night, shocking the police at every checkpoint with a bunch of giggly white people giving the thumbs up from a beat up old danfo...


Besides the danfo, some of the other bus varieties include the much bigger Molue variety, which usually hold well over their official capacity of 44, with people standing in the aisles and hanging out the door along with the conductor. They were also the inspiration for Fela Kuti's song "Suffering and smiling" with the following lyrics:

Every day my people dey inside bus
Every day my people dey inside bus
Forty-nine sitting, ninety-nine standing
Them go pack themselves in like sardine
Them dey faint, them dey wake like cock


Anyway this particular molue has an aesthetic that looks straight of Anthropolgie catalogue, I think.



And finally, there's the new BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) and LagBus system, which much more like the buses we see in the US. The much beloved governor of Lagos, Babatunde Fashola, is credited getting these "modern" buses out on the street, and, what's really impressive, actually enforcing at least some of the dedicated lanes for them on the traffic-plagued Lagos highways. Here, we see one plastered in advertisements for Gov. Fashola himself, who is up for re-election next month.

And well I wanted to share a video from the road but the technology gods just won't have any of it -- blogspot won't let me upload it directly and I even opened a youtube account only to have them refuse the format as well. I will work on this for the future, but in the meantime leave you with this borrowed footage instead. (It's kinda long, but the first couple minutes give you the idea...)

Micros and Minis

My daily commute involves a variety of transportation -- and today all of it is getting blessed.

Most mornings I catch one of the zippy white minibuses that crowd El Alto, while in the evening I make my way home via one of the lumbering microbuses. These decommissioned Blue Bird school busses have been operating in Bolivia for decades – many since the 1950s and 1960s. Sometimes when I’m in a hurry, I make my way down to La Paz in a shared taxi or “trufi” via the switchbacks of Pasankeri. Today I took that route and as the city spread below me it looked like the whole capital was fluttering: it’s carnival and today is Martes de Cha’lla or the Tuesday of libations and blessings; both the capital and its satellite, El Alto, are engulfed in corkscrew paper streamers, pastel plastic flags, loose flower petals, and balloons.

It seems all of La Paz and El Alto are blessing their homes, corners stores, newspapers stands, office buildings, or the neighborhood restaurants they operate out of their adobe homes. I even saw a shoeshine boy walk by this morning with his little kit wrapped in streamers. Although I know to be ready for it, I still can’t help but jump at the startlingly loud firecrackers people set off as they cha’llar their sources of income and ask for blessings, security, and wealth in the coming year. On each block, people are pouring cups of beer and digging into huge plates of deep-fried pork or sajta de pollo, their bodies entangled in the ubiquitous streamers, their heads dusted with confetti.

And because these conjoined cities are filled with taxi, trufi, micro and minibus drivers, the city streets are crowded today with rather festive looking transportion. Unfortunately carnival also means roving packs of children armed with cans of spray foam, super-soaker guns and water balloons, so all of my photos were taken hurriedly as I tried to dodge these little armies (we gringos are big game during carnival, so I spend a lot of time trying to avoid being caught exposed on the street). Here’s a rather sparsely-decorated microbus taken out my trufi window. Others are so laden down with garlands it isn’t clear how anyone can operate them.

It’s a common practice here in Bolivia for sindicatos de transporte or transport unions to hold elaborate blessings for their fleets. The small town of Copacabana – on the shore of lake Titicaca -- is a favorite place to ch’allar: weekly masses followed by car, bus, truck, and taxi blessings performed by both a Catholic priest (with holy water) and an Aymara yatiri/healer (with incense and alcohol). And many buses bear the markings of that blessing year-round: heavy velour drapery embossed in gold bearing the name of the Virgen de Copacabana.

This brief montage gives you a glimpse into the kinds of transportation I use on a daily basis, namely the minibuses that zip through the streets of El Alto and the larger Micros I can rely on to get home late at night. The opening shot shows some typical decor. Many minibuses are littered with stuffed animals. This driver has a ch'uspa from Alasitas (the annual miniatures fair) stuffed with Euros, Bolivianos and Dollars -- meant to represent his hope for wealth (Alasitas offers another opportunity for blessings, usually performed exclusively by a Yatiri /Aymara healer). At the center of this ch’uspa -- although it’s not very clear here due to lighting -- are some air fresheners featuring images of sexxxy ladies in bikinis. So we know his priorities for 2011. The next segment offers a glimpse of what it's like to walk through one of the main overpasses in the Ceja (El Alto’s main commercial district) where voceros call out destinations and prices; it’s followed by a view onto one of the arteries running into the hub of the Ceja. Today my 7-year-old vocero was alternately collecting fares and shooting innocent bystanders with his supersoaker as we raced through El Alto.

At night, Micro drivers fill up their larger, lumbering buses until people are hanging out the door -- but I couldn't quite capture that on video since my evening commute is too dark for my flip camera to capture. On work nights I wait in line sometimes for an hour to get a premium seat on a micro. Getting off the micro, however, can be a little stressful and requires using your butt and gut to force your way through the human wall that occupies the center aisle (here is a brief clip of a bus before it fills up). Finally, I close with a clip from a previous post -- my view from my usual Micro, number 530, making our way slowly through the bustle of the Ceja at night as we all make our way home after a long day of work...

Buses in Kolkata

Thinking about buses, I have this old 90s song, Buses and Trains (anybody?) stuck in my head.

Anyway, on to the scavenger hunt. Full disclosure: I don't take buses here in Kolkata; my transportation is mainly my car. But following is a video--taken from my car--showing Kolkata's iconic yellow Ambassador taxi, followed by the "mini-bus" or the private buses that serve/terrorize (depending on who you ask) the city.



The last time I took a bus here in India was a "luxury" bus to my Mom's hometown of Asansol, which is about 4-5 hours by bus or train. It was the first time we took the bus there. The bus itself was nice enough and air-conditioned (a plus in the summer heat!). But I have never been so afraid for that extended period of time, during which my in-bus snack-box went flying down the aisle at one point (pothole, stray animal in the way, out of control lorry (truck) who knows what the reason for the sudden break was!). Anyway, on the way back, I mutinied and refused to take the bus in favor of the train. I love trains. But that's another post.

Scavenger Call #5: BUSES

Well, after such resounding success on that last post, I'm so excited to announce the next! In particular, all your enthusiasm gives me high hopes to make this a more regular feature again, so with that long-term plan in mind, I am going to suggest a fairly specific task. That way we just might have enough stuff to get us through the next several months of fieldwork (6 months and 3 days for me -- scary!).

Going back to that original list, I think it's time for something from the transport category. And, given anthropologists' proclivity toward road accidents (cf. half of Susan's stories from Bolivia), I could think of no better topic for this post than...

***BUS PHOTOS!!***

So yes, calling all bus stories and photos: colorfully painted passenger buses, translations of things commonly written on buses, competing over how many people squeeze onto your buses, and, for serious bonus points, video of actually riding on said buses! (I know Susan has a head start on this one too, but let her serve as an inspiration to us all.)

You have one week. Let's do this.

Un dia en la vida de una Susana

Annie Dillard once said, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” I shame myself with this phrase when I spend too much of my time here in Bolivia reading gossip blogs and pathetically trying to download episodes of 30 Rock on Korean YouTube (damn you, Hulu international blockers!) instead of going to El Alto’s sprawling markets, knocking on the doors of aid agencies, or hiking in the Andes.

But life in El Alto is unpredictable -- if perpetually cold -- and therefore average days are hard to define. So perhaps a Glee-inspired mash-up?

Currently, most days in my life involve me trying desperately to come to grips with the fact that I am attempting to dance in a university troupe – aiming for Carnival, but more likely for a later entrada (dance parade) when I’ve had time to actually learn the choreography. Tinku rehearsal is Tues/Thursday nights from 8-10:30, and usually for about 3-4 hours on Saturday. So I spend a great many mornings waking up and thinking: Why can’t I sit up without the help of nearby furniture? Why do my feet feel broken? Why am I getting up at 6am when I got home from dance practice at midnight? Why is my coffee all the way across the rain-soaked, hail-splattered patio? But more on this perhaps-unwise aspiration later.

I live in a little two-room apartment that is part of a larger structure owned by my compadres de rutucha (or the Aymara rite of the first haircut), and use a little kitchen across the courtyard. On an average day I put on my faux Uggs to guard against the cold, and start boiling water for coffee. Because water boils at a lower temperature at this altitude, I have to leave it on for a while to kill any bichos trying to infect me with giardia for a 5^th time. Damn you giardia bichos! You are not welcome in my gut!

Here you can see a little glimpse of my home -- that's my room just before the camera pans out onto the street... I kinda love our quiet little neighborhood. (More videos available at KullakaSusana)

By 7:30 I need to be out the door if I am going to make it to the mediation center where I am currently working by 8:30am, though as Sohini and Stacey can attest, I am usually late. My home isn’t so far from my place of work -- as the Condor flies -- but rush hour in the Ceja (the main commercial district of El Alto, where all major arteries of El Alto connect) means it’s at least an hour-long bus ride to the higher, chillier neighborhood of Alto Lima.

Most mornings people in my neighborhood fight for seats on the inexplicably-infrequent mini-buses. But that’s why god gave us elbows. On my way to work, I awe at the Andes Mountains that surround the city, and dodge traffic as I change buses several times along the way. It’s then a 15-minute hike through the unpaved streets now gunked-up by the rainy season. On Wednesdays I get to trek through the weekly open-air market, past huge bags of potatoes and thick slabs of meat hanging from temporary butcher stands, piles of lettuce and tomatoes, and heaps of used clothing spread out on plastic sheets to keep them dry from the nearby open sewers. I love the bustle.

Mondays and Wednesdays I spend at the mediation center as a volunteer/researcher, doing intake for people seeking legal aid on a variety of issues, but most often spouse abuse, family conflict, and child support. Honestly, some of this work can be pretty brutal. Anyone think the National Science Foundation will pay for post-field therapy?

In addition to doing intake or sitting in on the intake sessions done by Center staff, I also help arrange mediation sessions and sit in on those conciliation appointments to observe how people think about and try to manage conflict – and how these aid programs try to intervene in those conflicts. I write-up all these experiences in my fieldnotes – the data we anthropologists later analyze as we write our dissertations, articles, and books.

Days I don’t work at the mediation center are often split between three main activities: catching up on fieldnotes, doing laundry, and conducting interviews with other institutions, aid workers, or government agents. Sometimes I attend workshops, conferences or training sessions on conflict resolution or current events.

While it’s time consuming to do my laundry by hand (in metal or plastic tubs out on our patio), I actually find it really cathartic, and it forces me to stay close to home some days as I alternate between scrubbing and writing. Those days I sip endless cups of Toddy hot chocolate mixed with instant coffee (I hear Sohini gasping in horror) and try to stay warm under my alpaca poncho while grasping my hot water bottle. Like my cohortmates, though, I often camp out at nice coffee shops down in the capital, La Paz, where faster speed WiFi lets me more efficiently check Facebo…I mean, download scholarly articles.

In these past weeks I have been devoting many of my evenings to Tinku dance rehearsal down in La Paz. I drop off my bags and change clothes at my friend Sarah’s apartment in the city center, where I can also catch a taxi ride back to El Alto after practice (it’s almost impossible to find a bus home after 11pm). I may not make the final cut for Carnival, but am kinda loving the catharsis of jumping, shouting, kicking, and punching that comes with our choreography, even if it leaves me breathless and I must limp through the next day. Also, I look like an Amazon next to the 4 foot 5” instructor. I know. I have seen video evidence. You, gentle reader, will never see that video. But here you may enjoy some of my Tinku colleagues (a very small group compared to the 100 or so who are part of the full troupe):

This is a clip of Paso "L" or the "L" sequence, one of about 16 different sequences. I have learned six thus far. There is one month until Carnival. Um. You can understand my doubt about making the cut. Paso "L" was the bane of my existence (it's just a lot of confusing repetition), until I started learning the "chicken" on Saturday (the day I passed my exam and became an official member of Fraternidad Tinkus Puros!). The Chicken is now my least understood paso. And like “L” before it, I now find myself having trouble falling asleep at night as visions of chicken steps dance through my head.

And so, our Day in the Life of Susan Mash-up comes to a close. I will hobble my way through some variation on these themes the next day. Maybe this time having lunch with a friend, or taking one of my godkids to the movies. Maybe this time going to a book launch -- or attending a panel on Vivir Bien (“living well,” the stated indigenous philosophical basis for the Morales Administration’s political platform). Maybe I spend it interviewing someone who works in far-off Santa Cruz via Skype, or talking with former colleagues about how events are unfolding in the country. Or maybe just practicing my dance moves in the courtyard while my goddaughter laughs.

A (not so busy) day in the life of...

So rather than regaling you all with the stories of my "busy" days, I'll share ways I keep myself occupied on those "not so busy" days.

1. Hit the snooze button until 8AM.

2. Come out of my room in a zombie-like state, put water on the electric kettle and make coffee in my french press. As much as I love coffee, I really dislike instant coffee, which is generally the favored form of coffee here--with lots of milk and sugar. So, I have to pack lots of ground coffee from home, and relatives from Bangalore have been wonderful in getting me coffee grown in South India.

3. Read my four newspapers: The Hindu, The Economic Times, The Times of India, and The Telegraph, while eating breakfast.


4. If I'm not doing anything else productive, I spend most of my day at my workspace (see below), alternating between fieldnotes, the interwebs, skype and general procrastination.


5. Some days I wander off to the nearby Cafe Coffee Day (conveniently located in a mall, where I can also spend some quality time shopping), for a change in environment. Though working in coffee shops is not nearly as common here, so I do get strange looks when I've been sitting around for too long.

6. In the early evening, I often spend some time reading and drinking tea up on our roof.


7. Evenings are pretty much a repeat of fieldnotes, interwebs and skype, before dinner, followed by important research activities in the form of media analysis (i.e. television).

A Day in the Life of... an Honorary Expat

Confession: I have been avoiding responding to this call for posts not really because I don't have a routine at the moment, but more because I don't have a routine that involves work.

See, I returned to Lagos the first week of January, only to find my primary fieldsite completely empty of research subjects. While I guess that's a good thing if no one is being trafficked at the moment (or at least no one is being subjected to the dubious rehabilitation process offered here), it makes my research a tad more difficult. Ok, I thought, I'll just pursue that long list of other options I've been meaning to get to! But after a few legitimate roadblocks there, I was stumped for things to do. After almost a month back, I've finally started to work some of that stuff out, but in the meantime, I kinda got into the routine of not doing much.

I blame that mostly on having an altogether too comfortable setup over here. See, what happened is, a little while ago, I took up a house-sitting gig for some expatriate American friends who were traveling back to the States for a couple weeks. Well, my friends got back, but I never really left. I'm looking for new accommodation now, but am meanwhile taking full advantage of all this place has to offer, and that's not exactly been a good thing for me in terms of productivity. I don't mean you have to be uncomfortable to do fieldwork. I just mean that never in my life, whether I am in the US or elsewhere, should I be given this latitude for laziness, because I will just never leave the house. Or, in this case, the compound. So, I'm just going to call this a day in the life of an honorary expat...thereby saving the juicy real Nigeria daily life stuff for other individual posts -- sneaky huh?

***

In the morning I wake up in my beautifully furnished and air-conditioned bedroom, one of two spare rooms in my friends' expansive expat flat. Usually I am woken up by my friends' German shorthair pointer Friday. Full name Thank God It's Friday, after the two very common Nigerian names Thank God and Friday, this six month old pup loves to curl up in bed under the covers, so when I'm the last person asleep in the house, he knows where to find me. I mean, I didn't go to grad school to wake up for a 9-5 right? Anyway, this is him, waiting patiently for the double tap invitation up to snuggle:

Friday

At this point I usually tell myself that I was just about to get up, but how could I refuse some puppy cuddles, so I drift off again for a bit. Finally, when the shame of sleeping in and/or my compulsive internet habit overtakes me, I wake up enough to check Facebook and email on my friends' nearly-US-fast wifi. Eventually I manage to drag myself out of the room and into the kitchen, often trying to pretend I've already been awake and productive for hours at the computer in my room, though I doubt this charade is ever successful. I make a cup of hot tea--another luxury of living in A/C--and eat a bowl of imported American cereal. Then I shower with hot water that actually has enough pressure to work like a real shower, while the steward makes my bed and washes my dishes. Seriously, it's ridiculous.

On good days, my friends' driver is available to take me around to run any errands I finally make myself do. Pretty much all people in the compound, and every other expat in the company for that matter, have the exact same car, with very minor variations. It's a Toyota Prado (basically a Land Cruiser), and they come in black, blue, or gray. Sometimes they have huge sparkly gold racing stripes, and sometimes not. These distinctions are very important when all 40 people in your compound drive the same car.

Prado round-up

When I get back from running errands, I usually go for a run. Of course, it's too hot and humid and dusty and polluted and smelly and sewage-y and exhuast-y and crowded and sidewalkless and you get the idea to go running outside, so, after over a decade of resistance, I have finally given into the treadmill. The compound here has a pretty well equipped little gym that is super air-conditioned and little used, so that's been great. Only problem is that the first time I used it, I totally thought the treadmill measured in miles, and I reported back to my friends how astonished I was at my own performance, running five miles after not running at all for months! Of course, it's actually in kilometers, but ever since then, I have been determined do five miles for real. So, for the past couple weeks, I have successfully worked up to a consistent 2K warm up, 5K run, and 1K cool down, and the new goal is to get it all in, including two stretching sessions, in the one hour it takes to listen to a This American Life episode. I'm still about 3 minutes over, but, as you might notice from my detailed account here, this is pretty much all I'm motivated about at the moment, so I expect to break that goal soon. As an aside, I can't say enough for how much I love a podcast workout; I was finding otherwise that I'd get bored before I'd get tired. Since I've only got a month or two of episodes left, though, other suggestions would be much appreciated!

Compound amenities: gym, tennis court, swimming pool,
outdoor kitchen and grill, lots of palm trees.

After the run, if it's still sunny out, and if the Harmattan winds manage to bring down the temperature without bringing up the dust too much, I might sneak in some time by the pool, but otherwise I come back upstairs and hang with my hosts. The lady of the house is a most excellent chef and has taken me in as the designated sous chef in what is honestly one of the best equipped kitchens I've ever cooked in, American or otherwise. Who do you know with a deli slicer, for example? Anyway, it's really incredible what they can put together. In the last week or so, I helped make ricotta cheese, Italian sausage, and four different home brews! Of course, it helps to have that annual shipping container of food and other consumables from the US, plus suitcases of meats, cheese, and produce from friends who regularly fly back and forth between here and the US and UK with luggage room to spare.

After dinner we watch TV or movies and joke about how hard their "hardship" post is. And since I'm planning on moving soon (soon! I swear! or I hope. very soon) I mostly think about how I am going to be able to adjust to bucket baths and daily blackouts and an all-palm-oil-all-the-time diet again. But I'm also excited about getting back into the real world... especially when I know I might still be able to take mini weekend vacations back to expat land as needed.

Ikoyi: Land of expats and elites.
And yes, that would be an ocean view from my room!
Well, lagoon anyway. Close enough.

A Day in the Life of...

Dear blog,

I receive many questions about what I am doing here. This includes "here" in the world more broadly, my life, and my professional quest to reach doctordom, as well as the "here" in the lab in Antigua, Guatemala.

So in an attempt to clarify what I "do," I begin another scavenger hunt, Numero 4: A Day in the Life of...

1) Wake up, shower, be careful not to hit my head on the sloped ceiling. Also be careful not to break the toilet chain because it's a pain to fix. Get dressed and put on my llama slippers that look like this:
2) Eat breakfast. Either Quaker Squares or peanut butter toast. Caitlin Walker is responsible for my craving for Quaker Squares.
3) Get coffee either by making it, or splurging on a tasty latte from Refuge, which is 2 doors down from my lab/house.
4) Plug in speakers to my iPod touch that my lovely cohortmates and fellow bloggers gave me to start the day with soothing or energizing tunes, depending on the mood.
5) Set up my drawing table with fresh printer paper, ruler, pens, etc.
6) Choose my fresh victims, one of many, many bags of ceramic rims which are considered diagnostic for one reason or another. This could be because they are pretty, or are from a definite time period, or just plain weird.
7) Produce a pencil drawing of the cross-section of the sherds. For example:
8) Repeat steps 6-7 until I get hungry or twitchy.
9) Take photos of drawn sherds, such as:
10) Scoot over to the Casa Herrera, where I maintain a desk, in order to scan all the drawings from the day and upload photos. This, unfortunately, involves wearing actual shoes.
11) Basically, from the pencil drawings, I want to have dissertation figure-ready profiles, so I perform some Photoshop magic to trace all the rims. Then filling them in with black, I obtain:
12) Voila! Instant dissertation figures that can be copied, pasted, grouped, etc. by whatever I want to do. For instance, if I want to make a chronological chart of all the ceramics in one type, such as Aguila Naranja here, then I have all the rims already to mix and match.
13) Check on my Words With Friends games. Want to take me on? Get in touch.
14) Read news, check mail, Facebook, etc.
15) Watch movies to escape it all.

Now I don't want you think that all my sherds are all eroded and un-fun as the ones I've shown here. Because sometimes I find gems, like this one:
Now, this beautiful Urita Gubiado-Inciso (Gouged-Incised) piece is cool for a special reason. Take a closer look at the difference in the weathering of the part on the far right:
The sherd to the left side of the break is from a stratigraphic level in the excavation that was deposited later in time, therefore closer to the surface, therefore more vulnerable to the elements. The sherd to the right is from a lower excavated level, which is why it looks a bit less worn.

So what does that mean, blog? It means that the deposit I excavated happened at one time, or over a very short period of time. This pot was broken and thrown down in a big pile of broken pottery as an event, a ritual deposit of some sort, rather than just in the trash.

When did this happen, you ask? Well, the folks over at Beta Analytic, Inc. tell me that this deposit occurred between a 2-sigma calibrated radiocarbon range of AD 230-410, which puts it in the early 4th Century, AD. This falls securely within the Early Classic Maya Period, which means that the people of El Palmar probably left around that time.

Yes, blog, I know what you're thinking. Did the Palmar folks take their show on up to El Diablo, which had a fantastic tomb that dated to shortly after this deposit?

Only time and science will tell!

Sincerely,

James