Blogs from Monteverde, Puntarenas, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean - page 17

Hello to All! This week our main focus has been to learn about Anthropological Measurements: things like height, weight (and calculating Body Mass Index - BMI) as well as blood glucose and blood pressure, skin fold measurements for detecting body fat, etc. We had lots of lectures and practice sessions Monday through Wednesday. This was all preparation for holding a local Health Fair where we would do this in a rural community called Canitas which is northwest of Monteverde. This was held on Thursday and we all think that it went pretty well. We would have liked to have more than the 30 or so participants but we will have to work with the data we collected. We will be running analyses on the data next week and doing more interviews for our research. It was ... read more

It is Sunday evening and I have had my first officially free day since we all started the program on June 22. Yesterday my group (the Nutrition Group) went with a fellow USF Graduate Student to 2 of the farms that he has been studying for his research. We split up into 2 groups and worked the fields for a while with each of the farmers. Our idea was to speak with farmers to see what motivates them to grow and whether they would be interested in selling their produce to the local farmer's market. We all used machetes and long knives to chop weeds around the plants in the field and were quite tired when we were done. One group had a very talkative farmer while the other had a very quiet farmer. We enjoyed ... read more

From Wednesday until Friday the Field School Group went back and forth between the Poco a Poco (Little by little) Hotel and the Monteverde Institute. We had several introductory classes about the institute as well as anthropology and public health lectures from our instructors. On Friday morning we were grouped into beginning, intermediate and advanced and took our first Spanish Class. Later in the afternoon we met our homestay families and then we all went to their houses for our first night. My family consistes of Marlena and Jose and their 22 year old daughter named Silvia. Jose works as a bus driver and also does some tractor work on the roads and Marlena stays at home and cares for Silvia's 2 year old daughter, Maria Jose. Silvia works in a very nice hotel (much more ... read more

Hi from a very wet Costa Rica One thing I didn't mention on my last blog, as I did not think it would be important, is that I got what I thought was a blister on my foot. The day after I last updated we had an epic travel day which involved no fewer then five buses, two taxis and one border crossing. We started of with a taxi ride to the bus station with a much more relaxed driver then the night before. We then got on a bus towards the border but we had to change buses half way . The border crossing was very easy with our tour leader taking all our passports to imigration and the officials did not even look at us. Then we were in Nicuragua. Then we got on ... read more

Steve- The last night in Tamerindo was quite eventful. We went out for a few drinks when halfway through the night a Boa Constrictor was founf in one of the toilets! There was a bit of commotion from the staff before one of the chefs went in and got him. He was about 5 feet long and the chef posed for photos with him before letting other people in the bar pose for photos with him. They then rang the local rspca to take him away. What a night to forget the camera! We left Tamerindo the next afternoon and thankfully there was a bit of surf which was great, especially with the water being as warm as bath water. Sure beats England. The trip to Monteverde took about 5 hours with the last hour and ... read more