Day 4: Attack dogs, river mud, Santa Barbara Hill, oh my!

I didn’t get a chance to post an entry yesterday because it was a long, but extremely productive day.

Our day started out back in Ascención, finishing up the last seven homes in that community.  We started trekking around the neighborhood, going door to door to recruit people, since some of the folks who had signed up the previous day weren’t home (it was the Founder’s Day holiday after all).  The houses were much smaller than the previous day, with all five of us barely being about to squeeze into the room to take our samples.  The most memorable of these small rooms was probably about halfway through the day and the room itself was only about 5 and a half feet high, with the door way being even less than that (I hit my head three times – which never happens to someone my height in the States when you walk out of a room).  We saw plenty of chickens, cats, and of course dogs throughout the day.  At one point, as we were walking to a home up never-ending hills, we were surrounded by dogs at all points of exit from the T in the street.  Luckily, the Peruvian woman who owned the home we were trying to get to was our shield from the barking, growling attack dogs.  I’m starting to think I should have splurged on the Rabies series before I left…

After a delicious and much-earned lunch, we set out to sample along a transect in Huancavelica.  We took a lot of soil samples, and one sediment sample so far, which was the most interesting of all of them.  Susan and I, with Nick, Ruben, and Javier’s help, climbed down a pile of garbage (I’m not kidding, wait until you see the picture) to a shit-of-all-types river bank, put on our gloves, and got into that smelly sediment for the good of science.  We both nearly threw up from the smell.  I keep saying I wish I could bottle up smells and bring them home for people, but that one I would only keep as a memory of that experience.  In the same journey, I stood face-to-face with the Santa Barbara Hill, where the mercury was mined (although, I was on the non-mining side of the hill) in the colonial period, and the pictures don’t even come close to capturing the steepness of the mountain.  What an unbelievable moment – to finally see the place that was the very beginning of our research 400 years ago.

Today is our second community meeting, then we’re going to head straight into sampling as quickly as possible.  Many, many more homes to go!