the week in review

So the week in Searcy (pronounced "sur-see") was pretty productive. I may have gone deer hunting and eaten beef jerky...I will neither confirm nor deny.

Arkansas is supposedly "the natural state." But I saw mostly rice, cotton & soybean fields. Lots and lots and lots of them. Not terribly natural. The food in Searcy and the surrounding communities left something to be desired. Sweet tea is a bad thing. And I went a week without good coffee. I had an interesting exchange with a cook in a motel/gas station/convenience store/lunch counter. He had rattled off the omelet options (which I think were something like cheese, ham & cheese or western) and I spaced out for a second. I heard him say something about onions and peppers and jumped to the conclusion that there was some sort of vegetable option. I asked for a vegetable omelet and was met by a blank stare and the question, "you mean, like lettuce and tomato?" I just got the western.

The people were lovely, though. A member of the housekeeping staff seemed genuinely sad to see me go, even though I had never spoken with her before (or had any interactions with any of the housekeeping staff, for that matter-- I kept weird hours). At home, I'm pretty sure this woman would have ignored me. The Fish & Wildlife guys that went out hunting with us at night were all nice, too.

I'm in Athens now. Not sure how the weekend will go. I have some errands to run, but there's a football game tomorrow. Athens is supposedly impassable on home football Saturdays (people are making it out to be something on the order of Boston on Marathon Monday...I can't imagine it's that bad.) And the buses don't run on Sundays. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to get stuff done. Oh, well. I have a lot of boards review questions to go through. I can always stay here and so that.

Too tired to think clearly right now...more to come.

Searcy, Arkansas

Searcy (population 21K) is a little bigger than I thought it would be. There are a few non-Wal-Mart grocery stores, and the one that we visited today had some hippie provisions. Yay. I can eat my regular cereal and organic yogurt. The hotel has free high-speed internet and a fitness room. More yay. I don't particularly enjoy living out of hotel rooms. It's nice when they have some decent amenities.

A few people went into the field this evening to collect some deer. The rest of us will post them tomorrow.

More to come.

photos

The girls, who will hopefully behave themselves for Peter while I'm gone.

Or adventures down South, as the case may be

Hopefully I'll have frequent enough access to the internet to use this blog for my month down south.

Flew from Boston to Atlanta yesterday. Studied for boards in the airport for a few hours (yuck), then got picked up by 2 SCWDS grad students. (SCWDS is the Southeast Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, the group with whom I'm spending this 4-week externship). Emily & Jess are nice girls. We drove for a looong time. There's not a whole lot in central Alabama.

(I tried to post a map in there, but it didn't work. Go to google maps and type in directions from Athens, GA to Memphis, TN. You'll get the idea.)

We spent the night at a hotel on Beale St. in Memphis. Got a beer at Silky O'Sullivan's (dueling piano bar with goats that live out next to the patio). I forgot that one can still smoke in bars that aren't in Mass or NYC. Ew.

Breakfast soon, then heading northwest into Arkansas.

Among my goals for the week in Arkansas-- not to break my streak of never having entered a Wal-Mart. Wish me luck.

trip home

I had some pretty productive meetings with people from the Ministry of Agriculture's (HPAI) Campaign Management Unit & with the FAO HPAI program before I left. I've got quite a bit of work ahead of me, writing my preliminary paper, going through data, and starting the risk analysis portion of the project.

My last couple of days in Jakarta with Thersya & her family were lovely. It was nice to have a few days off and a friend to spend them with. One of her sisters was also visiting, and we took it easy for the weekend. Ate some good food, sat in some outdoor cafes, did some more gift shopping, slept in...it was nice to be lazy. Thersya's family has cable (with ESPN) & I woke up early-ish Sat morning and got to watch a Yankee's game (the Fri PM Devil Ray's game- Chien-Ming Wang's 2 hit, 2 walk shutout). Since I've been living in Red Sox Nation for several years, I appreciate every opportunity to watch Yankees games, especially in a non-hostile environment. Thersya's family is quite close, and spending time with them made me miss my family a lot. I'm heading down to the beautiful Garden State to see them in a couple of weeks, and I'm really looking forward to that trip...except for the unavoidable traffic in CT and the car with no air conditioning.

On the subject of good food, Kobe beef is absolutely heavenly...I think I'm ruined for steak for a while.

The trip home went smoothly. LAX was a rude awakening after the Hong Kong airport, but I figured that my 6-hour layover in LA would not exactly be fun. We don't do airports or air travel well in the States...Singapore & Hong Kong do airports & air travel really well. The jet lag Monday was fierce. With help from Peter, I managed to keep myself awake (save 2 short naps) until after 9:00 Monday night. I was apparently pretty entertaining on both sides of those naps. Peter said that I was practically delerious, babbling away about who knows what. I spoke briefly with my parents shortly before the 2nd nap. They're spending some time in Britian with my sister, Megan, and her husband's family. I forget exactly where Andy is from...somehwere in Suffolk. They're all having a nice time, despite the fact that Gabby had decided to hold off on theething until they left for England. I have a funny feeling that I was somewhat incoherant during that conversation. I slept like a rock last night, and I feel OK so far today. Fingers crossed.

As I go through my photos, I'll probably post more.

Hope you're all well.

-Janine

photos from Jakarta

Here are a couple from the day of museum-going I had with Thersya in Jakarta. Unfortunarely, I have no photos of Thersya. Oh, well. More reason to go back to Indonesia! She & I sketched out a rough agenda for a trip...maybe that Peter & I can take with Mike & John? Or Josh & Anna? Or Meaghan? Or Kirsten? Hmmmmm? A few weeks in Java & Bali?

Anyway, I wrote earlier about the staircases & cannon, but here are some brief details again. The cannon was brought to Batavia, the center of Dutch culture in Jakarta, when the last of the Portuguese territories were taken over by the Dutch. These beautiful spiral staircases were one of Thersya's & my favorite parts of the museums. The collections weren't curated well at all, but the buildings were incredible...Dutch colonial structures with beautiful windows & staircases; big, old, wide floor boards; and some gorgeous old pieces of furniture.

photos from the last week in Lembang

We had an unexpectedly short work day during our last week in Lambang. We (Utari, Dedi and I) took this opportunity to stop by the Buddhist meditation center in Bandung district. It was gorgeous!

I like this photo of Dedi. He usually made funny faces when I took pictures of him.


Since I hate having my picture taken, here is one of the few photos I have of myself from the trip.



It was a lovely afternoon, and Utari, Dedi & I had a really nice time.

home

Hello,

I touched down at Logan at 6AM this morning (local time). The Delta red-eye from LAX gets the thumbs-down. I wanted to give whoever decided that a Bruce Willis action flick would make a good on-flight movie for the red-eye a piece of my mind. I'm pretty jet-lagged, so I'll update with photos, etc. tonight or tomorrow.

-Janine

inter-web superstar

I just discovered that this blog is linked from the vet school website.

http://vet.tufts.edu/content/events/950750028.html

Which feels a little strange, I have to say. I thought this would be read by friends & family. Hope I didn't post anything incriminating. I don't think I did. hmm. That would be very unprofessional for something that is linked from a professional school website.

I debriefed this morning with livestock services folks...they all work at the Ministry of Agriculture's (HPAI) campaign Management Unit. They had some really good input for me. And I had a bunch of documents on my laptop that I'm using as background refs that I gave to them. A productive meeting for all (I hope...it was for me, at least). One of them was a PDR (participatory disease response) team member from Yojakarta before she came to the central CMU a few months ago. So she had an interesting perspective on my work.

I'm meeting with some FAO personnel tomorrow to discuss HPAI surveillance and wrap up loose ends. After that, I'm off to spend another day or so having fun with Thersya before I head for home.

By the way, Chris was on News Hour earlier this month. Haven't watched the clip. That might have to wait until I'm back in broadband-landia and not in the world of dial-up access.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/july-dec06/birdflu_07-03.html

I'll try to post more photos before I head for home. If not, stay tuned. I'll get more up as I recover from my impending jet lag. (Which I have to do in time to act coherant when I stand in front of our cholinesterase analysis poster at the Wildlife Disease Association conference...I'm so glad it's only at UCONN and won't require major travel!)

Hope you're all well.

-Janine

weekend in Jakarta with Thersya!

I had a lovely weekend with Thersya in Jakarta. (For those of you who met me after college, Thersya and I graduated from Drew together—she’s a lovely Chinese-Indonesian and grew up between Singapore & Jakarta. She has been back in Jakarta for almost 3 years. Oh, and she’s a lot of fun.)

I took the executive-class train between Bandung & Jakarta. It was a pretty nice ride…big seats, tons of leg room (or crap room, if you are a short pack rat like myself), and they feed you and show you bad movies & music videos…all for only 75,000 Rp (about $8.30). It’s a beautiful ride. Well, most of it is. The train goes right by some small villages that you can’t see from the highway. Seeing the ramshackle houses, gross streams that get household waste water and piles of burning trash remind you that you’re in a developing country. A beautiful country, but very much a developing country with a lot of poverty.

Anyway, Thersya and I had a fun tourist weekend. On Saturday, we went to a few museums downtown that are all in the Kota area—known as Batavia during the Dutch colonial period. Not many of the old buildings are left, but the old town square is still there, and some of the buildings right around it are now museums. We went to the Wayang (puppet) museum, the ceramics museum, the Jakarta History museum and Balai Seni Rupa (the fine arts museum). Sounds like an overwhelming museum day, I know, but they are all small and not well-curated, so we went through them pretty quickly. It’s sort of sad: they have some really nice things, but the buildings are all dusty, the temperature & humidity aren’t controlled, there’s very little information posted in most of the galleries, etc. But the buildings themselves were gorgeous: high ceilings; huge old windows; impressive, solid beams and floor boards; beautiful staircases (including the two most beautiful spiral staircases I’ve ever seen). It was Thersya’s first time at any of these museums, too. We decided that we liked the buildings more than a lot of the galleries, but there was some gorgeous furniture in the history museum (big pieces, solid teak, really intricately carved) and a few really nice paintings in the art museum. The Cannon Si Jaguar was kind of neat, too. It was a Portuguese cannon, brought to as a trophy to Batavia after the Dutch booted the Portuguese out of Indonesia (mid 1600s). It has a hand making an impolite gesture coming out of the back…for some reason, it’s a sexual symbol in Indonesia and women who are having trouble getting pregnant supposedly sit on it.

We were eating champions this weekend. Sushi & sashimi on Friday night (from a restaurant that sends little covered dishes along the big conveyor belt that goes around the big rectangular bar—all the rage in Japan these days.) Dinner was followed by some wine at an outdoor bar/café & a late-night phone call to Mikey for his birthday!) Chinese noodles for breakfast and mutton sashimi for lunch with Thersya’s family on Saturday. Korean barbecue for Saturday dinner with some of Thersya’s friends. Dim sum brunch on Sunday (after a Balinese massage & scrub in the morning). Mmmmmm. Everything was so good. The food & weather in southeast Asia really agree with me. And I think I made Thersya’s dad happy by enthusiastically eating food with a lot of chilies.

Thersya and I were also shopping champions. I hate clothes shopping for myself, but I love shopping for gifts for people. And the array of batik, wood carvings, etc. in Sarinah department store is absolutely dizzying. Sarinah is a big department store downtown with one entire floor devoted to batik and other textiles, and another devoted only to other handicrafts. I got some really nice gifts. And the department stores that carry handicrafts usually have good quality and reasonable prices in an environment where bargaining is not part of the package. Westerners who shop in little stores here & there usually get quoted outrageous prices to start with and have to either completely overspend or bargain people down. That requires a lot of energy.

I head back home in less than a week. I have to make a list of all the outstanding photos I want to take and all of the food I want to eat before I leave! Haven’t had jackfruit yet. Don’t think I can hack durian (on this trip, at least). I did eat chicken feet at dim sum on Sunday, though. Surprisingly good. A little messy to eat, though—lots of little bones to spit out. So I’ve revised my “I will not eat…” list down to durian, brain (prion diseases freak me out), and bits of intestine. I will happily eat sausage in natural casings, but the sight of chopped up, cooked pieces of intestines grosses me out. The livestock services folks who go out into the field with us find this list to be quite amusing.

I’m going to see Thersya again for my last day or so in the country. I’m heading to Jakarta on Wednesday PM and going in to the office Thursday to debrief. Theoretically. They've not volunteered a lot of details re: Thursday morning. Like which office I should go to for a 9:30 AM presentation. Or what I'm supposed to do in the afternoon. Or whether they have anything they want me to do on Friday. You know, little things. Anyway, I'll meet up again with Thersya on Froday PM or Saturday AM, and then I'm back to the States eeeeeearly Sunday morning.

I'm trying to upload photos, but it doesn't seem to be working. Will try again later.

-Janine

Pangandaran

The beach resort community of Pangandaran is only about 3 hours further to the south and east past Tasikmalaya. So Utari & I decided to go for the weekend (Fri night to early Mon morning). I had really considered shifting our work in Tasik to Tuesday and spending an extra day at the beach, and I am so, so grateful that my workaholic tendencies won out. We left Pangandaran at 6:30 AM and an earthquake occurred about 9 hours later. A tsunami slammed the western side of Pangandaran. The town is on a narrow isthmus off the southern Java coast, in the SE corner of West Java. It has a large, forested national park at the headland. The whole town is just above sea level. I’ve heard estimates of 3-6 meters for the height of the tsunami. So far, I think there are about 350 confirmed dead.

Some of you will soon be getting cheery postcards written out at the beach. I felt weird sending them.

Sigh.

We had a really, really nice time in Pangandaran. We stayed in a teeny hotel—not the nicest place I’ve ever stayed in. But it was pretty clean, the rooms opened onto a little garden, the owners were really sweet and it was on an alley between the 2 main drags, about 2 blocks from the entrance to the national park and a few blocks from the fish markets, restaurants, etc. So it was pretty quiet, except when the mosque across the street was blaring the calls to prayer at a truly ear-splitting volume. They gave us breakfast, which we didn’t realize when we booked the room. Coffee/tea, toast, hard-boiled eggs and, each morning, an entire pineapple cut into the shape of a flower and sliced. Yum. And it was really cheap.

The eastern side of the isthmus had no beach, pretty much. There was a big retaining wall down the whole length of the town and a few areas to land boats and pull out fishing nets. The western side was the swimming beach. Black sand, nice waves. It was crowded, but not unbearably so. I saw a few guys in trunks, but the only 2 women I saw in bathing suits were westerners. A lot of the women swam in long pants, long-sleeved shirts and veils. And I saw several people walking down the beach in jackets and sweaters. It wasn’t as hot as I expected (not like Jakarta), but coats?!?!

I ate a lot of seafood: shrimp (with the shells still on…surprisingly good), crab, squid and fish. I think I gained back all the weight I lost while I was sick and then some. Sad.

On Saturday, we went to see a big international kite festival. Sat was smaller, mostly Indonesian kites. Sunday, we discovered too late, was the day that the international teams rolled out their huge, really fancy kites. Oh, well. In the afternoon, we went to the national park and wandered around. We did it sans the local guides, who will take you into the areas of the park that are supposed to be off-limits because they were getting trampled. No, thanks. Saw the barking deer and a mess of gibbons. The monkeys are really naughty…people tease them and feed them all kinds of crap, so they’ve gotten really bold. As we were on our way in, a large male ran right up to me, jumped up onto my messenger bag, and tried to take my water bottle. No way, man! I yanked the bottle out of his hands and he ran away. Over the course of the afternoon, we saw a lot of people feeding the gibbons peanuts, chips and all sorts of other crap. Didn’t see many birds. (I’ve been using my Indo bird guide to ID people’s pets…lots of people have pet passerines, usually in small cages. Sad.)

We browsed through some of the junk shops, too. A lot of t-shirts, a zillion temporary tattoo stands, and other usual beach junk. There were a lot of people hawking shells, chunks of coral, etc. Taxidermy is big: I saw small komodo dragons, a lot of fish, and a disturbing number of turtles, some of them quite large. Should have taken pictures. Really, really sad.

On Sunday, we did a Green Canyon day tour. They take people in groups of 4 to see a few local industries: people who make coconut palm sugar, wooden puppets (both of which we saw), tofu, and shrimp crackers (neither of which we saw). Then, they take you to the Canyon for a boat ride up a river (through the canyon, which is indeed green), and at the end you can swim almost all the way up to a waterfall. Gorgeous. Then, it’s off to a nearby beach for lunch and lazing about on the beach for a couple of hours. A really nice day.

Monday was back to work early. At the time I was not particularly jazzed; in retrospect, though, it was a good thing that we left. Sad.

Photos: wayang golek (wooden puppets, usually characters in traditional Indonesian and/or Hindu stories); I loved the motorcycles crossing the bamboo suspension bridge; pulling in a fishing net.

Tasikmalaya

We spent Thurs, Fri & Mon working in Tasikmalaya. Tasik has a lot of longyam (integrated poultry/fish farms) and I’m going to post some photos here. The chicken houses (more broiler, but some layer, too) are built over ponds. Depending on the specific management practices, the broiler litter may be shoveled into the pond a couple of times a production period (30-35 days). The broilers may not have littler for the last 10-12 days or so…they just walk around on the bamboo floor and poop (mostly) through the slats. Layers are, sadly, housed in battery-style cages and the floors under their cages are much more open. Most of these producers are small (2000 chickens or less in a house) and their biosecurity practices are terrible. Add that to the neighbors’ backyard chickens, ducks and geese that run all over creation, and you’re just asking for a hi-path avian influenza outbreak. Yikes.

The interviews went well, though. Everyone was so happy to help us and the folks who accompanied us around bent over backward to be helpful and enthusiastically invited us back. I had one really long interview because the father, 2 sons & a neighbor (who all work in longyam broiler production) had a ton of questions about HPAI. I couldn’t answer a lot of them (epidemiologists, virologists, vets, physicians, everyone is stumped about this human case business: why the fatality rate is so high; why a good chunk of the victims were healthy adults; and why only 50-some-odd people have gotten sick in Indonesia, which has a huge population and literally millions and millions of people have close contact with poultry and other birds on a regular basis.) But I told them that the best things they could do to protect themselves were to use PPE and to use good biosecurity in their own chicken houses. If they keep their birds healthy by using dedicated clothing and tools, disinfecting their tools and boots when they enter & exit the houses, avoiding contact with other birds, etc. they will be protecting themselves, as well. They seemed to be pretty happy to hear practical suggestions, and also excited to do something to help out the new PDS/PDR (participatory disease surveillance and response) teams that were trained by FAO the week I arrived and just started working in Tasik as of July 1.

The hotel in Tasik that we stayed in was really funny. They bragged about how they were the only hotel in Tasik with “stars” (3 of them, but it was not clear from whence they came.) It was clearly fancy at one point, perhaps 25-30 years ago. Now it’s just ornate and sort of shabby. And way too expensive. We had a late dinner in their ‘coffee shop’ which had a gold disco ball, loud elevator music, and a fabulous stage—complete with air-brushed portraits of Elvis & Marilyn Monroe. They also had a clearly posted policy that ladies entertaining gentleman visitors (and vice-versa) had to keep their doors open—tee, hee. A nice thing: they had a few more TV channels than our hotel in Lembang, including Real Madrid TV. So I got to watch a re-play of a playoff game from earlier this year, with commentary in English. But the hotel in Lembang is *so* much nicer…really clean, super-nice staff that throws food at us, hot water all the time, normal toilet. (Never underestimate the value of having regular access to a decent toilet while traveling.)

Photos: broiler and layer longyam, inside & outside. Chickens in a tree (gave some guys fixing a car a good laugh by taking that picture).

Orang amerika!

We worked in two more subdistricts of Bandung District on Weds, July 12. Hopefully, we’ll only have 1 more day of manure trader interviews left. We were accompanied by a woman from the local DINAS (livestock services) who had a ball…she bought snacks everywhere we went and ran around talking to people. When we finished for the day, we went back to her house and she tried to feed us. We had had a huge lunch: rice, fried tofu, chicken livers cooked in a gorgeous sauce and fried salted fish—small enough not to worry about the bones, except the vertebrae. With raw string beans and raw teeny, green, round eggplants. Delicious. (I am having a lot of fun picturing the yucky faces that some of you are making now…) I begged off eating more. While Utari was in the bathroom, the woman from DINAS (Junhariya) grabbed me by the hand and marched me outside to show me her neighbor’s mushroom greenhouses. The first few were locked, so we walked about (she still had me by the hand), looking for an open one. All the while, she was announcing “orang amerika! (person from America!)” to her neighbors. One of them tried to invite me in to eat a doughnut. Fortunately, we were on a mushroom-finding mission, so I didn’t have to eat any more. We finally found a neighbor who was a mushroom-greenhouse employee, and she let us in. Junhariya pointed out all the big, pretty ones to me, then proceeded to pick some of them off their little compressed sawdust substrate-thingies and hand them to me. By the time she was satisfied, I had a large armful of beautiful, huge oyster mushrooms—and absolutely no clue what to do with them. Fortunately, Dedi (our driver) likes mushrooms, so I sent him home with them. Junhariya was a hoot. I think we’re spending a day with her again at the end of the week. It should be fun.

another Singapore photo

This one got left out of the other Singapore photos somehow.