THE MEETING
The meeting in the Suojia Wetlands section of the Sanjiangyuan
National Nature Reserve (SNNR) was an amazing success. In attendance
were: the Nature Reserve, the Upper Yangtze Organization (UYO), about
20 representatives from different communities in the area, the
ecological research station managers and staff, and us. We worked out
many of the details of our collaboration on wildlife research and
monitoring. We outfitted the first wildlife monitors and game wardens
for the reserve and generally built up our friendships with the other
organizations and communities. The extended time together allowed us
to build trust and be able to effectively share our views on the
importance of community involvement and sound science (both of which
can be quite rare here).
During the six day meeting, we took two field trips- one into the
wetlands to count the last migratory birds of the season, and one to
the Tibetan Antelope area where we saw several herds of these
beautiful but endangered animals. One herd numbered 57 and was
entirely made up of males with long black horns.
On the way back to the research station from the antelope area, we
stopped at a nomad's tent in the middle of a broad, empty plane.
Outside he had a Toyota land cruiser from the early 80s that was
marked as border patrol. Inside the tent we dined on the usual:
stuffed intestines boiled then pan fried, canned fish, boiled meat,
and canned fat. I realized this time that the canned fat wasn't pork
but duck fat with bits of skin. Anyway- what was most surprising in
this tent was the telephone. We were six hours drive beyond the last
paved road, an hour's drive beyond the last electricity or phone lines
and here this nomad family was with a satellite phone powered by solar
panels! Crazy. We called up our teammates back home and found out that
the other two we had been expecting would not be joining us due to the
ill effects of altitude.
HEALTH NEWS
Altitude affects people differently at different times. A person can
go up and down from altitude with no discomfort five or six times and
the seventh have a terrible time of it. Our friend NIck- also an
environmental planner- had come from Singapore and was to join us at
the meeting, but his blood pressure sky-rocketed when he got to
Zhiduo. We usually track pulse and oxygen saturation in the blood as
people come up and we allow a few days acclimatization at each stage
on the way to the office at Zhiduo- but in this case we had to go a
little faster than hoped due to the meeting deadline. Nick's stats
were right on the borderline of acceptable, so Marion gave him a more
thorough examination and found that his BP was rising quickly and
decided he should hang back a day. When she checked again he was
through the roof and had to be evacuated back to a lower altitude.
I also felt the effects on this trip, even though I'm pretty well
acclimatized. The culprit was something that Gabe and I call "the
bottle game". When you don't have enough people for a game of soccer
(ie 5 or fewer) the best alternative is to find a plastic bottle and
make that the goal. There are no teams, it's just a dribbling,
defending free-for all fight to hit the bottle and it's usually enough
to leave one breathless after about 5 minutes. After a huge Sichuan
dinner at the meeting, me and a few of the guys played the bottle game
at about 14000 feet above sea level. Not good. Oh it was fun, don't
get me wrong, and I definitely needed to burn off the mounds of food
drizzled in Tabasco that I'd just eaten- but the game left me wheezing
and coughing from the depth of my lungs. I went to lie down and
couldn't stop coughing and it felt like liquid was gathering. After 10
minutes or so of heavy coughing, I decided to sit and wait. If this
went away in a couple of hours, I figured I would be fine and wouldn't
worry. If liquid was really building up in my lungs (pulmonary edema),
it wouldn't go away and I'd have to be evacuated immediately to lower
altitudes- 10 hours away at least. About 2 and a half hours later I
was fully recovered and ready for the evening meeting.
A few days later when we got back to the office I chatted about the
altitude effects with the doctor and found out that for some people it
magnifies the effects of exercise induced asthma which would have
brought on symptoms of wheezing and coughing. The worst health problem
I've faced so far: a severe headache on the way home from the meeting
because of caffeine withdrawal. It kept me up half the night and went
away with two big cups of coffee the next morning. Pitiful.
WEATHER
Cold. Fall is over. Regularly 15 degrees. BELOW. The house? About the same.
TRAVEL
After the meeting, Marc and I went over my next task: balancing the
books. We've got many different funding streams with different
accounting and reporting requirements and different fiscal year start
dates. Every receipt has to be coded to a specific funder and billed
against that account and registered. Last time the books were
balanced? April. Who's the accountant? Me. What's everybody else
doing? Health project in a new county to the west, clinic monitoring
in three different villages of Zhiduo, setting up another new clinic
in a village beyond Duocai. Me? I'm sitting in a freezing office
pawing through every gas, food, rent, utility, whatever receipt from
the past 6 months and working them out against the budget. Oh yeah-
and they're in Chinese. I came up with a plan. Marc, since you're
going to be gone, and Peter's gonna be gone, and really everybody else
except me is going to be gone.... and since I'm just doing the
accounting, would it be a problem if I wanted to maybe... take the bus
down to the city and work from there?
Two days later I was squeezed into a tiny seat on a bus packed with
chain-smoking muslim and chinese traders badly in need of showers. I
had a good book, 2 red bulls and a coke for the 17 hour ride down to
Xining.
When I arrived at 4 am, I found myself in a much warmer, much more
conducive atmosphere to number crunching. I immediately did two loads
of laundry, took a shower, and went to sleep.
Over the past week in Xining I've finished the book keeping, worked on
the predator proofing designs with a friend from Arkansas, ordered
camera traps for the snow leopard research, and begun studying macro
economics in order to tutor a friend who is working on an online
degree. Not bad. The beautiful fall weather that I found when I
arrived in the city ended quite abruptly one afternoon when I was
playing soccer in the park. The day started off plenty warm, but
sometime around 4 pm it was as if somebody flipped a switch and a
frigid wind blew in. By the end of the game we were all shaking and
could see our breaths. It's warmed up little since, so I guess
winter's found me in Xining, too.
