Baby salamander

I promised I'd be in bed by 11:00 PM, and it's now 10:50 PM on the dot. But I wanted to write a quickie blog post for some reason. So, photo review it is!

A few weeks ago my Parasitology class went on our one-day field trip. I was falling asleep on my feet and eventually sunk into a little corner and suddenly my teacher was looking down at me with slight concern and asked if I wanted to go outside and breathe some fresh air. I was all, "Uuuurgh, uh, urgh. OH! Sorry, sorry, sorry, I, um, yeah, I'll go outside."

Anyway, we went to a somewhat big aquarium/fish farm to buy some fish. Back in the lab, we cut them open and looked for parasites (we didn't find a lot. A tiny copepod, but not much other than that). One of the things they were breeding was axolotls, which are well-loved by most people who know them. The axolotl tadpoles were kind of dumb and we could scoop them up and watch them wiggle around cutely, unlike the toad tadpoles who would turn tail and flee if you so much as thought about them.

So that picture up there is an axolotl baby in my hand.

Cuetzalan

My Natural Resources class went on a field trip to Cuetzalan, Puebla to visit the town and study the artisans, beekeepers, general population and coffee, bamboo, pepper, cinnamon growers, both independent and those belonging to a cooperative called Tosepan Titataiske ("together we will overcome" in Náhuatl). The cooperative has several branches so just about anyone can join and do different activities, or be a member of their bank.

Our group was split into teams and each team studied something different about the community or the cooperative. My team studied something to do with the living conditions of the people who belong to the cooperative**. And after talking to the people in Cuetzalan, the (very poor) towns nearby and the people at the Tosepan cooperative, we reached some sad conclusions about the cooperative.

I mean, we wanted the cooperative to be everything it said it was, but the only positive things I can safely say about it are:

• It employs organic techniques to grow coffee and some other things (but this isn't the same thing as being sustainable, keep in mind)
• It got some roads built, so some marginalized communities have easier access to the sweet fruits of civilization. Such as cement.
• The coffee growers who manage to get in have a set price for the coffee they grow throughout the year, if the cooperative buys it from them. Which isn't always the case, apparently.

Other than that, well, it's not so nice. Let's just say that the woman I spoke to on our first day there wasn't missing out on much by not joining. She wanted to join, but she couldn't save up enough money ("my husband," she explained, "he's a Catholic. No, I mean, alcoholic. He's an alcoholic."). You need 800 pesos to join the cooperative as a member of the "caja de ahorros", which is basically a bank. My phone cost a few times that much.

This is Cuetzalan. The town center is at the end of this road.

**Honestly, I'm not sure exactly what the objectives of my team's study were. One girl sort of commandeered the whole thing and had an idea in mind that none of the other members of the team really understood. We were trying to all work on it but then she would resist any change we tried to implement, until eventually we all each reached the unspoken conclusion that we would just meekly follow her bidding. We asked again during the field trip what the exact objectives were and she floundered for a few minutes and didn't get around to telling us. I wasn't keen on the "lie back and do what you're told to do" idea until I had a panic attack during a Natural Resources class and the teacher found me curled up and sobbing in a corridor near the classroom and told me (nicely) to chill because "what we're doing in the class, it's nothing! It's shit! Real life s so much more complicated than this, in every aspect" etc. My psychologist and I agreed. The bottom line is that now I grasp our project by about 65% and my sanity is back up to about 90%, which is a better proportion than 85% and 55%, respectively.