Manjula goes blogging...

It is late Sunday night and I am in my office trying to come up with a good story for my very first blog. Alas, my brain cells are soaking in binomial regressions, generalized linear models, overdispersion factors, and S-Plus functions - hmmm… not the best ingredients for a good blog story…. But as I put my data through all these mathematical contortions, my mind wanders back to the simple days of data collection on the black Tortuguero beach and to some of the people who helped me and who tried to help me…My field season did not start very auspiciously. My first field assistant who came all the way from England and showed great promise on paper left within 48 hours. Just one hot and humid Tortuguero day of sunburns and blisters did him in. He just couldn’t bear the thought of waking up every morning for the next seven months knowing that he had a 12-mile walk on soft, black sand and many, many hours of work in either intense heat or pouring rain ahead of him. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him that within a week he would be Superman - hadn’t he told me that he had spent two years in the army?? There was no stopping him - he returned to London hoping to get a job as a stockbroker and I have never heard from him since. Then came Jose from Tortuguero village - he is one of the most intelligent people I have worked with. Though he spoke only Spanish and I communicated through phrases composed of French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish (possibly Sanskrit too!) words glued together, he always knew what needed to be done and why it needed to be done. Jose, unfortunately, did not last long because he was caught poaching a turtle. Another local field assistant later, Luciano, a Brazilian student, volunteered to help me with data collection. It is not always easy to work for many months on someone else’s project, especially a very physically taxing project, with unwavering enthusiasm and an equal sense of responsibility and dedication, but Luciano surpassed all my expectations. He was a field assistant extraordinaire and I have great respect for him. Looking now at all the “rite in the rain” notebooks piled high on my table, I know I owe him so much for all the numbers that I am now putting through fancy statistics…