The things I carry

What do the following items have in common?

1. Yellow plush lion that crinkles when you squeeze its middle
2. Nitrile exam gloves
3. Bungee cords

If you guessed “things you would carry if you wanted to abduct a small child and maybe not get caught,” you might be correct! You would also be correct if you guessed, “things you would carry if you wanted to distract a baby while you poke your semi-sterile finger in its mouth to see if it has teeth yet.” (The bungees are for equipment. I don’t actually use them on any babies, although . . . .)

I’ve been wondering if someone could piece together my profession from the stuff I carry with me every day. Say, for instance, my remains were found in the distant future by archaeologists (and hopefully not in the near future by a forensic team, not that Portel even has a forensic team), what would they conclude? Nothing says “anthropologist” like the following:

Pediatric scale and measuring board – I weigh babies on the electronic scale, which is super sensitive and requires an absolutely motionless and level surface with a motionless and level baby, or it doesn’t work. The board, which I use for length, is not sensitive but requires the mom to hold the baby’s head while I try to flatten his squirmy body, extend his legs, and flex his feet so I can measure length from top of head to bottom of heel. Two times, to reduce error, or for fun. Whichever.

Today I was weighing a baby and felt little hands palpating the backs of my legs. I thought it was the baby’s three-year-old brother, maybe wanting a balloon or something, but then I noticed he was sitting by his mother. The hands crept up my backside, over my lower back and then to my shoulders. I turned around and looked – of course! It was a juvenile guariba (howler monkey) the family is keeping in the house. It was apparently attracted to the “bling” on the pockets of my jeans and kept climbing.

Cute. And curious.

Disposable diapers – Sometimes babies aren’t wearing anything on their lower parts. I and my equipment have learned the hard way to attach one of these, in case.

Disposable wipes – For when I forget to attach one of the above, in case.

Bag of nails, 1.14 kilos – I went to the hardware store in town and asked for something I could use to verify that the pediatric scale is actually working, when it decides to work. They sell things like this – “weights,” I guess they’re called, weirdly enough – but they were expensive! The guy working in the store suggested I just buy a bag of nails, and he weighed it for me. Simple! And cheap! But kind of weird, and difficult to explain!

I always carry balloons and party favors for kids in the houses and communities I’m visiting (distraction disguised as thoughtfulness). Maria Júlia is a conscientious and uncompromising distributor of these presentinhos.

Umbrella – Don’t be fooled. This is not for rain. Rather, I use my umbrella while I ride my bike (did everyone get that?) to keep the sun off of me. This is the best form of “core work” I have ever found. It should be a new yoga pose, the “wobbling umbrella-clutching bicyclist.” Actually, it’s two poses. The one I just mentioned and the “sprawled-on-the-ground was-clutching-an-umbrella bicyclist.”

Bandannas – Right now it’s the summer here and humid but extremely dusty, sort of like Guam meets Albuquerque. It’s a weather phenomenon I don’t understand. People spray water outside their shops and houses to try to keep the dust from coming in. I am sweating more than usual – so much that I practically rain on moms and babies as I’m measuring. I use several bandannas per day to try to decrease my precipitation.

Laminated cards with Clip Art images – Physicians telling women what to do, smiling babies with teeth, a dollar sign with a line through it, a woman with a very pregnant belly – you get the idea. I use these cards when I interview women about why they breastfeed, why the give their babies food other than breast milk, and why they stop breastfeeding, asking moms to rank the cards in order of importance.

Sometimes a boat carries ME!

Black eyeliner pencil – in addition to weighing and measuring height, I am measuring something called mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), which helps me gauge a mother’s nutritional status before and during pregnancy. I first measure the length of the right upper arm and divide by two (I am actually locating the midpoint of the distance from the acromion of the scapula to the olecranon of the ulna, again, for those interested) and mark the spot with an eyeliner pencil. Then I measure arm circumference where I made the mark. This is easier or harder depending on the heat, which predicts amount of sweating involved – both mine and the mom’s – which predicts how well the eyeliner sticks to skin.

Folding lawn “chaise longue” – No, I do not use this for impromptu naps. Many people in this region sleep in hammocks, and so they don’t necessarily have a bed or couch where they can lie flat and I can measure their bellies. So, I bring my own! (Fundal height, the distance between the pubic bone over the belly to the top of the uterus, or “fundus,” is roughly equivalent in centimeters to gestational age in weeks, an important variable in my research. There’s a fundus among us!)

Check out this super-deluxe hand-made baby bouncy-seat thing. The plastic bottle has seeds in it that make noise when the seat bounces up and down.

Pregnancy wheel – A new game show? No, even more exciting! A cd-shaped plastic disk that calculates days and weeks of pregnancy starting from the first day of the last menstrual period. A professor in the nursing school at OSU gave me this key piece of equipment. It’s super handy. I can show a woman when she might expect to give birth based on her last period, her belly size, or her ultrasound results. It also helps me calculate when to visit a possibly-newborn baby.

Baby bottles – I carry an empty chuquinha, which is a tiny little baby bottle (50 ml, for those interested) with a small-holed nipple, and a mamadeira, a regular baby bottle (150 ml). I’m trying to get an idea of how much babies are ingesting, so I ask the moms to show me how full they fill these with water and powdered milk or formula and sometimes sugar. I’ve thought about double-tasking by filling the bottles with something as a treat for myself, though 50 ml of beer doesn’t go very far.

After thinking through what I carry on a daily basis, I concluded that my remains might cause me to be mistaken for a possibly Goth, maternally-inclined, size-obsessed, slightly lazy surveyor of some sort. Given that I’m carrying 47.3 pounds* of equipment and well, all sorts of weird crap, every day while riding a bike in the equatorial summer, I might also be mistaken (or not?) as someone who’s made some strange choices in life.

Maybe I’ll leave a note for the archaeologists.

*One day I decided to weigh everything I carry. Sadly, you can’t unknow what you know.