Why this blog?

Spanish version

(Warning!: If you haven't read ''The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut'' stop wasting your time here. Read it and come back later. If you have, you know what I'm talking about.)

Field biologists travel to places no one would, to work under the harshest imaginable conditions and always under a tight, tight budget. What can go wrong?. 

Dr. Nigel Barley is an anthropologist who wanted to write his Ph. D. Thesis about the Dowayo tribe in Cameroon. After one year on the field, he wrote not only his Thesis, but a book with the real stuff that he suffered/enjoyed (thin line this one) as well. I had always thought of the stories in the book as events painted with a layer of exaggeration or even imagination that maybe were real, maybe invented, all of them funny.

I know now they were real. And accurate.

In October 2016 I took my first field trip to the African forest at Dindefelo (Senegal). I carried two books with me, one of them The Innocent Anthropologist. The book served me in many ways: as an interpretation guide to a sometimes shocking reality, as a reference to many big small questions (Should I take a bath in this river?; Is this really edible? ... Really?; What the f*$& am I doing here?) and, most important, as an advisory book to African Magic (as in sorcery, the real one). 

Me working at Ibel (Kedougou: Senegal)

Following Dr. Barley's example, I'll try to put together my life experiences collecting ants in Africa, and I encourage others to do the same. All the narrated events in this blog are true and accurate, only filtered and interpreted by my simple, occidental, accommodated European mind softened by an easy life where things are almost ever taken for granted.

Under no circumstances I intend to make fun of anybody or disrespect any creed or belief. I have nothing but respect for all the people I have met and I'd like to think of most of them as my friends.

Gabriel García Márquez was asked once about his invention of "Magic realism". His answer:

"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."

(One disclaimer here: I'm not a professional biologist, and my field experience is quite limited. I can only imagine the kind of stories that real, professional field biologists have lived. If you want to tell them here, please, let me know.)