Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Posters For Perspective by Sarah Nuss

            We spent the last few weeks in Costa Rica at Las Cruces Biological Station in San Vito, working diligently on our independent research projects. We saw the ideas and research questions that we had brainstormed many weeks earlier become a reality. After meetings upon meetings, and what felt like countless problems that kept popping up, we had done it – we had carried out our own research project. As a culmination of the previous three weeks, on Thanksgiving morning, 13 nervous students paced around the presentation room, waiting to talk to groups of strangers about our work, and I was no exception. I wasn’t sure how the poster session would go. Although we had completed our project, our results weren’t as strong as we had hoped. I was proud of the work we had put in, but not sure how others would receive it.
            At 9:00 am, the first few people started trickling in, pausing briefly at each poster.  Next thing I knew, I was stumbling through my poster in Spanish, trying to hold the attention of the group in front of me. After I had finished, to my surprise, the group began to ask questions about our project, showing a real interest in what we had done. As more listeners rotated by, the presentation got easier and easier. I began to relax, my Spanish improved, and I was confident about the work we were presenting. Each presentation got more streamlined and more interactive, and the audience continued to ask questions and give positive feedback. The two hours flew by, and by the end, I was even disappointed that there were no more people to share our work with.

            Although the poster session was fun, what was most important for me was the perspective that it gave me about our research project. Although at times the work was frustrating, and we had to change many aspects from our original idea, it was a great learning experience. I not only learned a lot more about a topic that I had little experience with in the past, but also had the opportunity to see the whole research process from start to finish. I learned about group dynamics, problem solving, research design, and much more. Being able to present my final poster and share what I had learned allowed me to take a step back and realize some of these things. I am incredibly glad to be able to take this learning experience with me as I leave Costa Rica. 

Keeping it Clean and Green by Audrey Seligman

            These past few weeks at the Las Cruces Biological Station, I have felt as though things have really come full circle. The long awaited independent research projects began and came to a close in a blink of an eye.
            My research was about finding plant alternatives to commercialized soap, which would allow people who don’t have access to commercial soap maintain good hygiene, and therefor prevent diarrheal diseases - a leading killer of young children. There were two other girls in my research group and we all came in excited to get started and passionate about the work we were doing. And, after 5 days of intense lab work we were anxious to understand our results. Of course, we were all hoping to find out that the plants we chose had amazing effects at removing bacteria and that this was something that could be immediately applied to the community. But, as research goes, this is not what happened.  
            In culmination of our research there was a poster session that the community was invited to. A lot of the people who came were staff of the station that we saw on a daily basis. We had to do our presentation in Spanish as much of the staff does not speak English. Even though I know I miss-conjugated some words and had to look to a friend once in a while when I forgot a word, I still felt so excited and passionate about my research that it didn’t seem to matter. I was happy that I could still communicate what I had done and why my study was important, to a group of people who seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say.

            I truly think this experience has helped me grow and will leave an ever-lasting impression. Through my research not only did I learn a tremendous amount about biology, new lab techniques, and how to write a good paper, but I also learned a lot about balance. I was able to manage my time and mentally allowed myself to work hard in my academics and still take full advantage of the unique and incredible place I was visiting. Being able to do this made me incredibly happy and I felt fulfilled. I hope to carry this skill with me back home while studying at Macalester College.

It’s All About the Process: Learning by Doing by Keaton Stoner

            During the last three weeks of our semester abroad with OTS, we conducted our final research projects at Las Cruces Biological Station in San Vito. My group addressed whether local plants could serve as effective and practical mosquito larvicides in order to prevent dengue, a mosquito-borne disease that causes high morbidity in Costa Rica. As a whole, the research experience was very up-and-down; in the end, it really came full circle and left me with a greater sense of satisfaction than I had expected.
            Personally, I had never conducted a research investigation from start to finish prior to this project. As the process began, we were excited to be able to design and execute our own experiment, yet also a bit anxious about the tediousness of the process. Simply following the instructions of a pre-designed experiment is one thing, but doing all of the necessary research to fine tune specific methods is an entirely different beast. After many hours of researching exactly how our laboratory experiment would run in terms of concentrations, trial durations, and preparation procedures, we felt as though we were in the best possible position to gain consistent results. As we began our trials, however, we were disheartened at the seeming randomness of our initial results. We repeatedly tweaked our experiment in hopes of decreasing the variation in our data, but we eventually needed to move on with our experiment and accept whatever results we gathered.
            As a very concrete thinker (I like answers and numbers, not just more questions), this initially disheartened me. We had spent all of this time becoming experts on the topic, and now our excessive preparation seemed futile. After completing our trials and data analysis, I still lacked a sense of total fulfillment, despite being a bit more encouraged in the possible deductions we could make from our results. It wasn’t until our poster presentation on Thanksgiving morning that I really appreciated the research process that we had just struggled through. After laying out a “Sparknotes” version of our experiment on a poster, I realized that, while our experiment didn’t concretely “prove” anything, it raised a lot of interesting questions that had significant implications for people’s lives. Even more encouraging was the fact that people seemed genuinely interested in our project and where it would potentially lead in the future.

            Though you hear all the time that student research is about the process, not the outcome, it takes actually going through that process to understand this idea. Despite the tribulations that came with our experiment, I can confidently say that I am a better thinker for having done it.

When we don’t relate, we don’t act by Jessica Kenny

Housing conditions for highly-mobile workers at a coffee plantation.
SAN VITO, COTO BRUS – “Mira, vivimos como chanchos,” said the forty-ish year old father, shorter than me, standing outside in the rain and pointing at his family inside a wooden shack with dirt floors, a leaky roof, and lots of smoke from a cooking fire. Many curious little faces popped their heads out the door to watch me and Cindy as we rolled out the measuring tape to mark down the dimensions of the house: six by eight meters. We were at the La Bruja coffee plantation collecting data on crowding conditions as a potential risk factor for Tuberculosis among the highly mobile indigenous workers that traveled from Panama to Costa Rica for the harvest season. This Ngöbe-Buglé family of twelve had been returning to work at the same finca for nine years, yet, as the father told me, the boss had not moved one finger to improve their falling apart house.
I didn’t know what to say to him. What could I say? I was there with three other students, our teacher Nico, our driver Carlos, and the two Ngöbe cultural advisors Don Valentín and Doña Nelly, who were helping us interview indigenous workers for our independent project. We were stationed at La Bruja that night for at most two hours, while the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social (aka ‘la Caja’) conducted their yearly primary health consultation for plantation residents. After that, we’d be gone, off to another finca the next night, and eventually we’d be gone from Coto Brus completely after wrapping up our investigation. That father and his family would be reduced to a category and a number – respiratory symptomatic or not – and I would go on living my life at university in the United States. Despite all of the precautions we took to meet the standards of ethical research – obtaining written consent, going with cultural advisors and health personnel that could assist anyone who had TB symptoms, and “doing no harm” – something still felt unfair. Sure, we were seeking to “maximize the potential benefits” for our human subjects: our pilot research would hopefully provide quantitative data to put TB on the Caja’s radar for this particular population. But in this moment, it just seemed that we were interviewing people for five minutes about a serious respiratory condition, saying: “ok, thanks for your participation,” and leaving.

Our independent project research team. From left to right: Nicolás, Doña Nelly, Don Valentín, Sarah, Masha, me & Cindy (not shown).

It was a powerful experience to collect this data, analyze and write about it in a way that would hopefully serve a purpose to the local health authorities; and, I certainly walked away with a huge appreciation for the privileged life I lead. But this sort of “hit and run” quantitative research made me wish I could get to know these people better as complex human beings, not numbers. It made me reflect on the importance of qualitative, ethnographic research to contextualize numbers: how would an anthropologist view the whole picture? What do these workers and families do for fun? What keeps them going? And, it is not to shake off that family’s suffering from my conscience, but because, as the facts stood, it was impossible to relate to them.  When we don’t relate, we quarantine others into a category of almost morally acceptable suffering: “them” not “us.” When we don’t relate, we don’t act.