¿Que Pasa?

So people may be wondering, what is Emily actually DOING in Costa Rica? Yes?

Well, I am doing a program through the Organization for Tropical Studies, a tropical resarch organization affiliated with about 60 different universities around the world. This particular program is affiliated with Duke University, which has a long relationship with OTS (or OET, Organizacion para los Estudios Tropicales), but usually in a program focused on Tropical Biology. This semester is the very first semester of a new program in Global Health and Tropical Medicine. I came because I love cultures, with a recent infatuation with Latin America, I love warm weather, and I was passionate about the idea of global health, cultural ideas of health, different systems of knowledge, and what people can learn about each other. I am realizing that this is only the beginning of what I'm about to learn, and this semester is only going to be a teeny snapshot of the broad, multi-layered, interdisciplinary field that is public health.

It's not going to be easy. The schedule is packed every day with lectures, workshops, and activities from 8 am until 9pm. I have never had so much class! The introductory classes on biostatistics, creating questionnaires, narrowing a research sample, and using the internet (yes, really) were excruciatingly boring, but we've also had fascinating lectures on Costa Rican history, the health care system, water and watersheds, and snake bite cures, too! This is the stuff I came to learn about. There are only eight of us here, seven are girls, all from different schools -- Duke, Occidental, Amherst, Midd, University of Arkansas... So we get lectures from PhDs and doctors in their specialties, and it all relates back to global health or tropical medicine. We travel between three biological stations and take a course in intensive Spanish in San Jose for two weeks.

One assignment we had this week was to go into a nearby town to observe people and conduct practice interviews. One group asked about dengue fever, the other group asked about the general "problemas de salud en esta comunidad." Sounds simple enough, but we were so unprepared. Afterwards, we were discussing in in my room... Well, here's what I wrote to my mom about the experience:
"It felt so uncomfortable to use these people's lives as material for a practice homework assignment. It felt so pretentious to hop out of our OET van in our Patagonia sun pants, carrying clipboards and writing down, "standing water in gutters", "stream looks polluted", "lots of stray dogs in street," judging this population from the window of the van, for Christ's sake! And just intruding on their community park and bus station, invading their lives on a Sunday. Assuming they have all these health problems that they desperately wanted to tell us about, but having to intentions of trying to fix them. It felt wrong to all of us. We didn't know their language (some of us just have minimal Spanish), we didn't know their concerns, we didn't even know what dengue fever was. Another interesting this is that our teachers are Costa Ricans themselves. Did they not forsee this? So everyone complained, saying, "they should revise this activity, they should have prepared us better...etc." But I said I felt like the exercise was good simply because it was so bad. Now we know for sure that when we do this again, we need to know the issues, we need background on the community, we need to know the LANGUAGE, and we need to actually have a purpose or an intention to help in some way-- to give back, or at least to justify our invasiveness. I'm not sure if they intended to teach us all that in a single lesson, but now we'll always have a concrete memory of how we did it wrong, instead of just notes on how to do it right, but not why. I hope (and think) that everyone else came to see it that way too."
What's more, this is the first semester of the program, and I think the more reflection we do and the more feedback we give, the better.

Tomorrow we leave Palo Verde. We've seen some sweet animals here!! I'll try to put up photos soon. Keep posted for monkeys, crocodilos and an anteater ( so cute! )

Hope all is well with you, especially my friends who are travelling soon.
Puravida,
Emily