Mixin up the Medicine

    Did you ever want to be a sorcerer when you were a little kid? What about a healer, or an alchemist, or a mad scientist? I definitely did. During our trip to Las Alturas Professor Casey made me one.
    At 8:00 am we walked into the kitchen and were bathed by the aroma of ginger and a sickly smell of brown sugar. Professor Casey stood behind the picnic table laden with pots, burners, brown sugar, vodka, and heaps of smelly herbs. The sunlight from the window behind Professor Casey veiled her face in a shadow. She spoke. "Have you guys ever made herbal remedies?"
No.
But I want to!
    So it began. We went through a quick slideshow to learn the history of herbal remedies, and then 5 recipes were placed in front of us. A tincture, a scrub, a syrup, a lotion, and an ointment. We boiled, and we brewed, and we cackled at our creations.
    We tried everyone of then. I used the orange scrub on my face, which was made with 5 cups of brown sugar. Surprisingly, I couldn't put my face close to anything for the rest of the day for fear of being permanently stuck to it. The orange lotion made my skin feel like it had been lathered in holy water by Pope Francis himself, so naturally I rubbed it on every exposed part of my body. The ginger syrup took the longest to make, almost 2 hours, but oh was it worth it. Sweet and tart syrup that heals stomach pain and goes well with any food. The tincture takes 5-6 weeks to make. We're still twiddling our thumbs for that.
    The most amazing was the tea tree ointment. We used a slew of tea tree extract, almond oil, and bee's wax. A little know fact is that if you put these together in the right amounts, you get magic. The almond extract and bee's wax disinfects wounds, while the tea tree extract speeds the healing process. We literally made a healing ointment out of these three simple ingredients.
    ​It was amazing how we could make medicinal, cosmetic, and tasty concoctions out of herbs and natural substances. Not only did our activity give me respect for Mother Nature, but also it inspired me to keep making these brews at home. Thanks Professor Casey for bringing me one-step closer to becoming a medicine man!



-Will Johnson

Research Motto: Listen, Understand, Trust

As this semester comes to an end, I am so grateful that all the experiences in the past three months have solidified my passion for hands on global health work within communities. Above all, I am immensely grateful for the people of Costa Rica that have allowed us in their lives and oftentimes homes as we end our semester performing our independent research projects. I have been more and more drawn to global health because I have seen the way it demands unique and crucial social skills – listening, understanding, and building trust. These three traits were particularly necessary for my group’s research project as we investigated the impact of social determinants – such as socioeconomic status, use of government assistance programs, social support, stigma, and self motivation - on an adolescent mother’s educational attainment. While our peers chose more quantitative projects such researching parasite load or bacterial load, I was very excited to be working with the only project that addressed a social issue. I found it intriguing to go beyond “What is happening in this community” and delve into “Why is this happening?” We spent days formulating an adequate research question then creating survey questionnaires that would effectively achieve the data we needed without being too intrusive on a delicate subject. This is where “understand” comes into play. For a successful project we had put ourselves in the shoes of a Costa Rican adolescent mother and brainstorm possible responses to our questionnaire. Finally when the Independent Review Board approved our research, the time came for us to “build trust.” With the help of local health technicians making phone calls, we were able to reach about 80% acceptance and 23 former adolescent mothers participated in our study! By building local contacts we built trust that permitted these women to not only allow us into their homes but also spare us time out of their day for no compensation or direct benefit to themselves.

            We had our appointments set for the next three days but we quickly grew nervous in anticipation of our conversations with these women. Now came the “listening” part. While some women were more timid than others, we approached each home with open smiles and politely introduced ourselves and thanked them for their time. Question after question, these women poured out their stories from their past even through the most intimate questions. At times I felt as though I was more nervous than them but intently listened with an open mind to these fascinating anecdotes and attempted to record their narratives as best as possible as they rightly deserved.

            While we woke up early to drive 40 to 60 minutes to scattered locations on bumpy, curvy, dirt roads, listening to each narrative made it all worth it. In the same community, each story seemed to have its own individuality. We can’t simply label adolescent pregnancy as an issue with a single cause. This is why global health is so important because we have the opportunity to understand how health problems are so often linked to social issues. While a doctor can prescribe pre-natal vitamins or other pregnancy aspects, who is there to empower these women to stop the cycle of poverty or the cycle of adolescent pregnancy? With the help of our professors, at the end of each interview we encouraged each woman to research programs for aid to return to school. Ultimately, our data showed a significant higher educational outcome in non-mothers compared to former adolescent mothers with a majority of former adolescent mothers not completing secondary school. After weeks of work, our research will be added to a compilation of Latin American adolescent pregnancy data but most of all I hope we have inspired at least one woman that she indeed has the power to finish an education.

Jocelyn​​

All about the process

It's Day 2 of writing our final papers. I've been sitting in the
comedor since right after breakfast, only occasionally taking a break
from staring at my computer screen. These past few days haven't been
like any other finals weeks of my college career. Instead of
frantically switching between tasks (write essay, study for chemistry
exam, repeat), all of my energy is focused on one end goal: expressing
the findings of the research project my group and I have been working
on since before fall break.

This probably isn't what you would picture when the word "research"
comes to mind. It's probably not what I would think of first either.
My mind goes to the data collection process, the actions taken to test
a hypothesis.

Of course, that was part of it. My group studied respiratory
infections, a general category that ranges from the common cold to
pneumonia, in migrant Ngäbe children. Their families come to Costa
Rica from Panama every year to work on coffee plantations. We were
studying the reasons why the incidence of respiratory infections is so
high in this population. This involved going to visit the plantations:
making observations of the housing conditions, interviewing the
parents, seeing the types of food that are available.

What I didn't think of at first was how much more complicated it can
be. So much planning has to go into a research project, even a very
small-scale one like ours. First there was designing our survey tools,
constantly thinking about how we would get the information we need out
of these questions and blanks to fill in. There's the logistics
required to get a bunch of students to remote coffee plantations
(thanks to our professors). There's also the language and cultural
differences to consider. The workers speak Ngäbere, so we needed a
cultural assessor to go with us.

After our week of data collection, we were back at the station to
analyze our data. Slight hiccup in our well-made plans: all of our
results came out backwards. Later we found out that we were running
the wrong statistical test, and then everything started to fall into
place. We found that overcrowding, fewer meals per day, younger age
and the less time that a child was breastfed all made children more
likely to have symptoms of a respiratory infection (cough, fever,
runny nose). We also saw that the farm with the best overall
conditions had the lowest incidence of respiratory infections: is this
something that could be replicated in other farms?

Then comes the most important part: how to present the results? We'll
be making a summary of our findings to give back to the community.
This has been an incredible learning experience for us, doing a
research project from start to finish. However, we also hope that the
data we found can make a difference, contribute to a better
understanding of the situation of these children and their families so
that there will be improvements made in healthcare and the living
conditions on the plantations.

Back to the moment: I'm writing a final paper. Slowly it's starting
to come together, as I try to fit all the pieces of the puzzle into a
cohesive whole. All a part of the process of research.

-Stephanie P.

Works Cited:

Barboz-Argüello. 2005. Estacionalidad de egresos por neumonía en el
Servicio de Pediatría del Hospital "Maximilliano Peralta" y su
asociación con la migración indígena Ngöbe Buglé. Acta Médica
Costarricense. 47(2): 78–83.

International Organization for Migration. 2014. Costa Rica.
Retrieved from https://www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/where-we-work/americas/central-and-north-america-and-th/costa-rica.html

Finding a Cure with Culture

   It has been a week and I still cannot rid my mind of the conditions I experienced while carrying out my independent research within the Ngöbe community here in Coto Brus, Costa Rica. My research was focused on parasitic presence and species richness amongst migrant coffee plantation workers, and in order to test this, I had to collect fecal samples and administer surveys concerning the following: living conditions, available water sources, and hygiene practices. The living conditions on these coffee plantations I visited will remain in my mind for a while.

     I have just entered the room of some Ngöbe indigenous workers and I am overwhelmed by the sounds of running children, crying babies, and joking men and women. The smell and presence of smoke infiltrates my lungs and my eyes start to water as I prepare the fecal sample vials to hand out to our first study participant. These people are welcoming and willing to invite us into their home, and for this, I am lucky. As I look around the room I take in the lack of space and multitude of people that call this room home. The man whom we are interviewing has just told us that he lives with eleven people in a room fit for eight. The beds consist of a wire frame and wooden planks or cardboard for a mattress. Trash litters the floor and a single light bulb throws an eerie glow across the room. A beautiful little girl looks at me with a toothy grin on her face. She is tied off to a post on the bed on a leash in order to prevent her from tumbling to the ground. Her mother, only 19, smiles at this connection that the child and I have clearly made, and understands that I only mean well with the study that I have interrupted their evening schedule to do. A girl of only nine years old is seen in the corner stirring the Bache's dinner of rice and beans while the other children belonging to this Bache are running around excited to have gringoes (white people) in their home. This same scene is repeated over and over as me and my team move from room to room, farm to farm, town to town, and my heart hurts the same each time. Seeing these people living this way and leaving them each night without changing something about their living condition kills me and I wish there was something I could do to help.

     Interventions are a great tool and can be used to benefit a population in need, but too many interventions are done rashly and without preparation. While I wish I could have gone up to the plantation administrator and told him that he needed to treat these indigenous peoples as human beings, I knew that I wouldn't accomplish anything this way. Cultural sensitivity is a very important concept that gets overlooked a lot of the time when it comes to the implementation of new interventions. While I stood there in disbelief and felt helpless, I never once thought to ask these people if this was how they preferred to live. Maybe living together in close quarters is culturally sound, and using the outdoors to dispose of waste is the only thing they know. Maybe cooking over an open fire right outside their room is preferred over the use of a stove or enclosed kitchen. The want to help is key in creating and implementing an intervention, but the people in which you will be helping need to want to be helped. No intervention is worth the time and money if the people at the heart of the intervention aren't going to utilize the tools or new conditions supplied to them. I want to return one day, and I will, in order to not work to help these people, but to work alongside them to see where it is that they need help. Intervention success can only come from cultural sensitivity and a sense of community between the population in need and the hands that are willing to help.

Brianna Marino

Elon University Class of 2016

Exercise Science Major

Public Health Studies Minor

Sweet Signatures Vice President 

Zeta Tau Alpha Secretary