As I left the EBAIS (main clinic) of La Casona today, where I had been chatting with Maria the midwife and the indigenous community health worker, I walked towards the taxi that had just pulled up and saw a Ngobe woman with whom I am well acquainted getting out of the car with shopping bags. So I greeted her with a smile and we discussed her trip into town (San Vito), which is unaffordable for most La Casona residents. She told me money had been pooled to buy things for a sick woman and she lifted the bags to show me the purchases. Our goodbyes followed, and I closed the door behind me. Before I could utter my greeting to the driver, he turned to me and said in Spanish with a grin, "Wow, you know alot of people here in La Casona, don't you?"
The truth is, I am getting to know people. Today I found myself stopping in the road to chat with passing women who I had interviewed at some point in the last two months and waving to families sitting in the shade by their homes. Nothing is more warming to me than when a Ngobe woman smiles with recognition as we're walking in opposite directions and actually stops to chat.
My last day of interviews with the women of La Casona thus presents me the answer to a question that I have been asking myself for weeks: where should the year after my graduation be spent?
After all that these women have offered me over the past few weeks, I owe it to them to come back to La Casona and continue working as an advocate. If I can develop my ideas and find the funding, I hope to find myself back here again in a year.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Videos from the UNFPA Maternal Mortality reduction program in the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé of Panama
Take a closer look at the work being done in the Ngobe territory of Panama where maternal mortality is comparable with Sub-Saharan African (298/100,000) and only 45% of births are attended...
Video directed to health personnel (Spanish) – 14:01 min
Informative video directed to the Ngäbe-Buglé community (in Ngabere) – 11:11 min
Directed to the general public (Spanish) – 2:32 min
Directed to the general public (with English subtitles) – 2:32 min
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Meditations on Patience
Villa Palacios, Brus Malis, Copey:
The first three days of field work have been equally laden with frustrations and progress. I have trekked over mountains in deep silence, wiped out on muddy footpaths (giving my guide a good laugh), shared stories about myself with strangers, been tattooed by Ngobe children, and heard the echoes of a Ngobe elder chanting far overhead on the mountainside as I wandered through a valley. I have been looking for needles in haystack after haystack, trusting my guide to carry me through a place that feels otherworldy and almost forbidden to find some 40 women with newborns.
Just when I begin to get the queasy feeling that I couldn't possibly know what I'm doing and that these results can never be of any help to anyone, a woman will dare to go off the script of the structured questions and begin to tell me her story. It's always brief, but startling, when a woman stops staring at the ground to avoid eye contact, suddenly looks me directly in the eye, and becomes illuminated with the power of her own voice. And this is how I know that while I feel a questionnaire may never fully capture the nuanced reality of care-seeking for these women, I am the person hearing their voices for the first time about this topic and -at the very least- I am recording their answers so that more questions can be asked.
My guide for the past week is exactly my age; but unlike me, she is a spouse, mother to a four-year-old daughter, and a primary school student in the evenings. She has been wary and slow to trust me, but our fifteen hours of focused, meditative hiking together punctuated by funny little mishaps has brought us to an interesting state of give-and-take. There's the most obvious exchange of her guidance on trails for my money at the end of the day, but even our little spurts of conversations were a chain of revealing ourselves little by little, back and forth. This is not to say that there was a budding friendship at the end of the week, but a mutual acceptance and patience. I could write several pages about the strange relationship that emerges between a guide and a field researcher, as there's nothing else quite like it.
Tomorrow I go to Caño Bravo (provided that my guide, the local midwife Maria, doesn't decide for me that we should go somewhere else!). Maria is a witty, sharp woman who is widely known and respected in the community. Not surprisingly, Maria is a bit of a local superstar throughout Coto Brus due to her prominence as a community leader and the traditional crafts that she produces - I stumbled upon a professional photo taken of her recently at this link: (kacproductions, OTSmariaphoto). In the photo, she is wearing the traditional handmade dress of the Ngobe women, which is actually based on the dress of nuns who came in previous centuries to Christianize the Ngobe and other indigenous populations in Central America.
The women are primarily mothers and wives in this society, therefore they remain in their homes and do not often receive education unless they are living in the central community of La Casona, which receives the most contact with outsiders and Costa Rican government support in the form of schools and clinics.
Yet even in La Casona, girls often become pregnant at 13 or 14 for the first time and already turn their focus from being a student to being a mother. Family support is strong and women (especially co-wives) share responsibilities and childcare so that some women might take occasional night classes; however, most women in this community remain uneducated and without opportunities to choose their own fate. This is the aspect of the Ngobe culture that I find most frustrating.
Shunning for a moment a central tenet of anthropology, I cannot help but to make the judgment that the future of the Ngobe community will be more promising if women are introduced to the concept of reproductive rights. In this situation, I can see clearly the distinction between cultural relativism and moral relativism, as I do not think that these women should be culturally pressured to repeatedly risk their lives in pregnancy and childbirth unless they are able to choose those pregnancies and can carry them out safely with full access to care and assistance. They have every right to opt out on higher education or a Western-style "career" and choose the future of becoming a wife and mother. But I am making the value judgment that they deserve childhood, basic education, and the freedom to choose partnership and pregnancy at a later stage in life if they wish.
This is my little salute to the critics of cultural relativism (many of whom work in the field of anthropology) who are willing to take a stand on basic human rights issues, as contemporary anthropologists can no longer overlook human rights abuses.
The first three days of field work have been equally laden with frustrations and progress. I have trekked over mountains in deep silence, wiped out on muddy footpaths (giving my guide a good laugh), shared stories about myself with strangers, been tattooed by Ngobe children, and heard the echoes of a Ngobe elder chanting far overhead on the mountainside as I wandered through a valley. I have been looking for needles in haystack after haystack, trusting my guide to carry me through a place that feels otherworldy and almost forbidden to find some 40 women with newborns.
Just when I begin to get the queasy feeling that I couldn't possibly know what I'm doing and that these results can never be of any help to anyone, a woman will dare to go off the script of the structured questions and begin to tell me her story. It's always brief, but startling, when a woman stops staring at the ground to avoid eye contact, suddenly looks me directly in the eye, and becomes illuminated with the power of her own voice. And this is how I know that while I feel a questionnaire may never fully capture the nuanced reality of care-seeking for these women, I am the person hearing their voices for the first time about this topic and -at the very least- I am recording their answers so that more questions can be asked.
My guide for the past week is exactly my age; but unlike me, she is a spouse, mother to a four-year-old daughter, and a primary school student in the evenings. She has been wary and slow to trust me, but our fifteen hours of focused, meditative hiking together punctuated by funny little mishaps has brought us to an interesting state of give-and-take. There's the most obvious exchange of her guidance on trails for my money at the end of the day, but even our little spurts of conversations were a chain of revealing ourselves little by little, back and forth. This is not to say that there was a budding friendship at the end of the week, but a mutual acceptance and patience. I could write several pages about the strange relationship that emerges between a guide and a field researcher, as there's nothing else quite like it.
 |
| Sunset in Coto Brus. |
Tomorrow I go to Caño Bravo (provided that my guide, the local midwife Maria, doesn't decide for me that we should go somewhere else!). Maria is a witty, sharp woman who is widely known and respected in the community. Not surprisingly, Maria is a bit of a local superstar throughout Coto Brus due to her prominence as a community leader and the traditional crafts that she produces - I stumbled upon a professional photo taken of her recently at this link: (kacproductions, OTSmariaphoto). In the photo, she is wearing the traditional handmade dress of the Ngobe women, which is actually based on the dress of nuns who came in previous centuries to Christianize the Ngobe and other indigenous populations in Central America.
The women are primarily mothers and wives in this society, therefore they remain in their homes and do not often receive education unless they are living in the central community of La Casona, which receives the most contact with outsiders and Costa Rican government support in the form of schools and clinics.
Yet even in La Casona, girls often become pregnant at 13 or 14 for the first time and already turn their focus from being a student to being a mother. Family support is strong and women (especially co-wives) share responsibilities and childcare so that some women might take occasional night classes; however, most women in this community remain uneducated and without opportunities to choose their own fate. This is the aspect of the Ngobe culture that I find most frustrating.
Shunning for a moment a central tenet of anthropology, I cannot help but to make the judgment that the future of the Ngobe community will be more promising if women are introduced to the concept of reproductive rights. In this situation, I can see clearly the distinction between cultural relativism and moral relativism, as I do not think that these women should be culturally pressured to repeatedly risk their lives in pregnancy and childbirth unless they are able to choose those pregnancies and can carry them out safely with full access to care and assistance. They have every right to opt out on higher education or a Western-style "career" and choose the future of becoming a wife and mother. But I am making the value judgment that they deserve childhood, basic education, and the freedom to choose partnership and pregnancy at a later stage in life if they wish.
This is my little salute to the critics of cultural relativism (many of whom work in the field of anthropology) who are willing to take a stand on basic human rights issues, as contemporary anthropologists can no longer overlook human rights abuses.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Temblor!
This post is only for me to say that I just felt my first earthquake: a 6.0 with its epicenter somewhere near San Jose. Nothing too crazy down here in San Vito, just the doors and curtains swinging while my jaw dropped as I realized what was happening!
Link to event description:
USGS, Costa Rica Earthquake 6.0
Link to event description:
USGS, Costa Rica Earthquake 6.0
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Return to La Casona
 |
| Entering La Casona (view of primary school). |
La Casona is only one of many communities tucked away in the mountains of the Ngöbe territory. Most people from these other communities come to La Casona for the government-provided health care at the EBAIS and for any important gatherings, as the cacique (the leader of Ngöbe in this region) lives in La Casona.
This is the beautiful place to which I will come every morning to then trek deeper into the territory with my guides to find the women who I will interview.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Beginnings
End of OTS Global Health Semester; San Jose to San Vito:
Finally the day arrives after months of preparation, and for a brief moment, you forget everything that brought you there. It is an infinitesimal moment in which you know you expected to, are supposed to feel a burgeoning sense of accomplishment, purpose, and vitality. But instead you have suddenly opened your eyes after a long dream and realize you don't recognize anything around you and don't know which move is the correct one that you expected to, are supposed to make then and there.
As I stepped onto a bus in San Jose, Costa Rica, after having stowed away all of my possessions in the cargo hold, I found myself facing rows of unfamiliar faces staring blankly back at me. And I forgot everything. I felt the weight of all my decisions fall into my hands but I couldn't quite comprehend the passage that I was making. I found my seat and dug through my bag to find a notebook. I haphazardly it opened to any page that would look like all of the rest with frenzied, half-formulated notes about my research scribbled in all directions. I read those notes until they became familiar again and I could feel sure that they were mine.
My arrival in San Vito six hours later brought me to familiar sights and sounds. Yet even as I unload the contents of my bags into a cabin at the Las Cruces research station that I came to know so well during the semester, my uncertainty lingers.
Finally the day arrives after months of preparation, and for a brief moment, you forget everything that brought you there. It is an infinitesimal moment in which you know you expected to, are supposed to feel a burgeoning sense of accomplishment, purpose, and vitality. But instead you have suddenly opened your eyes after a long dream and realize you don't recognize anything around you and don't know which move is the correct one that you expected to, are supposed to make then and there.
As I stepped onto a bus in San Jose, Costa Rica, after having stowed away all of my possessions in the cargo hold, I found myself facing rows of unfamiliar faces staring blankly back at me. And I forgot everything. I felt the weight of all my decisions fall into my hands but I couldn't quite comprehend the passage that I was making. I found my seat and dug through my bag to find a notebook. I haphazardly it opened to any page that would look like all of the rest with frenzied, half-formulated notes about my research scribbled in all directions. I read those notes until they became familiar again and I could feel sure that they were mine.
My arrival in San Vito six hours later brought me to familiar sights and sounds. Yet even as I unload the contents of my bags into a cabin at the Las Cruces research station that I came to know so well during the semester, my uncertainty lingers.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
The Project
The Ngöbe are are a transnational indigenous population of approximately 200,000 to 250,000 who reside in territories in southern Costa Rica and western Panama. While the Costa Rican Ngöbe population is relatively sedentary, a large proportion of the Panamanian Ngöbe population annually migrates across the border into Costa Rica for seasonal employment during the coffee harvests. Both the Costa Rican and Panamanian Ngöbe territories have been formally recognized by the respective national governments; however, the Ngöbe still remain marginalized and underserved in both countries.
Among the most vulnerable members of the population are Ngöbe mothers and children. The national ministries of health and the UNFPA are currently working to reduce maternal mortality rates and make motherhood safer for Ngöbe women.
While infant mortality rates among the Ngöbe are already higher than national rates, the migrant Ngöbe population has been identified as having a particularly high infant mortality rate. During the next few months, I'll be conducting interviews with Costa Rican, Panamian, and migrant Ngöbe women to understand each group's particular circumstances of care access for infants and their care-seeking behaviors.
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