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.
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| 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.
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