Research Run Down

The last two weeks of the program had us busy out doing our final fieldwork projects! Our group was checking into differences in the nutritional status, dietary diversity and food security of children of a stationary vs. highly mobile Ngöbe population.

What does it mean for these people to be highly mobile? Glad ya asked. High levels of poverty plague populations of Ngöbe. Some Ngöbe from Panama come to Costa Rica every year in hopes of finding work, usually on coffee plantations. Since Costa Rica is a mostly mountainous country, the coffee matures at different times at different altitudes. Which means the work to be found shifts seasonally, and the Ngöbe migrate through the year to follow it, and then return to Panama at the harvest's end, and begin again the next year.

Panama border crossing

Migration at the Panama border

We conducted surveys with at La Casona, a stationary community, and at a health post at the Panama-Costa Rica border. I get really excited about any type of border in general (just ask me about driving on Western Ave. where one lane is DC and one is Maryland...I could just go around that traffic circle from district to state all day!), so it was cool to be working at a country border. With the help of our Ngöbe cultural advisor Oscar who would translate our Spanish into a more understandable mix of Spanish and the Ngöbe language, we asked parents to list the foods their child ate in a typical week and questions about their ability to access food.

Going into this project, we knew that poverty, and its unfortunate cousin food security, would be major issues within the population (food security being the ability to buy or access food and reliably knowing basically that your next meal will exist). I feel like so often you can talk about the issue of poverty and hunger in vague numbers, percentages and rhetoric. And while its important to know these facts, a mother with a child on her lap telling you that the main thing her kid eats is plantains and that she's had to cut down the amount she feeds her children in the past year due to lack of money really hits you in the face about the reality of their situation. And the situations of so many others. Especially when this happens time and time again.

After a week of interviews, some logistical difficulties, language barriers, and heights and weights measured galore, we sat down to analyze what we had collected. And what we found was not what we were expecting. We had hypothesized that the non-mobile group would have higher dietary diversity, BMIs and fewer food insecure families. Both groups were food insecure. But, the mobile Ngöbe were more likely to either be really highly severely food insecure or food secure, whereas the non-mobile Ngöbe were more likely to be moderately food insecure. We think this disparity might be because the mobile group comes from many a geographic area in Panama and different walks of life, whereas the Ngöbe in La Casona lead fairly similar lifestyles.

The non-mobile children has significantly lower BMIs than the mobile children...and this difference was especially notable comparing kids under 7 years of age. In La Casona, kids start to go to school when they're around 7 years old...and they receive a free meal there! Which might contribute to the differences between age groups.

If you're so inclined and inspired to read the final report for this research, you can check it out on the OTS website! (Here you'll find everyone's research write ups on a wide array of interesting topics. You'll also see the write ups from the Sarsaparilla/Smilax and Edible Mushrooms research from earlier in the semester!).

Final Poster!