Rising to the challenge of the moment

UIndy OT Fall Prevention Team

Well, here is the team picture I finally got to upload! This was yesterday, Tuesday 7/29/14 in Belmopan, Belize. That was a very challenging day. We dealt with language barriers and misunderstanding (ignoring?) of my inclusion criteria, to the point that I almost didn't have any participants. We ended up having a great day of fall prevention testing and teaching, translated into both Spanish and Ketchi (a Mayan dialect). The students truly rose to the challenge and learned to give instructions to people who couldn't understand a word they were saying, through demonstration and pantomime, and use of whoever was willing to translate. They totally got the job done! While I can't use non-English speakers in the research, I truly hope the participants got something out of the day, and I think they did. The students seemed to. We learned a lot about cultural appropriateness, too. It is inappropriate to send people home empty-handed. Fortunately, HelpAge provided biscuits and juice (a typical mid-day snack) for people to eat before they left for home. Everyone seemed to have a good time.

Today we completed our first full day of home visits. Though Latin American homes were familiar to me, I think they were a bit of an eye opener for some of the students. There were some homes that were truly beautiful and functional, and some that lacked what we would consider basic necessities, especially for older adults. How do you complete home modifications for an outhouse? Or, had you ever considered the fall risk that free-range chickens and turkeys in the yard would present? I also learned that when you grow up in a society with limited health care, you learn a limited health vocabulary. For example, what if you have never heard of tranquilizers? Or used a Likert scale to express how you think about something? I was feeling really challenged about the data I was trying to collect, until my husband (a sociologist) reminded me that part of what I am doing is studying the difficulties of researching in a developing country. Although I plan to continue to attempt to collect fall prevention data, the heart of my study may end up being a report on some of these difficulties.

Tomorrow will be another day of home visits - wish us well!