A Blind Scientist Abroad

Probably the most profound experience studying abroad was my summer sojourn in Costa Rica with the School for Field Studies in 2007. This wasn’t my first time studying internationally, though it was the most immersive, and divergent from the typical college experience. The School for Field Studies is based in the U.S. but features centers in different parts of the globe, dedicated to giving students their first chance at doing biological and conservation field research far away from home. I was an undergrad, aspiring to research birds, so Costa Rica, a hotbed of biodiversity a relatively short flight from the U.S. was ideal, even though I’d not been south of the U.S. border at this point, and my Spanish was pretty basic.

I informed the school staff in Boston ahead of time of my blindness, and what I understood of my needs. They were able to provide me with digital copies of the course Literature and struck me as enthusiastic. They also gave me some audio recordings of birds one may hear in the field in Costa Rica.

The cohort of perhaps 25 students was nearly entirely from the U.S. Ages varied and included recent high school graduates, and one man in his early 50s seeking a career change. We stayed on an organic farm outside the small town of Las Minas in the west of the country. Large fruiting trees and banana stand mixed with a young forested landscape of bamboo, strangler figs, and gumbo-limbo.

The experience started out a bit like a summer school or educational summer camp might in the U.S., with classes and field trips during the day, followed by free time, sometimes including trips to town in the evening and on weekends. For me, the routine was simple enough. Paths between buildings were well marked and uncomplicated. Tasks, including reading, listening to lectures, eating, and helping with clean-up, were straightforward and simple. While I’ve never been the most gregarious person, I got along well with enough of the students and staff so that I had people to stay close to and talk to about questions and difficulties. Life was pretty simple, with everyone sticking to a similar routine, and I recall no heavy sense of exclusion from peers. I imagine if this was some retreat in the U.S., where most of my peers arrived in their own vehicles and were expected to transport themselves and find entertainment and food off-site, things would have been quite different.

With the help of the recordings I mentioned, and one of the Costa Rican professors living and teaching on the little campus, I learned many of the local bird species I was constantly hearing about including, the great Kiscadee, keel-billed toucan, and hooded antshrike. The trips to town, while in the company of English-speaking Americans, gave me plenty of opportunities to exercise my Spanish. I loved trekking through the countryside, and one of the highlights of my time was taking a dip in a warm stream among waterfalls and cascades.

After some time, we began taking longer, often multi-day trips into the surrounding landscapes: which included volcanos, beaches, mangroves, cloud forests, and Pacific dry forests and rainforests. The professors gave us specific tasks, like conducting surveys with visitors to national parks, and recording plant and bird sightings onto spreadsheets. This was a little complicated for me. The surveys and checklists were on pieces of paper I could not read. If I had gotten a digital copy, it was on my laptop –not something I could quickly glance at in the field. Having never done such things, I didn’t know how to prepare. The students were together, and we shared a pretty collaborative attitude. I managed to memorize or paraphrase in my head many of the survey questions and got to the point where I could conduct a survey, so long as I could stop someone. If I was alone, I would have to make the survey taker fill out the sheet themselves, which struck me as haphazard and slightly rude, if functional. We hadn’t established any prior strategy, like audio recordings, and this, for me, predated tablet devices that may have helped. Collecting field notes was also suboptimal for me. I did get my hands on a not-entirely accessible voice recorder to help me with this process, but I wasn’t accomplishing the same as my peers. My notes weren’t being entered into a nice little spreadsheet for data entry, and I didn’t have access to the same information about my location at my fingertips.

Still, I plugged on. Birds were and still are a huge passion of mine. I was learning about new species while roughing it in the field. The information I was gathering would feed into real-life scientific research on biodiversity. Fortunately, the School for Field Studies provided their students with wellington boots to borrow, as this was something I neglected to pack. We collected data along specific paths or transects, which included flooded back-country roads and running streams. Howler monkeys let off their loud, jaguar-like growls through miles of a forest canopy. I was being a scientist, and I was loving it.

The difficulties didn’t stop there though. Having had little training with Excel at this point, I was unable to offer help entering the data we collected into larger workbooks, which I could not access on my own – I needed my laptop with JAWS installed to do any computing. While there was the one professor who helped me learn several of the birds I was hearing, and who treated me with great respect, other instructors, including the one I spent the most time with in the field, were not so kind. I was regularly being told scoldingly to hurry up if my careful walking and way-finding slowed me down. My questions and requests for assistance, like with the voice recorder, were frequently met with derision – sometimes condescending laughter. I distinctly remember an older professor named Jose, who was highly regarded by my peers, sitting next to me as we rode back to the farm campus from an outing in a van. He said “Trevor, what the hell are you doing in this part of the world?” and chuckled. His laughter was joined by a staff member in front of us. The message may have been too subtle for others to give much thought to, but to me, it was clear and acute. I was a stranger here. This was no place for someone of my kind, and I should be somewhere safe, where I could be cared for properly. Friends largely didn’t understand and gaslit my complaints of such snickering. Surely the professors were just giving a hard time all in good fun, and behind this was welcoming, respect and understanding.

Being made to feel an outsider and unwelcome wasn’t new, though I would come to learn that it existed in nearly all the academic corridors I passed through in my pursuit of scientific passions. After one faces difficulty like this, they will of course question themselves. They will wonder what they could have done better to prepare or troubleshoot. Being reflective can and does help us move forward into new experiences and trials. Nevertheless, we can’t prepare for everything, and discriminatory behavior is almost everywhere. Part of taking an adventure like studying and volunteering abroad is the acceptance that these things will happen, and they will often catch us off guard, with no effective responses. That doesn’t make bad treatment right, and we have the right to opt-out sometimes. I still look back at my summer in Costa Rica as one of the most fantastic times in my life, and that too is something I didn’t fully anticipate.