Amerindians in Guyana will reap educational and health benefits from microscopes, computer equipment and school supplies donated by Wartburg College and the Iowa Falls-Alden School District.
Wartburg professors and students in the four-week May Term course Ecology and Culture of Guyana gave two compound microscopes, two laptop computers, two microscope eyepiece cameras and school supplies to the Yupukari Community Learning Center.
Additional school supplies were collected and donated by students and teachers at the Iowa Falls-Alden School.
According to the Rupununi Learners Foundation, a regional nonprofit development agency that runs the center and promotes ecotourism, Amerindian students and “continuing learners” will use the equipment to study the environment, while local scientists will be able to detect malaria among residents.
Dr. Roy Ventullo, professor of biology and director of undergraduate research, has taken students into the interior of Guyana in northeast South America during the past 17 years. Dr. Samantha Larimer, assistant professor of biology, also teaches the course.
The donations are already being put to good use.
“Students have been looking up close and personal to all sorts of things from ants and bees to mosquito larvae and as much microscopic life that we can capture,” said Fernando Li, managing director of the learning center. “The equipment has allowed us to capture video and stills from all our investigations.” (The learning center posted a video of children using the microscopes at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yKnxIJXiS4)
The benefits are far-reaching.
“One of the most exciting visits will be from our local microscopist responsible for identifying malaria in villagers’ bloodstreams,” Li said. “Roy and Wartburg College may have supported the improvement of early detection and training in the village. For that we are forever grateful.”
Ventullo said “service learning” has been a part of the course since it started in 1996. Students and faculty have made previous donations to Yupukari and other villages.
“We have been working with the folks at the Rupununi Learners Foundation and developed real friendships with many of them,” Ventullo said. “They mentioned they could use some school materials. So in 2010 and 2012, we carried in more than $1,000 worth of pens, pencils, rulers, scissors, erasers, solar calculators — not only used by the learning center, but in surrounding villages as well.”
In fact, the service-learning component has paid extra dividends.
During 2009, students Ahbay Nadipuram and Rachel Coleman (who had previously taken the May Term course), returned with a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant to help fight malaria among the Amerindians. They donated sewing machines, rolls of netting and generators that allowed women’s sewing groups to make and distribute mosquito nets to families in the villages.