Puerto Rico Asset Value -- A day with the community

We began our day by heading back to Combate’s villa pesquera. We talked with Mickey again and also made two new friends, Waldemar and Anibal. They told us about their diving practices and experiences (both good and bad), as well as their motor maintenance. Speaking with Mickey confirmed what we had begun to suspect the day before; there was a miscommunication when we spoke of motor failure. What they defined as motor failure was when the machine failed because of age, while we also meant to ask about human-caused errors. Waldemar gave us more details about the death of the fisherman who they named the villa after. He told us that although the villa fishermen are now aware of the dangers, he believes a diving safety class could help new fishermen. He also mentioned his concern for newer, younger fishermen who might not be completely aware of the how dangerous scuba fishing can be. Anibal gave us a detailed breakdown of the cost of his motor maintenance.

To our surprise, Mickey brought food that his wife had made for us! He brought a surtido, a sampler, which includes carne frita, pez frito, chicharrón de pollo, sorullos, bolitas de queso, and bolitas de mofongo, with mayo-ketchup. It was delicious. Like, you have no idea. It’s probably not the healthiest meal out there, but we put our concerns for calories aside in the name of good food. Mickey brought us live carrucho (queen conch) to show us how he extracted it from the shell. This gave us a better picture of how he works when fishing under water, which is valuable context for us to have. He also let each of us try a bite of raw carrucho (queen conch), and gifted us two conch shells for us to keep.  

While half the team was off in Puerto Real, Jamey, Paulina and I stayed at the Villa and waited for Guillermo to return. He had been out fishing with lines, and brought back quite the assortment of fish, including a lionfish that had been pulled up by line from 200-250 feet. Talk about decompression issues! While we were waiting for Guillermo to finish up his work at the villa, we went with a few other fishermen to dispose of the guts that had just been cleaned from the catch. There are large predatory fish that swim close to the docks expecting this. Mickey even brought a line for us to try to catch them. Unfortunately even with all of the expert help from the fishermen, these fish were too savvy to be tricked into biting the hook. It made us realize how hard it really is for fisherman to make a consistent living; if the fish are not able to be caught on a certain day, the fisherman do not make money. Fishing is not a regular nine to five job with a consistent wage. The weather and fish behavior essentially dictate fishers’ ability to make a living. Eventually we got to talk to Guillermo a little bit more about his diving practices before leaving to get dinner at Andy’s house.

With our work for the day done, we headed over to Andy’s house for dinner. Andy had prepared a carrucho dish for us, and it was amazing! It had been soaked with oil and vinegar, and served with olives as well as slices of plantain and onion. We then spent several hours talking with Andy, his wife, and his youngest son. It was a great opportunity for us to experience and understand how important carrucho is here in Combate. With carrucho being the main target for fishermen here, it is crucial in ensuring fishermen make enough money, which is why they are willing to risk their health and life scuba fishing for them.

Although we did not accomplish all that we had initially set out to do that, we actually learned quite a lot we hadn’t expected. We now have a clearer understanding of the relationship between fishermen and their motors, and know that we need to work on how we ask fishermen our questions. We are also incredibly grateful for how much the fishermen have welcomed us into their community (and even their homes).

Puerto Rico Asset Value -- It's all about safety

We squeezed everything we could out of our last day on our second trip to Puerto Rico. While we had to travel across the island to make our flight departing in San Juan, we managed to schedule a meeting with Dr. Arroyo at CentroMedico Hospital, the only location on the island with a three section hyperbaric chamber. A nurse practitioner spent hours going over the procedures they practice in treating between forty to sixty decompressed divers each year. The medical staff’s knowledge regarding the differing levels of injury a fisherman may experience after diving was valuable. We learned that there are two categories they use to describe scuba diving incidents. The first degree of injury is marked by fisherman who feel pains in their joints, have “the bends”, or who have decompression sickness. The second and more severe degree of injury is declared when patients exhibit neurological disorders. Unfortunately, the more times a fisherman is hurt enough to be transported to the chamber, the more susceptible they are to internal issues in the future, should they continue diving.

A major issue the doctors discussed with us is the fact that fisherman, in particular the new and younger ones, feel strongly against going to the chamber despite their medical state. They are either scared of the chamber itself, or worried that they will be held up from fishing the next day. We might expect, a person’s health is more important than money, however; we clearly can see a reversal of these notions in the diving fisherman. In conjunction with their consistent pushing of physical boundaries, the doctors explained that fisherman do not spend enough time above the water between diving cycles, causing their pains to worsen over time. Also, when fishermen surface and feel like they may get the bends, they will return to the water with the thought that the pressure will help them feel better, however; their returning underwater actually increases the amount of nitrogen within their blood and thus increases their chances of becoming extremely sick. We are trying to understand more clearly their reasoning for ignoring dive tables and pushing their bodies to their absolute limit. It is becoming more and more clear that fisherman who are the sole provider for their families feel pressured to continue to dive day in and day out despite the toll their work takes on their personal health.

A major breakthrough was made in meeting Dr. Arroyo, who is working on publishing a paper regarding Puerto Rican fisherman and their dive practices. He has explained to us that useful information such as age, gender, location, and reason for accidents amongst the fisherman will be of access to us via his publication, set to be available in the coming months. It was great to establish a relationship with Dr. Arroyo because he will be an invaluable resource to us and the next semester Asset Value team in decoding the diver’s motivations, activities, and repercussions of their work.

Puerto Rico Asset Value -- Meeting our collaborators at Sea Grant

After return from our lunch with Nelson in Rincon, we went to the University in Mayaguez for our meeting with Berliz Morales who runs the Aquatic Safety Outreach program through Sea Grant. We arrived a bit earlier than our meeting, so we decided to check out the nearby agricultural experiment station hoping to learn a little more about agriculture in Puerto Rico. When we arrived, we were told so sign in and the woman at the front desk emphasized to us that this was a research station not a botanical garden. But when we started to walk around it was hard to see that it was any different than any botanical garden other than some research greenhouses scattered around.

We thought we could walk along the path through the station straight over to sea grant for a pleasant detour and change of scenery. We were wrong. Turns out the whole area was fenced off and we ended up having to book it back to the car to make our meeting.

When we met with Berliz we learned about how Sea Grant had already been attempting to develop solutions to the issue of frequent decompression sickness among fishermen. In fact it was the doctors at the hospital who had originally alerted them to the issue as they saw more and more patients at the hyperbaric chamber. Berliz had a lot of valuable information and resources to share with us, and we ended up leaving her with a whole list of resources and contacts to send to us. It does seem like there are multiple entities aware and trying learn more about this issue in Puerto Rico and places in the Caribbean, so some of our work may have partially been done for us.

Sea Grants approach to the problem is education based as most of their work tends to be. It certainly seems like a case of we have a hammer and we are going to use it and hope it works sometimes. Berliz almost said exactly this in her own words during our meeting. We were glad hearing that there are people trying to address this issue, but we wondered if classes and education would be that effective. It seems to us like our advantage here is that we might be more flexible in the solutions that we could provide.

The team admiring a particularly large talipot palm tree at the experiment station

Puerto Rico Asset Value -- Revisiting our users

Blog Post Day 1

Our second first day in Puerto Rico was a resounding success. Maybe it was because we landed in San Juan at 19:30 instead of 04:00 and were better rested, or maybe it was because we were able to be much more focused in our questions and goals, or maybe it was that we already knew and felt familiar with our contacts, but it feels like we did a LOT more today than our first first day in Combate.

A couple things are different this time around. Most importantly, we're down two team members, as neither Mika nor Becca were able to come on this trip. Secondly, we're staying in a different apartment. Finally, and least (most?) importantly, we have the Swaggon  - our rental minivan swag wagon, which lets the whole team ride together everywhere we need to go. It has been great for team health and cohesiveness!

Our morning started out with a trip to our favorite breakfast location at 08:00, where we saw Jenny and Walter. Refreshed by the coffee and sandwiches, we buckled down and got organized for the day. At 10:00, Cesar, Paulina and I headed over to the Villa Pesquera to meet with Guillermo. Before he showed up we had the opportunity to talk with Tio Negro, one of the mechanics we spoke with last trip. We asked him about his motor’s repair and maintenance history in an attempt to get a sense of the economic impact of motors on our users’ lives. Guillermo arrived and joined in the conversation, contributing his own numbers to the database. Negro drifted away as Mickey, freshly shaved and smiling, came over and provided his knowledge on the subject of motor costs and lifetimes. We were able to get a better picture of how often motors need to be taken to a mechanic for service over and above the preventative maintenance that most fishermen do on their own.

The preparation we had done for the trip must have paid off since we were getting nugget after nugget of precious information, filling in the blanks in the picture we had begun to paint of life as a subsistence fisherman in Puerto Rico.

At some point, Oscar, Jamey and Anna showed up, and after a short time talking as a full group - and drinking some delicious fish soup made by Mickey's mother - we split up, with three of us talking with Guillermo, and the other three working with Mickey. In these subgroups, we performed several card sorting activities, to try to obliquely get sensitive information about the fishermen's priorities, finances, and values. These were incredibly successful, as the process of sorting and ranking values and priorities surrounding finances and time created a feeling of safety. This enabled our users to open up about their finances a bit more. and the information they provided us helped us to determine the effect that a few extra dollars a day could have on their lives. Around 12:30 we left the Villa, thanking our friends and making plans to see them the next day.

The day being far from over, we refilled water bottles and jumped in the Swaggon to meet Andy at his house. We attempted a card sort with Andy, but he wasn't having it, despite Anna's best efforts. The linear, organized thinking pattern that is so common at Olin didn’t fit with Andy’s narrative-based and experiential thought processes. Instead of sorting cards, he used their contents as jumping blocks for stories that the words on the card inspired within him, telling us about why teaching is so important to him and talking about the relationship between fishermen and government agencies. This was all valuable information that allowed us to get to know Andy a bit more - it was simply delivered in a way that was less organized than anticipated. While we were talking, the most powerful sun-shower I had ever seen passed through. It poured for a solid half hour, although there didn’t seem to be a single cloud overhead.

Always a wealth of information, the time with Andy quickly passed, and before we knew it nearly two hours had gone by. As we visited our slower friend named Andy, Andy Sr. invited us to his house the next day for a dinner of carrucho, or conch - a shellfish that is newly in season and ridiculously abundant for the first time in three years.

Before we left, Andy told us about a pig roast that was happening at a restaurant on our way back to town, so of course we stopped in to experience traditional cuisine. Oscar ordered lechon (pig on a stick), cuajito (pig esophagus), and morcilla (pig's blood sausage in pig intestine), of which all of us had the first, but only Jamey and Anna were brave enough to try the last two. The rain, which had let up as we left Andy's, began in full force as we were eating. The sky split and dumped its contents, but eventually the rain slowed and as we were leaving, we noticed that a rainbow had taken the place of the rain - a good omen for the rest of our trip.

We headed back to the apartment to debrief and crunch the numbers we had received by putting everything in terms of dollars per day. From these calculations, we were able to determine that our vibration monitoring technology could save $2-3 dollars a day for our users, before considering the avoided expense of costly motor repair. Satisfied with our day’s work, we went to bed in order to be well rested for Day 2.