Rosalba Company in Guatemala: an account of an experience in research in the service of development

Rosalba Company, during her stay in Guatemala.

 

Rosalba Company, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Loyola Andalucía University, speaks for the first time about her experience in Guatemala after participating for a month in the project that the ETEA Foundation – Development Institute of Loyola University is developing in the Guatemalan country to promote the use of innovative tools in the detection of developmental difficulties in children in disadvantaged contexts.

Rosalba has been conducting psychological evaluations of the child population of Santa Lucía la Reforma, “a small town characterized by its high percentage of indigenous population,” says the researcher. The work is carried out in an environment with significant difficulties. “The children lost concentration very quickly. We had to do the evaluation on different days, since they lasted two hours. If it is already difficult for children to attend when they have their basic needs covered, imagine there that some children were going to class and had nutritional deficiencies,” comments Rosalba.

Systematized violence is another of the problems present in the Guatemalan region and which they try to address during the research through a questionnaire to find out how this factor affects the cognitive development of children. Undoubtedly, for Rosalba this topic was her first shock with reality: “On a personal level, I was very surprised that in the training sessions the school principals and psychologists from Fundación Fe y Alegría told us about such strong realities. Violence is very much the order of the day there, and also the types of violence are perhaps totally different from what we can experience here”. Mistreatment of women, sexual assaults and threats with weapons are some of the most common examples of violence in Guatemala, and although children are not direct victims of these types of violence, their daily exposure or the fact of witnessing certain violent acts can generate difficulties in their cognitive development.

According to the researcher, in order to properly implement an assessment program that takes into account all the elements of this disadvantaged context, it is necessary, first of all, that the children’s basic needs are covered. In addition, it is very important to understand the Mayan cosmovision, that is, the way in which Guatemalans live their indigenous identity, which is necessary to approach the rural population. “All the children speak Mayan as their main language. We are doing a pilot test to see if assessing the children in their mother tongue or not influences the scores they get in 3 tests of the study that evaluate aspects of language.” Explains Rosalba, who also highlights the importance of adapting the assessment to the population’s own characteristics, taking into account the indigenous identity as part of the children’s personal development and seeking to respect it when thinking about an intervention plan.

A very development-oriented research

As part of her doctoral thesis, directed by Dr. Joaquín Ibáñez, principal investigator of the project, Rosalba is conducting a systematic review of all the interventions that have been carried out with children living in conditions of low socioeconomic status to stimulate their cognitive development, and aims to create an intervention program that can be applied in different places so that these children can develop their maximum capacities.

The ultimate goal of this research is to create and implement an intervention program to stimulate cognitive development in children living in these conditions and that can be applied with populations that have similar characteristics. For example, in Seville, in the southern polygon, a very depressed area where children may live in characteristics of poverty. “The ideal would be to create a program within schooling, within class hours, and that teachers can carry them out; small measures that help stimulate children. But it’s a very long road,” says Company.

A transforming experience

On a personal level, Rosalba remembers all the people with whom she shared that month in Guatemala. Attracted to Latin America since she was a child, since her mother is Colombian, she does not forget the affection received by people who “even having little, give you everything”, and considers it a luxury to be able to provide solutions to her situation from the field in which she works, as she describes it herself: “It has been an experience of vital renewal that has given me light to see that my work during the thesis can go further and improve the lives of many children.”