- A Bridge for Cultural Exchange
- Bitten by the Web Design Bug
- Student's Persistence Leads to Victory
- Forming Friendships Across Time Zones
- A Quest that Ends in Reward
- Teamwork Hatches Award-Winning Site
- Reflections from a First-Time Coach
- Raising Awareness of an Environmental Emergency
- Making a World of Difference in AIDS Education
- Don't Know Much About Biotechnology?
Raising Awareness of an Environmental Emergency
By Charis Santiago
Salmonids: In Troubled Waters
I had never heard of ThinkQuest until the day a friend of mine asked me to join his team. I was living in Uzbekistan, Central Asia with my family at the time. We had been there for the past five years; my parents doing community development in that forgotten, and unloved land. Uzbekistan was far away from old friends and family in Canada, but it was home. The land had become a part of me and I had become a part of it. I had gone from owning the title "foreigner" to earning the title "Uzbek." I wasn't like them, yet at the same time, I was one of them. I was half of everything.
I was asked to join the ThinkQuest team for the want of a researcher and greater diversity: Asian by experience and birth, female, and equally comfortable speaking a second language. The decision to join was difficult. I was torn between a desire to try this new challenge and the knowledge that this project could be more work than I wanted to take on. The rest of my teammates were located halfway around the world in Canada, which meant a 12-hour time difference! The internet in Uzbekistan was hard to connect to…land lines were continually too slow, being shut down, or being stolen from outside our house when we were away! And, phoning Canada would be unreliable and undoubtedly too expensive. I thought carefully about the options…I took the leap and said yes.
My team decided to develop a website about aquaculture, exploring whether fish farms are a solution for the problem of over-fishing. In an atypical twist, I ended up researching Uzbekistan and included my travels to the Aral Sea as part of my "work." Once the world's fourth largest inland sea, the Aral Sea has been reduced to about two-fifths of its original size in just the past four decades. As I stood on the edge of what once was a huge body of water, the feeling was of desolation, with nothing alive for hundreds of kilometers except the crickets and lizards. Huge skeletons of forgotten ships lay in what is spoken of as a ship graveyard. How could a body of water once so enormous, so alive and teeming with fish disappear so quickly?
To find the answers, I searched through literature and interviewed fish farm managers, environmental scientists, and other experts. I also visited bazaars and witnessed firsthand the impact on the local people whose livelihoods depend on the fishing industry. Through my research, I began to understand that the drying up of the Aral Sea had occurred under human hands—hands that had built canals to divert water to farmlands, hands that had poisoned the soil and water with toxic pesticides, and hands that had over-fished the already dwindling supply. I can definitely say that I never did as much studying on one subject alone as I did for this website! But, my research had a purpose and I felt very privileged to have the opportunity to tell the world about the disaster that threatens to destroy the country that had become my own.
This past December, my family flew back to Canada for a long anticipated, Christmas-time visit. Shortly after we arrived, I joined the weekly meetings with the rest of my team, and we were able to work through thoughts and ideas as a group. I also had the opportunity to meet our team coach, John Harris, and quickly came to respect him for all the help and encouragement he gave each step of the way. During this visit, a new, unexpected twist to life occurred: my family was requested to leave Uzbekistan for good. We had six weeks to return, pack up our belongings, say our goodbyes and leave our "home." The political situation is rapidly changing and most international, western-based organizations are being shut down and expelled from the country. We returned with heavy hearts to do as requested.
I took my ThinkQuest work with me, and our website was slowly pieced together even as my life was changing from the norm. It became even more special for me to be writing about the land I loved and the land I was about to leave. I have to admit that the whole undertaking was hard and exhausting at times but the end result was amazing…I hadn't known that together we could come up with anything quite so successful! It was a test to conduct research when resources were hard to find, to not give up when phone lines and email were not cooperating, and to work together with so many different ideas and personalities located halfway around the world. But, the achievement was well worth the effort and extra work that every one of my teammates and I put into the website.
Over the years, Uzbekistan has taken a unique place in my heart, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share my fondness and knowledge about that nation with my team and the global audience served by ThinkQuest.
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