Vinson Community Planner Joins Public Service Trip to Costa Rica
Taking public service to Central America, the Vinson Institute's Chrissy Marlowe joined four University of Georgia master's candidates and a dozen Chinese landscape architecture students on a community outreach project this fall at UGA's Costa Rica campus.
The students produced landscape and drainage plans for the village of San Luis's new community center as part of the 11-day trip, funded in part by the UGA Office of Vice President of Public Service and Outreach.
The collaboration also provided a dynamic cross-cultural experience for students enrolled in the UGA College of Environment and Design's partnership with Nanjing Forestry University, said Marlowe, a public service assistant with the Institute's Governmental Training, Education, and Development Division.
"It was really interesting . . . to watch two different cultures together experiencing a third culture," she said.
Assistant Professor Stephen J. Ramos and four Environment and Design graduate students worked on the community center project with 12 Nanjing Forestry University landscape architecture students and their professor for nearly two weeks in early October.
San Luis, a village of about 350 people near the Costa Rica campus, won a government grant to build a community center on land that a local farmer had donated. Students from UGA and Nanjing Forestry University produced designs for landscaping, a playground, parking, and drainage—important for the site, because the village sits in a rainy, cloud-forest climate.
The students also worked on an assignment to create an "identity" for the crossroads where the center is located, "so it's not just simply an intersection, but the community center intersection," said Ramos.
Watching students from China and the United States submerge themselves in Costa Rica's Latin American culture was fascinating because it inspired the collaborators to a high level of creativity, said Marlowe, a community planning specialist.
The service-learning trip included one morning devoted to planting 175 native trees, a component of UGA Costa Rica's carbon offset program. The tree-planting outreach project created a windbreak on a neighboring farm.
Students and group leaders also toured coffee and sugar cane plantations nearby, and learned about the Costa Rican environment and ecology at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve. UGA's Costa Rica campus is adjacent to the reserve, which was set aside to protect the cloud forest's extraordinary biodiversity. Marlowe described seeing flocks of parrots flit through the greenery and white clouds of ground fog creeping stealthily across a highway as students and Costa Ricans talked on the roadside.
"It is a beautiful country," said Marlowe. "The cloud forest is like nothing I've ever experienced."
