I’m Walda, and I'm a Biology student from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, just pending my thesis to graduate.

These past two days I’ve working with Emily and the ‘Chemistry group’. We spent our time at the lab treating samples and running chemical analysis for chlorophyll a, nitrogen and phosphorus from the field samples that the other groups and ourselves have been collecting at field work. In my group, Luisa and Juan Carlos are Environmental Engineers, and Christine and I are Biologists, so, as you can imagine, we all tend to prefer the field work. Nevertheless, we all learned the importance of what’s done in the lab, because, just like Emily (the nicest chemist in the world ;) says  “without us, all they have are meaningless bottles of water. This is one of the most critical parts of the job, because we give them the DATA, and without data, they just can’t do anything”. These words changed my perspective about the work that we do at the lab. I still prefer the field work because I’m a ‘field person’, but I’m definitely putting a lot more attention to the lab, and If I ever get a chance to work with water quality experiments in a big project, I’m definitely going to be supervising that the people that run the chemical analyses do it correctly (in the case that other people have to do it). Emily also told me something that I think is very important: that we should never use commercial kits to run chemical analysis in ‘natural’ waters, because those kits can only detect very high levels of nutrients, and therefore they should only be used when running analysis for highly eutrofized conditions, like heavily contaminated ponds, or in water treatment plants. I really think that was a really important thing that people should be taking into account, because you just CAN’T be reporting wrong results. That just messes up with everything that you’re trying to do, no matter how good your intentions are. That’s why it’s just great to have Emily teaching us these important things, and it is also great to have Juan Carlos with us, because he is the only representative of AMSCLAE  (institution that’s officially in charge to manage the lake), in our group, and he was very concerned about this. I’m shure that from now on, he will be implementing good lab practices and AMSCLAE, and I think that’s just great.

We also did some other things, that I will be telling you about later, when I get back from working with Eliska and my ‘Wetland’ workshop.

And for those of you that are reading this, have a great day… :)