For information about LCOG's classes for seniors, go here.
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Michael Dunne: Ours is an aging population. That means lots of wisdom, lots of experience, and also lots of chronic health conditions, from mobility issues to cognitive issues. As we get older, we inevitably deal with more challenges of the body and mind, and sometimes those challenges create a new set of problems, like stress, anxiety and isolation.
Today on the show, you'll hear from Senior and Disability Services, a division of Lane Council of Governments, about programs they offer to help seniors deal with their underlying challenges, as well as stress and loneliness. Then, in the second part of the show, we'll hear from two of our reporters. The first will talk about how Oregon State University researchers are learning how to grow food on the moon, and the second will talk about how Lane County fortifies the election process against any possibility of fraud.
Dallas Abraham is Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Coordinator with Senior and Disability Services, which is part of Lane Council of Governments. Dallas, welcome to the show.
Dallas Abraham: Hi. Thank you for having me.
Dunne: Let's start with this. Give us a general sense of older adults in our community who are living with an ongoing or chronic condition that impacts their quality of life. Do you have any numbers, or can you speak generally?
Abraham: Well, one thing I've heard is that aging itself is a chronic condition in its own way, so it comes up for everybody in some fashion or another.
Dunne: And certainly, we have an aging population, so that makes sense. What are some of those chronic conditions that many of our seniors have to deal with?
Abraham: Some of the things we see most frequently in our workshops are people dealing with mobility issues that come with aging. As those knee replacements start to stack up, that arthritis starts to stack up, that changes how your physical body can move through your life, and we see an awful lot of that.
Dunne: What about cognitive challenges?
Abraham: We definitely have that in our workshops as well. There are folks dealing with everything from cancer to heart disease to mental illnesses. It's a very broad spectrum of what we're defining as chronic conditions.
Dunne: Those conditions present their own sets of challenges, but what are other things that you universally see across conditions, regardless of the diagnosis? Stress and anxiety, for example?
Abraham: The reason we're able to bring such a diverse group of people into the same room to talk about really hard things is because living with a chronic condition will typically present some very similar symptoms. Whether you're dealing with stress or chronic pain, or whether it's a mental health issue, it's going to affect how you sleep. It's going to affect how you perceive pain. It's going to affect how often you experience depression and anxiety. So we talk about those symptoms that are common for everyone. A diverse group of people get to see that their lived struggle actually has a lot in common with everyone around them, when maybe they were feeling isolated when they came in.
Dunne: Could those commonalities be a reason for some people to say, 'Of course I'm getting old, I have these problems, I should just suffer in silence'?
Abraham: There are a lot of people who show up on the first day feeling like their life is happening to them, like things are getting removed from them and they're losing power to do the things they want to do. What we try to do over six weeks is find ways for each individual to regain that sense of control in their life.
Dunne: Well, then let's dive into the workshop. You and LCOG and Senior and Disability Services have a program called the Living Well with Chronic Conditions Workshop. What do you offer? What do you do?
Abraham: That one is a very exciting program that we're able to bring to people, and we're looking to expand it this year. We have a bunch of new leaders that we're trying to get that workshop out to in our rural communities. We want to meet people where they are. What happens with that workshop is we try to get eight to 15 people in a room together, ideally. It's a mix between providing health information that's evidence-based, delivered by trained leaders, and a small support group atmosphere. Some of it is information we're giving, but the people who show up are also sharing their experiences with each other and having a chance to be heard about what they're going through.
Dunne: I know you cover a lot of different topics in this workshop. Give us an example of some of those topics.
Abraham: One of the things we do every single week is action planning. People will come in and decide on a small, bite-sized piece of something they want to get done that week, something that would make them feel good and feels achievable. We help them format that so they can bring it back next week and talk about what happened. We also talk about dealing with fatigue, sleep issues and communication. Surprisingly, you don't always think about communication in the context of a health condition, but how we talk to ourselves about our condition and how we communicate with our family and our doctors can really be affected when you're dealing with a lot of big changes happening quickly.
Dunne: That sparks a question: What role do family members need to play in this?
Abraham: Nobody lives in a vacuum. Nobody is experiencing this on their own. But what happens very frequently is people become more isolated as their life experience changes from those around them. Some of the things we specifically go over include asking for specific kinds of help, giving yourself permission to ask for help, and how to say no to things you don't want. Something a lot of people struggle with is drawing boundaries around their time and energy, learning how to say, 'I want to maintain our relationship, but I'm not available for that right now because of my condition.'
Dunne: I imagine these chronic conditions can lead to something we often hear about, especially in our senior community: that sense of isolation. If nothing else, these workshops help bring people together.
Abraham: Absolutely. There are folks who will show up not quite ready to fully identify with having a health condition. They're just there to socialize and be around other people. But once we make that space for them to think about it and open up, having other people around who are also able to show vulnerability and share really helps. Being connected to other humans at a time that can be difficult makes a real difference.
Dunne: What have people who've gone through these workshops told you about what they got from it?
Abraham: Some of the things I love to hear: Our workshops are only six weeks long, and you can't solve everything in six weeks, but something that happens pretty often is someone will show up on the first day with their wheels spinning, just feeling like they're receiving a tidal wave of things happening to them. By the end of six weeks, they have a strong sense of being able to map themselves from where they're at currently to where they want to go. If they can leave with some sense of self-efficacy, it can be a really life-changing thing.
Dunne: So if someone's listening right now and they want to participate, what do they do?
Abraham: All of our workshops are registration-based, so we take a little information: name, birth date and how to contact you. After that, all you have to do is show up at the time and place. Once you talk to me, it's free to everyone 60 and over. All of our workshops include a free book, and there are a lot of worksheets we go over. Sometimes we're able to offer incentives to people who complete the full workshop. The only requirement right now is that folks be 60 or over. All they have to do is give me a call, and then they can show up for free.
Dunne: We'll put a link on our web post. Dallas Abraham is Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Coordinator with Senior and Disability Services, part of LCOG, Lane Council of Governments. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with us.
Our reporter Karen Richards now brings us a story about how to grow potatoes in space. Karen, thanks so much for coming in and talking with us.
Abraham: Thank you for having me. We're happy to bring these to the community.
Karen Richards: You're welcome.
Dunne: I enjoyed your story, not least because of the headline 'space spuds.' I'm very excited to talk about this. You interviewed a scientist at Oregon State University about the possibility of growing crops on the moon. Talk about your story. What did you find out?
Richards: Sure. Part of the Artemis program, and I'm sure many of us watched the recent mission, with the first people going around the moon in 50 years. Part of the whole Artemis mission, with several more deployments planned over the next few years, is to start establishing a base for humans on the moon and using that as a launching point for further exploration. One thing they would like to be able to do is grow food. One thing 'The Martian' had right, in both the movie and the book, is that potatoes are a good food to try to grow.
Dunne: That's one of my favorite movies, and I love that scene. For folks who remember, it featured a stranded astronaut who had to try to grow potatoes in Martian soil using, shall we say, very organic material. It seemed like science fiction, but it sounds like that could actually happen.
Richards: Potatoes are one of the most nutrient-rich foods for their size and are very easy to grow. They're trying to simulate lunar soil because they don't have enough actual lunar material to try growing plants in directly. We may get more from future Artemis missions, so for now they simulate it with the right balance of minerals. Potatoes don't grow in that by itself, so they have to add some sort of compost. The researcher told me that as they establish this base, the likely approach would be to grow something else first, like clover, which grows quickly. They would till that into the soil and eventually build up enough organic material to grow potatoes.
Dunne: So for someone who's not a scientist, like myself: The lunar surface is basically inert material, and you need to add organic matter to it in order to support life.
Richards: Yes, something like volcanic ash here on Earth, but probably even less full of any organic material.
Dunne: I would imagine it's not easy. The right conditions need to be prepared in order to make this kind of experimental soil work. What are some of the challenges they face?
Richards: They're not even accounting for the lack of an atmosphere, the radiation and other factors they can't really replicate in a lab. So this is truly just about the simulated soil, the potatoes and which varieties grow. There's a limit to how far they can actually simulate.
Dunne: What were some of the limits on what they were able to grow in this synthetic soil? Did they come out as beautiful as, say, a Hermiston bumper crop?
Richards: As any good experiment has, there was a control group with very good soil from Hermiston, Oregon. Those potatoes grew really well. Then they had some grown only in simulated soil. Something did grow, but it wasn't even enough material to grind up and assess the DNA. They were very stunted. Then they added percentages of compost, and the goal was to find the right number, one that wouldn't require so much organic material that you couldn't send enough in a space capsule to start with. So far, 15% compost was what they found worked pretty well. The potatoes still weren't quite edible. They had a lot of minerals in them that probably wouldn't be tolerated if you were trying to survive on them.
Dunne: I always find it fascinating talking to scientists doing something like this. Were they frustrated by the difficulty of it?
Richards: More than anything, they were excited. It's something new that hasn't been done before. They get to figure out what we know and what we don't, and tweak the variables. And at the end of the day, you can use this same science to grow food in places on Earth that aren't suited for large-scale farming: places with poor soil, inner cities, that kind of thing.
Dunne: That was another thing in your story that I found fascinating, because with such a huge global population and the need to feed so many people, there are a lot of places with really poor soil. And I've often remarked that a lot of science developed through the space program wasn't intended for rockets but percolated down to things we need every single day.
Richards: Exactly. We talked about that, including how some people do question why you'd work on growing something for people in space or on the moon when there are already people who are hungry on Earth right now. What he told me was that it helps everyone here as well.
Dunne: Any other crops besides potatoes that show some promise, or is he just focusing on the spud?
Richards: This was a NASA-funded grant specifically for the Artemis program, so they really are just focusing on the spud. But there are Yukon Golds, some red potatoes, and I believe purple potatoes in the mix.
Dunne: All right. Did you see 'The Martian'?
Richards: Yes.
Dunne: It's based on a novel, and I thought it stayed pretty close to the science.
Richards: As far as the scene people will remember about using your own waste, Dr. Handy said you don't want to just disregard anything you have. He said a real system would look different from what was shown in the movie, but they would use anything available.
Dunne: It's a fascinating area of study, and I'm sure more will come out of OSU. Karen Richards, always appreciate you coming in. Thanks so much.
And now, Macy Moore of our station went to see how Lane County ensures that fraud can't corrupt our elections. Macy Moore, reporter with us here at KLCC. Macy, great to see you. Thanks for coming down and chatting with me.
Richards: You're welcome.
Macy Moore: Yeah, of course.
Dunne: The election was last night, but you did a story recently about elections in Lane County and what the elections office does. Tell us about what you learned.
Moore: I joined some other journalists from other news organizations on a tour of the Lane County Elections Office. They took us through the whole process, from putting your ballot in a ballot box all the way through when it gets scanned for the vote to be counted. What stood out most to me was that every step of the process has multiple people doing it together. You can't do anything alone, whether you're collecting ballots, opening them, scanning them or running them through the signature verification machine. It's all done in teams, and those teams are made up of people with mixed political affiliations. Teams make sense for security reasons because you're watching each other, but mixed political affiliations also means that hopefully there won't be political bias in the ballot process. When you get hired to work for the elections office or volunteer there, they learn your political leanings and pair you with team members who are different from you.
Dunne: That's an interesting redundancy strategy. I have to say: Probably a decade ago, if the Lane County Elections Office held a press event for people to come in and see how it worked, they might not get any takers, because it was almost assumed to be unremarkable. Obviously, we don't live in that world anymore. Did they talk about trying to reassure the public?
Moore: Yes. The county clerk talked to us a lot about how, over the last 10 years or so in this profession, the public relations portion of the job has gotten much more important. People really want to know that their ballots are safe, especially in Oregon, where there's no in-person polling. They want to know that their ballots are getting to the elections office and being counted properly. He said the job has really changed from just overseeing election processes to being very transparent about how they work. He said that transparency is their biggest tool for helping people feel secure about their ballots.
Dunne: How much is done by machine, and how much is done by a human being?
Moore: The two main parts done by machine are signature verification and scanning. For signature verification, they use the same technology that banks use, similar to when you scan a check with your phone. A large machine goes through and handles about 40% of those ballots. The rest go to specially trained humans for signature verification. Then the scanning process works much like a scantron test in school, and ballots with unusual bubbling are hand-checked and counted that way.
Dunne: Is it a balance of paid workers and volunteers?
Moore: Yes. Some people are volunteers or seasonal workers who only come in during elections. But many of the people, especially in the large room where they open the ballots and separate them, because your ballot itself doesn't carry any personal information, only the envelope does, had been doing this for Lane County for about 10 years.
Dunne: Does it seem like an interesting blend of low-tech and high-tech?
Moore: Yes. The county clerk also talked about how security doesn't have to mean a high-tech solution. When they take ballots out of the ballot box, they put them into a plastic tub with numbered security seals that look like zip ties. They do it in pairs, zip-tie both sides, and then those numbers are matched by a different group of people inside. That's a low-tech security solution.
Dunne: Macy Moore, a reporter here at KLCC. You do great work. Thank you for joining the show and talking about this fascinating process.
That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show: While their cookie sales are what most of us see, Girl Scouts is a leadership development organization, and you'll meet two such local leaders and hear about their scouting journey. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
Moore: It was a really fascinating process, to be honest.
