Going home!

Tomorrow I'm leaving Bolivia. In my last week I have done some last focus groups and survey test runs with the coordinator of this project, whom I finally got to meet in person, visited an archeological site that we had unsuccessfully tried to see twice before (so there will be picture at some point...), and finally got flowers painted on my fingernails like the Bolivians. I'm going home without any data, and probably without much hope of getting any data, but I've learned about all I can have hoped to learn in three months, which I think is more important. And with any luck, I may get to keep working on this project. Thanks for reading my blog - and check back for my next adventure...

Pictures from the field

Things are wrapping up here - trying to get everything in order and saying my goodbyes. I am about to head out for my last trip to the field - this time just a couple of days to run through the survey a few times with the project coordinator who just arrived from the States. Before I go, here are some photos from our last two trips. You can see them bigger here if you want.

End of field work

My last couple of entries from the field. Pictures coming later.

Day 6: Asking questions doesn’t lead to answers, it leads to more questions. Natura has been working with Santa Rosa since 2003, and about 20 of the 100+ families in the community are conserving land with Natura’s project. We were hoping to talk with families who are involved and those who aren’t, to get a complete picture of Natura’s impact on the community. We haven’t looked at the data yet, but just from some comments from our enumerators, it is clear that there are some interesting questions here.

A premise of PES is that you are compensating people for changing how they use their land. This means you typically work with landowners. Just as in pretty much anywhere in the world, landowners have more money than non-landowners, so Natura is here working with only the most well-off members of this poor community. Naturally, this makes non-landowners not so fond of Natura.

From my experience, it seems clear that development work should involve an entire community, or at least have support from the whole community. This is not the case here. So what could Natura do to involve everyone, landowners and non-owners alike? Natura is working to get the most land conserved for their dollar, but it seems they may be trading off equity in favor of efficiency. It could be that everyone is helped as the extra money brought in circulates through the community, but this is in no way inevitable. It may be the opposite – if landowners are cultivating less of their land they may be eliminating work opportunities for those who work for pay. Hard to say. What is clear is that something should be done to consider the involvement of all members of a community, and that this is not an easy thing to figure out.

I think I see a new thesis idea on the horizon. Good thing as my previous one crashed and burned over the last few days.

Day 7: We spend all day in various taxis, since we decide not to deal with the broken truck, to get back to Santa Cruz, where there is a hot shower waiting for me.

Field work reports, continued

I continue with my account of my trip to Comarapa.

Day 4: Abbie’s research implodes. Yesterday we learned that you need information about a community before going in to do a survey. Today we learned that you need a lot more than information. People keep telling me that NGOs come to their communities, make promises, and never come back. Not only does this mean that NGOs are not doing anything useful to help people, which is bad enough, it also means that these NGOs that hope to do good work can’t get into the communities because they don’t trust us. So we come in and say we want to do a survey so that we can come back with some kind of project, why would they want to help us? And when they ask what kind of a project, we can’t say because we want to work with them to develop a project that truly comes from their needs and interests – but they want to know what we are going to give them, and they want it now.

Verdecillos, where we were to do our second day of surveys, seemed a little wary of us when we first showed up, but once we explained what we were doing, they seemed open, and we thought we would be ok. Turns out Verdecillos has no faith in NGOs whatsoever, probably from bad past experiences with NGOs who promise things and never come back, so after our meeting they decided that nobody from the community would talk to us. And we didn’t discover this until we had spent most of the day and half a tank of gas driving all over this very spread-out community. It is clear at this point that Verdecillos wants nothing to do with Natura or any other NGO, and if Natura does want to try to smooth things over and build a relationship with this community that it is not something that Stella and I and our team of enumerators were going to be able to do in one afternoon. So we return home today pretty much empty-handed, with just one more day in Comarapa.

Day 5: Things pick up a little. After our disaster in Verdecillos, we spent a good amount of time debating what to do next – do we go back and try to fix things and do some surveys, do we move on to our next site, do we just give up altogether since there’s no way we’re going to get the number of data points we want at this point? We decided to go back to Quiñales to see if we could find a few houses that we missed on the first day, and things went pretty well. It involved a lot of driving (with some beautiful views at least), but we managed to get six interviews before lunch, and we packed up to move on to our next site.

And that’s where things went downhill again. Our next site was Santa Rosa, the community I visited in May where Natura has been working for five years. This was actually a change after political problems kept us from going to a community in Comarapa where Natura has been doing land purchases, but we thought it was a good change, since Natura has a well-established relationship there and we were ready not to have doors slammed in our faces. When we got to Los Negros, the municipal center two hours away from our destination, we noticed something leaking from under the truck. This is not the first problem we have had with the truck. Almost every trip I have taken has involved some truck problems – on this trip alone we had already had to deal with electrical problems that caused the truck not to start and some mysterious smoke coming out of the steering wheel. After two hours of running around we found out that the only mechanic is away for two days – eventually we found a place to park the truck and crammed into a taxi for the last leg of our trip.

I’ll post the last entries tomorrow to keep this post a reasonable length.

The roller coaster ride of field work

On Tuesday morning, we excitedly packed up the truck with piles of papers and a team of four enumerators to go and try it out in three communities in Comarapa, one of which had been involved with Natura. Here’s a day-by-day account of the adventure that is field work in Bolivia.

Survey Test, Day 1: Roller coaster roads. I have spent many hours of my life on windy, bumpy roads around the world. This road is difficult in a unique way. The first hour or two is full of speed bumps so intense that you have to stop before you can go over them. After that, much of the road is smooth and nice – but then you hit these landslides and big gaps in the pavement that jolt you from your enjoyment of the beautiful view and throw you around the car for a minute. Then it gets smooth again for just long enough to get back up to full speed, and then BOOM, another one. For some reason this speeding up and slowing down is much more frustrating than a road that is just bumpy and slow all the time.

Survey Test, Day 2: Top of the roller coaster, everything is great. After some meetings with the mayor of Comarapa and a representative of the water cooperative, we headed out to meet with Quiñales, the first of three communities where we hoped to do our surveys. They were happy to participate, so we make a schedule of which houses we’ll go to the next day, and head off to Verdecillos, community #2, where they are already having a meeting that we hope to take advantage of. They are less receptive, a little wary of an organization they don’t know wanting information about the community. Fortunately, we had come with a technician from Natura who knows the area, and he helped smooth things over, explaining why it was so important for us to learn about the community in order to be able to help them – and by the end, they seemed willing to cooperate and said they would be waiting in their houses on Friday when we came back. Sweet – one day, and we are all set up for surveys in two communities! This is going to be great.

Survey Test, Day 3: Things go downhill fast. Before going into a community to do a survey, it’s important to have some key information – things like how many families live there, where their houses are, what language they speak. When we met with Natura’s technician back in Santa Cruz, he chose some communities for us and said he’d set it all up so that we could get the surveys we needed. The information we had was the names of the communities, and the supposed number of families in each one, and that was it. In our meeting in Quiñales, they told us all the houses are close together, and everyone knows where everyone else lives – great, we thought, we can drop our enumerators off at their first house on the list and from there they can just ask where the next one is, and continue like this all day. First problem: the houses were not anything like close together, so our enumerators spent much of the day walking all over, trying to find houses and trying to find us – and of course there is no cell phone service. Second problem: of the 47 families that we were told live in Quiñales more than half actually live in Comarapa and just have land in Quiñales. So we couldn’t even find enough houses, let alone enough where people are home and available to spend an hour and a half answering our questions. So Stella and I spent the day trying to keep track of our four enumerators who were all over the community, trying to find houses to send them to, hoping that after they walk half an hour to find a house that they find someone there. Third problem: a lot of people in Quiñales don’t speak Spanish. When we got back to the office, the guy who is supposedly helping us said oh yeah, a lot of people around here only speak Quechua. And now is a better time to tell us this than when we had our meeting back in Santa Cruz to choose communities to visit? We felt like we had been sent to these communities, with a whole team of enumerators no less, with no information and no support, and had serious doubts about doing back to Santa Cruz with any data that we can use. Things are not looking good.

Today is actually Day 4, but I´ll leave you in suspense until next post because this is already really long.

Swine flu fever

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but here in Santa Cruz swine flu hysteria is everywhere. A couple of weeks ago they closed down all the places where groups could congregate, like movie theatres and clubs. I had to wait two whole weeks to see Harry Potter (and all that anticipation made it even more disappointing), and when I did finally get to see it this weekend, they tried to hand me a face mask and force hand sanitizer on me as I walked in the theatre. People are walking around everywhere with face masks, I feel like I’m in some overblown epidemic movie.

Assuming that swine flu doesn’t get me in the next 24 hours, I am heading out for my last big trip to the field. Tomorrow we go to Comarapa, an area where Natura has begun working with a few communities. The way that Natura applies Payments for Environmental Services in the field is that they create a fund, with contributions from the municipality and from Natura, along with funding that comes from a small percentage added to the water bill of the downstream water users – the idea is that over time it will be fully funded by the water users who are benefiting from the conservation. With this fund, upstream land users are compensated based on the number of hectares they conserve. In Los Negros, where I visited my second week here, landowners are compensated with bee boxes and training in apiculture. The idea is that they are compensated with a project that reinforces the goal of conservation, and is a long-term income-generating investment. In each area where Natura works, they meet with the communities to decide what project is most appropriate to serve as compensation – fruit trees, sustainable timber extraction, etc. In Comarapa, where I am going tomorrow, the work is a little different, but the idea is the same – that the fund is used to pay for the provision of environmental services. The water fund has been used there to buy certain tracts of land that are important to conserve to protect the water supply, rather than paid to individual landowners in exchange for changes in their land use.

We’ll be interviewing all the families in three communities, trying not only to get some information on those communities that may be interesting for Natura, but also trying to see whether our survey works so we can make it perfect for the final run. It’s all very exciting.

Pictures from the Salar

I kind of have a pet peeve about people who go on vacation upload their entire memory card from their camera to share with everyone. I mean, I like looking at your pictures, but not 300 of them. And really, you can't go through and delete the doubles and the pictures you actually took of your finger or the inside of your backpack?

And so I tried to spare you a never-ending slideshow of Salar pictures. But this is the best I could do. I just can't cut any more. If you leave on Picasa's automatic 4-seconds-per-picture, it's only five minutes. I think the Salar deserves at least that.

I'd recommend looking at these full size. If I do say so myself. (For full credit, some of these are Stella's and Bryn's pictures, they're not all mine.)