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.)

Return from the field, and some delayed pictures

After two months of hard work, we went out in the field last week to do some first test runs of the survey. There's only so much survey design you can do sitting behind a desk, the only way to see if you're doing a good job is to go and actually try asking people questions.

We did a couple of days of focus groups to test out some ideas and questions that needed some more work, and on our fourth day in the field, we put the whole thing together and went out excitedly to run through the whole first draft of the survey. And it crashed and burned. Our enumerators didn't know the questions well enough because we had just put it all together that day, the formatting was a disaster, and the respondents didn't understand half of the questions we asked. The woman my enumerator and I were interviewing didn't invite us in, so were standing outside of her door juggling clipboards and papers, trying to keep her attention as children ran in and out the door, until she basically kicked us out because we had taken too much of her time. Things didn't look good.

So the next day was a long one - trying to figure out how to fix all of the problems from the night before, how to make the questions clear and understandable and how to make them measure the things we wanted to measure, all in time to run it again that day. At about 4 in the afternoon we decided to stop with what we had and go try it again. And it was a thousand times better. But still far from done. So now I'm in the office with a big pile of surveys to go through to make the last draft to take out for a big trial run next week. Amazing how quickly things go when your time is running out.

These last few weeks I will be in the field most of the time. It's a little tiring, and I miss my hot shower and my vegetables, but I'm glad to be getting out and doing the field work I came to Bolivia for.

And here's the second-to-last installment of photos from our vacation. I'm a little faster with the writing than I am with the photos, sorry.

Shopping!

Ok, this was a while ago now, but I'm catching up on my pictures. We spent a day on our vacation at a big artisan market, stocking up on souvenirs and presents. Here are some pictures. Tomorrow, pics from Potosi, the highest city in the world!

The Salar de Uyuni

Last week we went on a three-day tour of the Salar de Uyuni and the surrounding desert. The Salar is possibly the most unique landscape I have ever seen in my life. It is over 10,000 square kilometers of flat, blinding white salt. (Yes, I wore sunscreen on the small amount of skin I had exposed.) It is so huge and flat and reflective that it is actually used to calibrate satellites.

Not only is the Salar a source of salt, of course, but underneath is the world’s largest lithium reserve. As we move towards electric cars and renewable energy, battery technology is going to be really important. But having suffered centuries of foreigners coming in to take natural resources and leaving nothing, Bolivia isn’t going to let their lithium go easily. It will be interesting to watch how it plays out.

But back to our vacation. Much of it was spent in our Toyota SUV that is just like the other 30 or so SUVs that are lugging tourists around to all the sights. Our tour guide had us on a tight schedule, always telling us how much time we had to take pictures of each place. Bathroom stops, unfortunately, were not part of his schedule.

After the first day in the Salar, we woke up our second day and went to see some pre-Inca mummies that were not very well preserved in these coral-rock tombs. We learned nothing about these mummies, but it was certainly a creepy way to start our journey into the desert. We spent most of the second day driving around the desert, stopping to see beautiful lakes and crazy volcanic rock formations. The starkness of the desert was striking. Dusty soil, a few scrubby plants here and there – it is amazing that people can even live out there, but this seemingly dead soil is the home of super-nutritious quinoa, so go figure. Llamas and vicuñas, their wild relatives, are just about the only animals that can live at such an altitude and such dry harsh conditions. Except for, you guessed it… flamingos! Did you know that flamingos lived in the Bolivian desert? Neither did I! Oh, and this weird rabbit-chinchilla thing that jumps around on the rocks. Very strange place.

On day three, we woke up at 4:30 to put on our bathing suits. Very surreal to put on bathing suits inside my down sleeping bag when it’s below freezing. That’s right, below freezing INSIDE the room. Then we drove through the dark for a bit and I think we took a wrong turn and ended up in Mordor because suddenly we were surrounded by scalding hot, nasty-smelling gases come out of the ground all around us. Glad I wasn’t wearing any rings.

Next stop, we get out of the car, strip off our many layers of long underwear, hats, gloves, etc, and jump into the most amazing natural hot springs I have seen in my entire life, and watch the sun rise over the mountains. Then pancakes with dulce de leche for breakfast. Paradise in the middle of the desert.

Pictures from Sucre

Here are some pictures from the first part of our vacation (and a few from when we went back to Sucre at the end) - if you want to see any of my pictures at normal size, you can click on the title of the slideshow and it'll take you to the album. Coming soon, stories and pictures from Potosi and the Salar de Uyuni....

Vacation!

The other interns and I thought that we should take advantage of being in Bolivia and go see some sites, and we decided that all those weekends we have been (and will be) working entitled us to a whole week off. It´s fun being a backpacking tourist again, if only for a week.

On Saturday we flew to Sucre, the capital of Bolivia, and also its most beautiful city. As soon as our plane landed I knew I was going to like Sucre better than Santa Cruz. It´s much smaller, and full of beautiful colonial architecture and pretty plazas - it reminds me a lot of Antigua Guatemala for anyone who´s been there, tourists included. After wandering around the city for a while, and buying a little more silver jewelry than I probably should have, we went to a performance of different folk dances from all over Bolivia, each with different music and different costumes. It was incredible, definitely better than the Bolivian version of Cabaret we saw. And at the end they all ran out into the audience and pulled everyone up on stage so we got to dance a little too. And they served Bolivian wine for just over $7 a bottle.

Yesterday we decided to tourist it up and catch a gringo bus to a market town outside of Sucre. It was a fairly standard touristy artesan market, everyone with their textiles spread out on the sidewalk, everyone with kind of the same things, but even though they´re the same they were all beautiful. And they seem to do everything - weaving, knitting, embroidery, crochet, I even saw some felt. So Christmas is almost taken care of.

Last night we arrived in Potosi, the highest city in the world at just over 4,000 meters (13,420 feet). As we were driving in I felt myself breathing deeper and deeper, and walking the one flight upstairs to my hostel room makes my heart beat like crazy. And it´s cold! Like hat and gloves cold. Though we have been told that we ain´t seen nothing yet - we´ve heard between 10 and 25 below zero (celsius) for where we´re going next....

Pictures of Santa Cruz

I'm off for a week of vacation tomorrow. Going to Sucre, Potosi, and the Salar, the big salt flats of Bolivia. Before I go, here are some pictures of Santa Cruz from the past six weeks.

The performing arts in Bolivia

As promised, reports from the Marc Anthony concert. My friend Paulo convinced me that I had to go see Marc Anthony with him. I barely know who Marc Anthony is, but apparently he is married to J.Lo and he is a big star here, so I thought why not?

Efficiency is something that I have noticed generally to be lacking here, and huge concerts are no exception. This concert was in a stadium which I presume has multiple entrances, but everyone with a lawn ticket (and we're talking about a lot of people) had to enter through one narrow entrance. This meant first an hour or so of waiting in a long line, then giving up on the long line and just going up to the front like everyone else and being carried through a stampede of crazy Marc Anthony fans for another half hour or so. It was impossible to move any part of my body, other than my mouth, which I used to swear loudly in English because I don't know strong enough words in Spanish. I can now completely understand how it is that people die in stampedes.

The concert was ok. It was cold and I couldn't see over all the tall Bolivians in front of me. Typical.

The next day the other interns and I decided to check out the theatre. Cabaret was playing downtown, so we got tickets. A play about WWII Berlin. In Spanish. It was so weird. I know that with limited resources to invest in education, the arts tend to get the short end of the stick, in any country. But it was striking to see the results. The lead female had a chorus of three women back stage to sing her part with her (or for her half of the time), and the cabaret dancers were so uncomfortable they made me feel nervous. The whole experience was kind of surreal.

But we're going to try again. Tomorrow night, we're going to a show that somehow incorporates Les Miserables, Cats, Grease, Dirty Dancing, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and... I think there was one more in there too - Paulo's mom said it was the best play she's ever seen, so we shelled out almost $20 for fourth row seats. I can't wait.

So really, what am I doing here?

I realized recently that I haven't really written about what I'm doing in Bolivia. I wrote a little about Payments for Environmental Services, which is related to my work, and I think I've mentioned the fact that I'm doing something with surveys, but maybe you want to know why I'm here. If not, skip this post, I'll write about my Marc Anthony concert experience next time.

A big problem in conservation work, and development work in general, is that NGOs or USAID or whoever comes into communities and dumps money into projects that are supposed to help people. Maybe they do help people, but maybe they don't, and it's hard for us to know - even if we do some kind of before and after data collection, there are a million things that could be affecting how things are going in the community other than the development project we're trying to evaluate. So how do we know if what we're doing is worthwhile at all?

The project I'm working on is trying to answer that question. Fundación Natura has a new integrated management area that they are going to start working in, and we are designing a big field experiment to evaluate the effects of the kind of work Natura does. There are about 140 communities in the area - some will get a PES project, some will just get payments (to control for the fact that PES is increasing people's incomes, so we can see the difference between those getting money that is contingent on conservation behavior and those that are just getting money with no strings attached), some will get environmental education, some will get a combination of payments and education, and some will get nothing, as a control to see what would happen in the absence of Natura's projects.

My job is to work on what it is that we want to evaluate in these communities. The obvious thing is the environmental indicators - do the communities with Natura's projects have more forest area in conservation, or cleaner water downstream? But we're working on the social and economic piece - how do these projects affect people's behavior, social norms and views towards the environment? Maybe people will conserve more because the projects make people value the environment more, or maybe they will conserve more just because they're receiving money to do so, or maybe people will value the environment more but not change their behavior. What is the effect of Natura essentially putting a price on environmental services? Will it make people value the environment more, or does putting a price tag on the forest turn it into a commodity with no intrinsic value?

I'm working on this survey with another intern, and I'm looking specifically at the social norms and values part of the evaluation, while she's looking more at socioeconomic indicators and behavior. And it turns out that measuring things like how much someone cares about the environment is really hard. These things would be hard to measure in a community of people just like me who spoke my language - it's a thousand times harder in a different culture and a different language. Hence the focus groups and the pilot testing.

Citrus Festival

Last weekend we went out to El Torno again to do some more focus groups. The focus groups are the first field stage of developing a survey, where you talk to people who are ideally similar to the people you will eventually be surveying to get to know the population a little better so you can design better questions. The first stage of focus groups are wide open - we go in with some general questions, but let the conversation go where it will. This was our fourth trip out to El Torno, the third where we would actually be conducting focus groups - the first was for a coworker to introduce me to someone who was going to help us get some groups together, since you can't just email and set up a meeting. And of course there was the second trip, where we ate chorizo with a bunch of people so they would like us enough to give us an hour of their time.

When we got to the first community outside of El Torno on Saturday we were told that nobody was around because everyone was at the Citrus Festival, to which we had been invited a couple of weeks earlier, but we had forgotten about it. So we turned around, hoping that if everyone was there it should be easy to pull together small groups to talk to us for a few minutes, especially since we had a huge bag of candy and cookies to entice them. But instead we bought a bunch of citrus products, watched the Citrus Queen beauty pagent, and drank local orange liquor with some community leaders (one of whom offered me one of his sons - of my choosing - to marry, one of whom offered me a house to live in while I finish my thesis). Hard work down here in Bolivia.

But on Sunday we did do some real work. We lucked out and were there on the day that everyone was gathering in one of the towns to get their land titles, so we were able to pull some groups aside to talk to. And after a couple of wide open focus groups we decided to give our preliminary questions a try. We had decided to go on this trip on Friday at 4, and we left at 7am on Saturday, so my questions weren't quite in field-testing shape yet, and had been translated by google translator at the last minute. They didn't go so well, so we cut our trip short and came back to the office to work on the next draft. I am learning why it is that you can't just write a bunch of questions and take them out into the field. Measuring things like how much someone cares about the environment is hard in any context, so to do it in another language and another culture is going to require a lot of field testing. Fortunately, this means another trip out into the field next week.

Here are some pictures.

Dinner Party!

For the sake of variety for you, my dear reader(s), I'm going to go a little out of chronological order and skip my weekend in El Torno and go straight to last night, when we had our first dinner party in Bolivia. Next post I'll talk about my weekend.

Last night, on our way back from a weekend in the field, Stella, Josefina, and I decided we should have a dinner party. At the last minute, just like everything here. And just like my favorite dinner parties at home. It was nice having people over and cooking and drinking wine, it kind of felt like home - except that we were in a fancy apartment and we only had four dinner plates. Also, it was nice to have a social event that didn't involve meat.

Here are some pictures.

Pictures from El Torno

We just decided an hour ago that we're going back out to the field for 3-4 days at 7 tomorrow morning and I have questions to finish and food to buy, so this is all I'm going to write.

Campo Tourism

Last Friday I took off with two of my colleagues to meet with people in some communities where I will be doing the first part of my field work, the focus groups to refine the themes and questions to go into my part of the survey. (I realized I haven't really written about my work. Next post. Right now I want to talk about our crazy weekend.)

After a couple of successful meetings, we headed down to El Torno, the town close to these communities, to pick up another colleague and her friend who was visiting, because we were all going to go to some cabins and see some waterfalls, and to sleep, because finding the cabins in the dark, we were told, would be nearly impossible.

The next morning we woke up early and after two and a half bumpy hours we arrived at the cabins. They were lovely. Birds were singing, the sun was shining, and we had some waterfalls to see. But first, let's get into these cabins. Hmm...

We had called two days earlier to say we would be coming, and were told that someone would be there to let us in, so off we go to find the person with the keys. The first person we run into tells us the guy with the keys isn't here, he's gone to El Torno and may or may not be back today. But this other guy who lives across the river might have the key. So we go to his house, and find nobody home. Back to the woman washing her clothes by the river, who suggests we talk to the guys building a house by the school to see if any of them can take us to the waterfall, let's worry about the keys later. The guys say there's this other guy who lives half an hour up the road who is having a party and who has the key. So we'll go up there after our trip to the waterfall. Great, we're all set.

So we go to the waterfalls. There are three of them, and they're huge - 100 meters - and gorgeous. I'll post pictures. We wade in the waterfalls, lay in the sun, it's great. And when we get back, we head to the party to get the keys.

We drive about half an hour on yet another crazy bumpy dirt road, and when the road ends, we're at the party. And it is quite the party. People are standing around, one woman is walking around with a pitcher of chicha and a single glass, and from the sedateness of the crowd it seems like she should get a few more glasses or move a little faster. There is a cool ceremony going on that involves throwing a machete, digging a big hole, and burying some food there, as a way to ensure bovine productivity for the next year. And people have no idea why we're there, but they still offer us chicha, yuca with cheese, and hot whipped milk with liquor in it.

As for the key, the guy who's throwing the party, the reason we came, doesn't have the key. Apparently only the guy who went to El Torno has the key. A few guys walk up to the top of a hill to get cell reception and come back with news that he is on his way and should be back around 6. Sweet. So we bid our raging party goodbye and head back to wait. And wait. And it gets dark. So we look at the stars, eat oranges, and keep waiting.

Finally, around 7:30, we decide to head back to the city because it's a long drive and we're not sure if they'll ever show up. Less than half an hour later we run into the truck with the guy with the key. Great. At this point most of our group was a little fed up and set on going home, so we don't turn around, and a few hours later we are back in dirty loud Santa Cruz, where there are no stars.

And at about midnight Paulo wants to go salsa dancing, and how could I possibly resist salsa dancing? It was a long day.

Lomas de Arena

aka La Playa de Bolivia.

Bolivia lost its coast to Chile and Peru back in the 19th century, but we were not about to have our summer/winter in Bolivia go by without a visit to the beach. It has sand, it has water, therefore Lomas de Arena would be our beach.

This was my second trip to the Lomas de Arena (see earlier post), this time by day, and this time with charged camera batteries.

Comments

Thanks to those who have been making comments. I like getting comments on my blog, it's nice to know people are reading it.

But let me know who you are! And how did you find my blog? I didn't know anyone other than my parents were even reading this thing....

They don't make doors in Santa Rosa

In Santa Rosa, where I spent my second week in Bolivia, they harvest wood, which they bring to Santa Cruz to sell, and buy things made of wood, like chairs and doors, from Santa Cruz, to bring back to the community. Santa Cruz is about 7 hours away in a private car, surely more if you're taking public transportation, and the trip is not free. So why would not save the trip and turn the wood you have right here in the community into the chairs and tables you need? I asked this and the answer I got was that there's no carpenter.

So why doesn't someone in the community learn to make doors? In this way Santa Rosa is like a microcosm of Bolivia - or of almost any resource-rich developing country: extracting and exporting raw materials and importing those same materials back after they have been turned into high-value goods. What if Santa Rosa could make their own doors? What if Bolivia could take all of that lithium they have been blessed with and make batteries for the electric cars that may someday take over the world's roads? Abundant natural resources should translate into wealth, but without the ability to add value to those resources by turning trees into doors or crude oil into gasoline, those who hold resources only get small portion of those resources' value. How much of the $4.00 you spend on your latte goes to the coffee growers?

Ok, so Santa Rosa probably couldn't get rich making doors, but it just got me thinking about the obstacles to adding value to natural resources. Why can't someone learn to make doors? Has nobody thought of it? Why hasn't anyone thought of it? Is it an education system that doesn't teach creative problem-solving? Is it a lack of access to the technology or information one might need to make doors, or lack of access to credit to make an investment in a power saw? On a larger level, what is missing to give those people who now make up the first link of the chain from resource to finished product the ability to get a little more of that final value?

Another birthday churrasco

We had a birthday in the office last week, which we celebrated last Friday with a big Bolivian churrasco and dancing. Here are some pictures so you can see how the Bolivians party.

How my neighbors celebrate birthdays

There are things I miss about home. Pedestrian crossing lights. Vegetarian food. Washing machines. Pandora. But now I know what I miss the most.

Noise ordinances.

I had not been asleep long last night when I was awoken by a stirring rendition of Happy Birthday played by an unknown number of trumpets, bass drums, and snare drums coming from just outside my window. In the haze of sleepiness I was convinced they were in my bedroom until I looked around and didn't see them. I looked at the clock - 12:00 exactly. It had just turned someone's birthday.

The next half hour or so felt pretty surreal. I couldn't imagine that in the real world people would actually start banging on drums and blowing on trumpets in the middle of the night, but I couldn't get myself to wake up from the dream that I thought I must be in the middle of. My roommates, and the bags under my eyes, confirmed this morning that it really happened.

I hope the neighbors don't have any more birthdays coming up soon.

Stuck in the rain

Last week I had the opportunity to visit one of the communities to see Natura's Payments for Environmental Services projects in action. We visited Santa Rosa, a community of about 100 families, 18 of whom receive compensation for conserving forest land. In this case, instead of cash, they receive compensation in the form of bee boxes, which come with some training in apiculture. The community decided they would rather receive bee boxes than cash, because they are an investment that can give them a steady source of income. Bee boxes also reinforce the importance of conservation, since an intact forest has flowers for the bees to pollinate.

The primary purpose of the trip to Santa Rosa was to check some rain gauges to see whether an increase in forest cover has any effect on local rain patterns. (They are also taking measures of water flow in the rivers.) But we woke up on Tuesday to rain. And they told us we couldn't go check the gauges in the rain because the paths would be too muddy. Great.

So we spent Tuesday walking around Santa Rosa in the rain, learning about apiculture (such as mixing propolis with cola to make what they call - really - propolissimo), and sitting around. Now the problem with the rain was not only that we couldn't do the work we had come to do, but that we also couldn't leave. The road we had come in on promised to be a giant dangerous mudslide, so we were stuck, unable to do much of anything, until the rain let up. This was my chance to practice my new Zen approach to accepting what life throws at me.

Not much to report about the days we spent in Santa Rosa - it was actually a very nice town and not such a bad place to be stuck. We were there for Mothers' day, so we got to see a performance at the school with kids performing poems for their mothers that they had memorized (and were thus performed in the incomprehensible let-me-get-through-this-as-fast-as-possible-so-I-can-get-off-the-stage monotone) and some lip sync dances which ranged from the very strange chicken and egg dance to some pre-teen girls who made it clear that cable had arrived in Santa Rosa. And a party where the women cooked a bunch of food and the men sat around drinking chicha - not the most feminist version of Mothers' day if you ask me.

On Thursday the rain had let up long enough that we decided to brave the roads and try to get back to Santa Cruz. This would prove to be another test of my Zen-ness. After two hours of driving we discover that someone had left something in Santa Rosa. So we hang out for 45 minutes while some people make some phone calls to see if someone can bring it down to us. Most of us move on the the next town to eat lunch while one person waits for our messenger to arrive. Then a couple of hours sitting around in a colleague's house full of "I love you" stuffed animals and tweetie bird all over the walls. At around 5:00, having driven about three hours since 10:00 AM, we take off, all of us, with all of our stuff. Thinking this is the end of our delays. Until an hour out of Santa Cruz we hear some banging from under the car. Several stops of jumping out, trying to see what it is, driving a little with someone in the back trying to see what it is, we decide we think it's the breaks, so let's drive slowly until we see a mechanic. Which we never do. So we drive all the way to Santa Cruz at about 30 km/hr, arriving at about 10:00. And that is how a six hour trip turns into an entire day of travel. And I used to get annoyed if I had to wait seven minutes for a green line train from Columbia Heights.

And by popular request, some photos of my trip to Santa Rosa. Apologies for the lack of captions, apparently captions are not on the list of things the Bolivian internet will allow today.

Abbie's big driving adventure

Last Sunday, I was eating gelato with my roommates Paulo and Bryn, when our friend Josefina (who also works at Natura) called Paulo to see if we wanted to go for a drive to a cool park outside of Santa Cruz. The only catch: neither Josefina nor Paulo drive. After much reassuring that yes, it is legal to drive in Bolivia with a US driver's license (I have since learned this may not be the case - shhhh...), and that the traffic on Sundays is nothing like the traffic I had been seeing every day since I got here, I find myself behind the wheel of Josefina's mother's car, navigating through lane-divider-free roads among drivers that make Boston drivers look like zealous adherents to traffic laws.

The first thing I noticed was the extreme lack of accelerating power. The high price of gasoline has induced many car owners to install natural gas tanks on their cars - a trend I can't imagine us speed-hungry US-Americans adopting any time soon. The second thing I noticed was that it's easier to be in a car than on foot in Santa Cruz traffic. I found myself surprisingly not fearing for my life, as the movement of the cars that seemed so erratic and terrifying when I was on foot seemed surprisingly predictable and reasonable when I was a part of it. They tell me that sharks don't seem as scary when you're diving as they do from the surface, maybe it's the same with Santa Cruz drivers.

So we made our way out of the city, past a huge market of used clothes from the US, through suburbs and smaller towns, to the Lomas de Arena park. And I thought Santa Cruz traffic was going to be my driving adventure. I have seen bad roads, but I have seen most of them from the back of a chicken bus, not from behind the wheel. Suffice it to say that the potholes and puddles got bigger and bigger, until the one where water went over the hood of the car. That's when we switched to gasoline and everyone got out and pushed while I started the car and attempted to drive. And it stalled. And I started it again. And it stalled again. And as we tried to figure out how to open the hood, and as the sun started going down, eventually something must have dried out and the car suddenly started to work. But at next big puddle we decided to stop the car and go the rest of the way on foot.

Now this whole time I had no idea where we were going, or what "lomas de arena" meant - and then we arrive at a mountain of sand. Oh, lomas de arena must be sand dunes. We climbed to the top and saw more dunes, and more beyond those. By this time the sun had mostly set, and in the light that remained and under the stars that were starting to come out, I understood why we had come all this way. It was beautiful. We waded in a lagoon and lay on the sand looking up at the stars, and weren't to worried about whether we would be able to get out in the car because it wouldn't have been such a bad spot to be stuck for a while.

Unfortunately my old rechargable batteries that I had charged the night before seem to have reached the end of their life, so the beauty is captured in my memory, but not in digital form to share with you.

And in case you were wondering, we made it home fine. If this academic career doesn't work out, maybe I should buy myself a chicken bus.

Preface to the next two stories

My trip to Bolivia is not just about gaining experience working in another country or about gathering data for my thesis. Some of you know that I have been going through a period of personal and professional changes in my life, and for me this trip has some significance, both personally and professionally/academically, for the new direction life is taking me. As I have struggled through some challenging months, I have also found new opportunities and possibilities opening up - or perhaps it is that I am finally able to open up to the possibilities out there - that make me excited about what comes next.

I think two personal goals have come out of these past few months. The first is to live life for myself, to pursue my own goals and adventures, and not to be held back by anything or anyone else. The second is to take whatever life throws at me, to go forward from where I am now without blaming myself for past mistakes (which I am trying to call "learning experiences"), to look forward, not back.

The two stories this week threw at me are good illustrations of these two goals: the first an adventure that the old me may have been afraid of, and the second an opportunity to practice being a little more Zen about what life throws at me.

The city that never sleeps

On Thursday I got to move out of my tiny hostel room and into an apartment. It was a great accomplishment. I'll be living there with two other people who work at Natura with me - one Bolivian and one other intern from the US. When we moved in we had no stove, fridge (hmm... I've done this before...), beds, or anything, and only two of the three rooms are ready so two of us are sharing until the third room is ready. It sort of feels like camping. But I did get a mattress last night, and it has changed my life.

We bought a fridge on Saturday - here you buy fridges (and washing machines and flat-screen TVs) on the street, just like anything else, and put in the back of a taxi to get it home. Here we are moving the fridge into the kitchen. In the picture with me is Bryn, one of my two roommates.

On Friday we got to experience a Bolivian style birthday party. Our apartment is above our landlord's house, and they invited us to party it up with them. Birthdays here are celebrated with a churrasco, which is basically a huge meaty barbeque. They really really like meat here in Santa Cruz. And of course, there was dancing. What a trade off - there seems to be a correlation between places that like to dance and places that like to eat meat. Does that mean I'd be a better dancer if I traded in my tofu for a steak? I think I may find out this summer.

Here are a couple of pictures. Behind the dancers you can see the churrasco, but it's hard to capture just how much meat there was.



At about 1am we left the birthday party to go dancing. Yes, leaving the house at 1. Me. When we got home from dancing at 3:30, the party was still going strong. And these weren't college kids. The whole family was up. Maybe it's the meat.

On Saturday there was a second churrasco at the house - do they do this every night? - and we fell asleep to the sounds of reggaeton from one side (the party next door) and cumbia on the other. Fortunately on Sunday they took the night off so we got a quiet night.

On Sunday we had a completely different kind of adventure which I'll have to tell you about next time. As a preview, it involves me behind the wheel...

What are Payments for Environmental Services?

So why am I in Bolivia? I mentioned this thing called Payments for Environmental Services in my very first post, promising I would tell you later what that means. So, per request, here goes.

The basic idea behind payments for environmental services (also called payments for ecosystem services - fortunately they both have the same acronym, PES) is that the environment provides services, such as carbon sequestration and storage, regulation of water flow, and biodiversity protection, that benefit society as a whole. Because those who own the land providing these useful services do not reap the full benefits, they don't fully account for environmental services when they make land management decisions. Environmental services are what economists call "public goods," and they tend to be underprovided if those who provide them are not adequately compensated.

For example, say I own a forest upstream from your farm. When I clearcut the trees along the side of the river, you may experience flooding, sedimentation, and/or water scarcity. Sorry, not my problem.

But what if you offer to pay me not to cut down trees along the river? Say I'd get $1,000 from selling timber or whatever agriculture replaces my forest, but my clearcutting causes $2,000 in losses for your farm - well, if you paid me, say, $1,500 not to clearcut, we'd both be better off. Hooray for economics! Everyone wins!

Why is this such a good idea?
-It's voluntary - I can accept your money and change my land use, or I can choose not to. It doesn't infringe on property rights.
-It's efficient - it prioritizes land that provides the most valuable services (and these services can include biodiversity/species protection, not only services that are economic inputs).
-It's sustainable, because it's based on the self-interest of service users, not external donors and NGOs.
-It compensates landowners for something they provide for society as a whole. For those who like econ jargon, it "internalizes the externalities," in this case positive externalities.

In case you want to read more, FAO has some good information on PES.

So that's the theory. Sounds like you don't even need us pesky NGOs and grad students here, the invisible hand will do all the work! Right? More on this in a later post....

Where I sleep

This is my tiny hostel room I was telling you about.

As you can see, I get one bed, my stuff gets the other. Then Natura got an intern from the US and she needed a place to stay. My stuff is now mostly under the bed. It's rather cramped. I think I'm ready to move into an apartment.

In the office

Perhaps stranger than being in a new country is being back in an office after not working in an office for over two years.

Natura's office is much bigger than I expected - and unlike the last office I worked in, there are windows everywhere. It's lovely. I'm working in an office, which I will be sharing once my Yale counterpart arrives, with a big window to the center of the office and a big window to the outside, which unfortunately only has a view of a big cement wall, but through which I can listen to the sounds of a nearby schoolyard all day. Yesterday that included coordinated singing, what sounded like fireworks, and loud screaming every time the bell rang. Oh, and my office has its own bathroom with a shower.

So far I have been getting set up - which has included downloading a bunch of things onto this brand-new computer they sent me here with - and reading a lot - studies I printed out before I came here, background on the project, materials about survey design, and some actual surveys to serve as guides. This weekend I'll be going with some of my coworkers out to Los Negros, where Natura has already instituted a PES project, to get a sense of where we'll be testing out our survey.

I am currently downloading Picasa so expect pictures soon.

Arrival

Two red-eye flights in three days, 29 hours in Durham to pack up everything I own into either my suitcase or my closet, and I arrived in Santa Cruz. I slept for about 15 of my first 24 hours here, and today I´m ready to start exploring.

My first impression of Santa Cruz is its similarity to just about every other large Latin American city I´ve spent time in - same architecture, same traffic (and same honking and lack of traffic signals), same sidewalks just wide enough for one person, even the same smells. I´m staying in a room about the size of my bathroom (those of you who have seen my bathroom will believe this) in a hostel that I am sharing with a large missionary group from Arkansas. Today they were out practicing some kind of percussion-chant-skit thing that had something to do with Jesus. We´re a couple of blocks from a central park where kids run through flocks of pigeons and people sit around on benches drinking coffee and reading the paper. It´s a pretty chill town.

More later on what I discover in my wanderings around town. For now I´m going to find a spot for lunch - probably more empanadas.

Entering the blogosphere

Welcome to my first blog post ever. Usually when I travel I send these long mass emails to everyone I know, but email seems so passe. So here I am, venturing into the modern world with this blog.

I will be spending three months in Bolivia this summer, living in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the eastern part of the country and working for the NGO Fundacion Natura Bolivia. I will be working with another MEM student from Yale to develope a survey instrument that will serve two purposes. First, in its pilot phase we will be evaluating Natura's Payments for Environmental Services projects (more on those in a future post) in a number of communities where Natura has been working. Second, the survey we develop will be used to collect baseline data in communities in the newly established Rio Grande - Valles Crucenos protected area in order to set up a long-term study of the effectiveness of conservation interventions that will be initiated in the coming year or so.

When I arrive and begin to figure out my summer, I'm sure I'll have more to say about my project. And hopefully some fun travel stories too.