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.