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.