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.