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.